Properties (Obsidian)

In tools like Obsidian, you can add metadata that applies to the entire note in a section called front matter.

Obsidian uses YAML (a recursive acronym for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language” — see The Official YAML Web Site) as the format for this section. Because of that, many users simply call it “YAML.” Strictly speaking, YAML and front matter are not the same thing, but for practical purposes, the distinction is not critical.

In recent versions, Obsidian started referring to these as Properties and introduced a graphical interface (GUI) to view and edit them. When working with properties, pay special attention to data types and especially to date formats, which can affect consistency and queries.

Front Matter Basics

The front matter must always be placed at the top of a note, starting and ending with three dashes (---).

Example front matter

---
author: Jorge Godoy
date: 2023-01-02
tags: 
  - documentation
  - study
---

For items with multiple values, the multi-line list syntax (as shown above) is preferred over arrays ([item1, item2]). This convention is standardized in the Obsidian API, and more plugins are adopting it for metadata handling.

How Properties Are Used

Properties can enrich your notes in many ways, such as:

Classifying information with tags or categories.
Adding date details for filtering and sorting.
Linking to related notes or external resources.
Storing geolocation or contextual metadata.

They act as structured fields that make your notes easier to query, organize, and connect.

Check Note categories and types for some examples.

Properties as Databases

Since Obsidian 1.9, properties can also be used with the core plugin Bases. This allows you to treat your notes as if they were entries in a database:

Each property becomes a column.
Each note provides the values for those columns.

This transforms your vault into a flexible, lightweight database: enabling advanced filtering, grouping, and visualization of your notes.