Obsidian Importer

Announcement
1

Hello,

We worked on an importer for Obsidian’s vaults and I’d like to have some feedback about it.
If someone is willing to test it, please drop a line here.

Cheers.

3 Likes
2

I’ll test it for you. :+1:

3

While not specific to the importer -

on iPad, when importing an obsidian note that contains YAML front matter, Bear adds a leading # to the first line (#—). I suppose this is because Obsidian allows you to fold the front matter? Anyway, once imported into Bear, Bear recognizes the first line as a header 1.

2 Likes
4

I assume because in your case new notes are created with a header (an option in bear preferences). Nevertheless this could be adressed by adding the header under the yaml-block

5

Thanks. I changed the Bear setting to Create new notes with “empty”. But the result is the same - the first line containing — is imported as a header. I can change the Bear import to “Use file name as title” and the formatting is correct but then it is not recognized as YAML front matter. As you mention, it’s a simple process to correct - but it’s a manual process.

Anyway, I realize it’s not a Bear issue.

6

I am in the process of transiting into bear from obsidian. I’d love to test it.

7

My initial impressions:

The biggest issues for me are 1) Local images not being imported, 2) no support for URL based images 3) lots of other Markdown that doesn’t have a Bear equivalent being dumped in as is.

I think 1) would need extra work on the importer, 2) may need bigger modifications to Bear (and would be great!) but 3) is a bit more complicated (what should be done with it?) but I can clean it up myself.

Overall I’m excited that this is in the works but it’s not quite ready for my own use case.

8

So I’ve jumped the gun and imported my 2000+ notes from Obsidian unto Bear using the production importer.

I love that it went through everything and intelligently imported files and attachements directly into notes. It was long, but it worked.

One thing I’m super bummed about though is that it did detect tags but did not consider folders. For ulterior iterations of the importer, I think it would make sense for it to convert folders as tags as well to retain some semblance of order. That’s what I was expecting at least.

2 Likes