About

MDCollections is an iOS app that makes it easier and faster to add your collections to Obsidian.

How it started

I have been using Markdown, Frontmatter, and Jekyll as a hobbyist and for work, and I love everything about the combination. When I discovered Obsidian, it represented a portable system that combined my mobile notes with Markdown and Frontmatter in a way that was incredibly flexible — with so many diverse plugins and extensions that the possibilities felt endless.

Then I saw Dann Berg’s video “How to create a template in Obsidian (Beginner’s Tutorial)” and realized my imagination wasn’t big enough. With DataView, Templater, Meta Bind, Backlinks, and especially Bases, there were so many options that Obsidian made possible. I started seeing people track their books (I versus AI), their movies (Nick Milo), their video game collections (Max Frequency) — and my mind exploded.

I love books. I love movies. I have video games. But I also have a bunch of limited screen-printed posters and I never remember which ones I have. I have original comic art with no readily available inventory. I have a huge collection of action figures and toys, and I hate buying duplicates without knowing where in storage they are.

Posters, comic art, and hitting a wall

I started using Dann’s template ideas to capture my poster collection — publisher, artist, theme, size, date purchased, price, image, item number, edition number. It was amazing. For the first time ever, I had a thumbnail view of my collection. I could define the thumbnail size, decide what to show, and filter by publisher or artist.

I wanted more, so I did the same for my original comic art. I scanned all of the artwork and captured publisher, title, issue number, volume number, penciler, inker, colorist, letterer, writer, purchase date, purchase price — everything that mattered.

I was addicted. I wanted to digitize all of my collections. My toy collection was next. But I hit a wall. Unlike posters or artwork, the toys were in containers in my storage unit. I wanted photos of the front and back of the boxes, I wanted to know which container each item was in, I wanted manufacturer, theme, item name — and it quickly became evident that there was no way I would finish this task in one lifetime.

Even with Obsidian on my phone syncing to my computer, adding each toy took too long. I needed to take pictures, look up information, and still had no way to track where items were physically located.

There had to be a faster way to input item data into Obsidian.

Building MDCollections

Since everything was a Markdown file with a templated convention for file layouts, and I knew that writing tools was a valid approach, I thought — why not build something that makes my life easier?

I hadn’t written an iOS app in about five years, and I thought it would be fun to write something for myself. So I did, and I went a little crazy. It really is exactly what I was looking for.

The app works with whatever filesystem layout you have in Obsidian — generally one folder per collection, one asset folder for images and PDFs, and a template file compatible with the Templater plugin. You create a collection, define the properties you want to track, set property types (string, list, date, currency, image, document, etc.), and start capturing. This alone is already faster than doing it in Obsidian directly — you can take pictures, scan boxes, templatize file names, and automatically set capture dates.

But adding information like manufacturer and description was still time-consuming. So I added a barcode scanner that connects to an API, provides a UPC lookup, and populates item data with the return values. This improved capture speed significantly.

I still had one problem: how do I know where I’m keeping each item?

So I added storage locations and containers to the app. You can track them as item properties and see every collectible in a given location. But I wanted it to be fast. I made it possible to generate QR codes for locations and containers, and added storage location and storage container property types. When adding a new item, you scan the container’s QR code and the location is captured automatically.

The add-new-item flow became: barcode scan, photos of the front and back of the box, scan the container QR code, done. Sometimes the API doesn’t find anything or the data is a little off, but in general it is dramatically faster than doing it manually.

Where it is now

I’ve been using the app since December 2024 and I’ve worked out the kinks for my use cases. With MDCollections I captured 153 toys, 61 video games, and recently started on my DVDs and Blu-rays — on top of the posters and comic art I’d already cataloged in Obsidian.

The app is iOS only for now. It’s designed to work with Obsidian and Syncthing, but it also works as a standalone app. No data is captured or collected — it’s meant to be a useful tool, nothing more.

Thank you to Obsidian, the YouTube and Reddit communities, and everyone who has shared their collection workflows. Happy to answer any questions.

The application can be downloaded for iOS here.