Cinematic Covers

Give Obsidian notes a calm, cinematic reading experience with Notion-style cover banners, subtle motion, note icons, and refined Markdown typography.

What it adds

• Cinematic cover banners with a natural bottom fade
• Larger banner controls that appear on hover
• URL- and book-based automatic banner selection
• Optional Pexels image picker
• Emoji, Iconify, favicon, and local-image note icons
• Parallax motion, sticky banners, height, dimming, radius, and fit controls
• Hideable properties and note titles
• Enhanced styling for Markdown, code, JSON, JSONL, LaTeX, and AI transcripts
• Content font presets for reading, technical notes, and long-form writing
• A dashboard for per-note and global settings

Quick start

1. Open Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
2. Search for Cinematic Covers.
3. Install and enable it.
4. Open the command palette and run Cinematic Covers: Open dashboard.
5. Choose a banner, adjust the appearance, and save.

The plugin works in both Reading view and Live Preview.

Add a banner to a note

Add a supported field to the note’s YAML frontmatter:

---
cover: "[[.attachments/banners/my-banner.jpg]]"
---

Supported banner formats include:

cover: "[[image.png]]"
cover: "image.png"
cover: "path/to/image.png"
cover: "https://example.com/image.jpg"

The primary field is cover. The fallback fields coverFilename and banner are also supported.

Automatic banners

When a note has no banner, Auto-set banner (URL/Book) tries to:

1. Find a page URL in fields such as URL, url, source, link, or href.
2. Download the page’s Open Graph or Twitter image.
3. Fall back to a Google Books cover based on the note title.
4. Use the default cinematic nature image if no source resolves.

Downloaded banners are saved in .attachments/banners/ by default.

Note icons

Set the favicon field to add a small icon beside the note title:

---
favicon: "🧪"
---

Supported values include emoji, Iconify icons, favicon or image URLs, and local image paths. Icons are kept separate from banner sources, so a favicon will not become an oversized cover image.

Appearance controls

Open the Cinematic Covers dashboard or plugin settings to control:

Option	What it changes
Height	Cover height in pixels
Dim	Image darkness and text contrast
Bottom fade	Blends the image naturally into the note
Sticky pin	Keeps the banner visible while scrolling
Parallax	Adds gentle depth while scrolling
Radius	Rounds the banner corners
Fit	Controls how the image fills the cover
Banner buttons	Shows or hides hover controls
Hide properties	Hides rendered properties without removing frontmatter
Hide note title	Hides the rendered title without renaming the file

Markdown and AI notes

Enhanced Markdown styling improves headings, links, lists, tables, blockquotes, callouts, code blocks, JSON, JSONL, and LaTeX.

Common AI transcript labels are formatted automatically:

System:
Developer:
User:
Assistant:
Tool:

Content fonts

Use Content font in the dashboard or settings to choose the note’s prose font:

• Inter — best general-purpose choice for mixed notes
• Source Serif 4 — comfortable for long-form reading
• IBM Plex Mono — ideal for technical notes and logs

Code blocks continue to use a monospace font for readability.

Commands

• Cinematic Covers: Open dashboard
• Cinematic Covers: Auto-set banner (URL/Book)
• Cinematic Covers: Pick banner from Pexels…
• Cinematic Covers: Clear invalid banner field

You can also open the dashboard from the Cinematic Covers ribbon icon.

Settings and privacy

API keys are entered locally in plugin settings and are not included in the plugin release. The published repository does not contain your data.json settings file.

Pexels and Pixabay are optional. You can use local images, URLs, Google Books, and the default banner without configuring an image-provider key.

Troubleshooting

The banner is not showing

• Confirm the note is in Reading view or Live Preview.
• Check that the image path exists inside the vault.
• Run Clear invalid banner field, then set the banner again.

The icon appears as a banner

• Put the value in favicon, not cover.

The properties are still visible

• Enable Hide properties in the dashboard or plugin settings. This changes presentation only; it does not delete frontmatter.

License

Cinematic Covers is released under the MIT License.