After last week’s look at some read later services I had a bunch of suggestions including the Obsidian ReadItLater plugin. To test this out you need to go to Obsidian settings then Community Plugins where you can search for and active this plugin.
Usage
Unlike the Obsidian Web Clipper you don’t use an external tool to push items into your Obsidian vault, you go to a webpage and copy the URL then you can use a custom keyboard command to trigger the plugins Save Clipboard action.
In my experience it handles YouTube far better than any of the options I looked at last week, with it properly embedding the YouTube video and skipping all the random text on the page that adds nothing to the experience.
Looking at the plugin documentation it has custom recognition for the following services:
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Bilibili
- Twitter/X
- Stack Exchange
- Mastodon
- TikTok
- Website URLs
- Text snippets
I really only save things from the web and then YouTube as a custom provider and I have to say I’m very happy with how the content comes in.
By default the plugin creates it’s own folder for any clippings you bring in, but it’s also easy to change by simply typing in a new folder location. I centralized all my read later content into the Clippings folder created by Obsidian Web Clipper and put all the downloaded assets in my standard zz - Assets folder.
Settings also allow customization for your templates for each content type as well as how the plugin will perform when saving a link.
My Only Issue
My big issue with using this plugin to save content is that it doesn’t have a plugin for your browser so to save an article I don’t use a keyboard command in Firefox, I copy the URL and then invoke the Save Clipboard action via my custom keyboard command.
This issue extends to usage on iOS/iPadOS, with nothing in the Share Sheet available to save content. Again I have to copy/paste URLs into Obsidian to save the content for later. Not a deal breaker, but a smoother workflow would be nice.
Then again, if a link feels like too much work to save, maybe I shouldn’t be saving it for later because it’s such low value?
If anyone has other options I’d love to hear about them.