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External media

Images

I use the Local Images Plus plugin to download external images into my Obsidian vault. This makes them available within my website.

YouTube videos

The goal is to link to YouTube videos, without embedding them. A website visitor will have to go to the video on the YouTube website.

I use the YouTube Search plugin to generate the code to include in a page.1 It needs no Google API key (it uses YouTube's public oEmbed endpoint plus page scraping) and downloads the thumbnail into the vault itself, so no separate image-download plugin is needed.

The basic outlines for a video looks like this:

YouTube video link
![deepseek-thumbnail.jpg](deepseek-thumbnail.jpg){loading=lazy}
:material-youtube:{ .youtube } [DeepSeek - Computerphile (2025-01-28)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY4Z-9QlZ64)
  • The image is a local image taken from YouTube.
  • The caption contains a title and link to the original YouTube video.

Working with the plugin

  • Set the note template to produce the block above.
    Custom Note Template
    !{{thumbnailUrl}}
:material-youtube:{ .youtube } [{{title}} ({{publishedAt}})]({{url}})
  • Enable local thumbnail download so {{thumbnailUrl}} resolves to a ![...](...){loading=lazy} wikilink of the downloaded image instead of a remote URL.
  • Paste a YouTube link (or let it auto-detect one from the clipboard), review the preview, and create the note — this creates a new note in a scratch location, e.g. /maintenance/local-notes.
  • Copy the relevant portion to the post or page where it should reside. The thumbnail image should already be available locally.
  • Delete the created scratch note when no longer needed.

  1. Previously I used the YouTube Template plugin together with Local Images Plus for the thumbnail. I switched because it required a Google API key and two plugins instead of one (2026-09). ↩