Why ZBuilding your own Obsidian library and media library — what to do when douban images break?
In this video:
- How to build an Obsidian library / media library
- Dataview vs. Bases, the two display options compared
- Why douban images break + alternatives
- A Dataview query that supports both local images and remote URLs
Chapters: 00:00 Building the library and media library 00:18 Comparing the two display options 00:50 The douban plugin stops working 01:29 Alternatives and setup 02:01 Fixing local image paths
Related code: douban book template book-search book template douban movie template Media DB template Related video: 005 - Writing a note = updating the blog
content
I used to build a library and a media library inside Obsidian. The Library and Watch List on my blog were inspired by that setup. Main steps: install the plugin → set up a template → display the page. Display options
- dataview
- bases
Issues with displaying via Bases:
- it starts to look messy once there’s a lot of information
- it can’t show everything you need on a single page
douban used to let you build and display a full book/movie library, but later it likely tightened its hotlink protection, so importing metadata breaks the images and they won’t display. Here are the alternatives I found:
- BookSearch: can import English-language books
- Media DB: can import movies / TV series / music / books, etc.
- If none of the above plugins can find the metadata you need, you can import the metadata with douban first, then find and replace the images yourself from the web page
- If the images are downloaded locally, you need to modify the Dataview query code so it supports both remote URLs and local paths
Note: when setting up templates, they won’t take effect without the .md extension.
movieTemplate: "10.Template/影视.md"seriesTemplate: "10.Template/影视.md"
Required plugins
- Douban
- Templater
- Dataview
- BookSearch
- Media DB
If you have good ideas, let me know too — let’s brainstorm together.