I first wrote about clipping in Obsidian two years ago (was 2023 really two years ago? Wild).

Clipping at the time was good, but it wasn’t great. If you revisit that article, you will note that I couldn’t wholesale recommend any one option: every option was imperfect, with its own list of pros and cons.

I guess that wasn’t good enough for Kepano, the CEO of Obsidian, because he went and created his own clipper for Obsidian.

And guess what? He fixed every complaint I had, and single-handedly created the best web clipper that exists.

Obsidian Clipper is now the clipper for Obsidian. I whole-heartedly recommend it. If you’re looking to clip articles into Obsidian, look no further: you won’t find a better option than the official one.

Let’s talk about how best to utilize this new and impressive tool.

On This Page

• 1 Getting Started with the Obsidian Web Clipper

• 2 Installing Obsidian Web Clipper

• 3 Configuring the Obsidian Web Clipper

• 3.1 Changing Your Metadata

• 3.2 Highlights

• 3.3 Interpreter

• 3.4 Templates

• 4 Conclusion

Getting Started with the Obsidian Web Clipper

Before you clip anything into Obsidian, I would encourage you to start with why. I wrote a whole article about why (and why not) to clip articles, and I would encourage you to start there.

My rule of thumb: when in doubt don’t clip, add a link instead. Links are likely to be more useful most of the time, because they don’t clutter up your vault with extraneous content.

However, eventually you will experience some link rot. You will find a link in your vault that no longer exists, and you will have to search for and update that link to something more relevant. That is the danger of using links, but I think it’s a small price to pay for having a cleaner, more streamlined vault.

It’s up to you though: you could clip everything or nothing, but I find that it typically serves me best to clip only the most important sources for my vault.

Installing Obsidian Web Clipper

Installing the clipper couldn’t be easier: go to the official Web Clipper site and click the “Add to (your browser)” button. Install the browser extension, and then an Obsidian icon should pop up in the upper right hand corner of your browser (or it could be hidden behind a puzzle piece icon, highlighted in the below screenshot):


That’s it! Once installed, you can click on the Obsidian icon in any article to preview what it would look like to clip that article. For example:


Configuring the Obsidian Web Clipper

Installing the plugin might be all you need: you don’t have to do anything to configure this plugin. The default settings are great.

However, if you already have an existing vault with pre-designed metadata, you might want to tweak the default template to match your existing metadata. Fortunately, this is quite easy to do.

In the screenshot above, do you notice the gear icon in the top right corner of the Clipper overlay? To configure Obsidian Web Clipper open your own overlay and click that gear icon. That will take you to the settings page, which looks something like this:


Changing Your Metadata

If you go to the “Properties” tab in the Clipper settings, you can adjust the default properties for Clipper. These properties are merely for convenience: you don’t need to change anything here, it just makes it easier to create and edit templates.

You can even import properties from your Vault, which would mirror your properties one-to-one. Could be super handy if you have a bunch of custom metadata already in your vault.

Highlights

By default, Clipper will clip an entire article whenever you activate it. But you can also enable “highlight mode”, and choose which parts of an article you want to clip. Do that by clicking on this little icon:


Then in highlight mode, you can click and drag to select text, and click the purple “Clip highlights” button when you are done.


It works great. If you like highlighting articles, you might want to give this a shot.

Interpreter

Obsidian Clipper also gives you the option to integrate an AI into your clipping. The Interpreter settings are disabled by default, but allow you to summarize an article with AI before placing it inside your vault.

I tend to be skeptical of AI at the best of times, but I can’t deny that this is a neat solution. I like that it allows you to summarize articles outside of your vault, thus minimizing the security risk of including an AI inside your vault. If you want AI summaries inside your vault, this seems like a reasonably safe way to accomplish that.

Your mileage may vary, but the interpreter is there if you need it.

Templates

Last but not least, Obsidian Clipper allows you to set up different templates that can format data in different ways.

Honestly I haven’t used these all that much, I mostly just use the default template. But for certain things they are super useful. For instance, you could import book metadata from Goodreads, video metadata from YouTube, or import recipes using the Recipe template.

If you want something even more creative, you can use the Obsidian Clipper to aggregate a shopping list. Neat.

See the official Clipper templates for more ideas, and see the official docs if you want to import or export them.

Also, if you decide to create your own templates, you’ll want to read about the default variables you can use. There’s a lot of different options, so it’s not too difficult to tweak your templates to do exactly what you want them to do.

Conclusion

If you’ve been looking for a good solution for clipping articles in Obsidian, then look no further. The Obsidian Web Clipper is great, and makes it easy to integrate online information into your vault.