File Metadata

A sidebar panel for Obsidian that shows file info, text statistics, and a document outline — without touching your frontmatter.

Features

• File info — name, full path, folder, created/modified dates, size
• Details — frontmatter tags, backlinks count, and all frontmatter properties
• Text statistics — words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, estimated pages, reading time, readability score
• Link & code counts — internal/external links, fenced code blocks
• Document outline — clickable headings indented by level
• Image metadata — dimensions, colour space, camera (EXIF via exifr)
• Collapsible sections — click any section header to collapse or expand it
• Click to copy — click any row to copy its value; right-click for more options
• Date format — choose between short, long, or relative date display
• Style Settings support — customise colours, spacing, and layout via the Style Settings plugin
• Configurable — toggle individual fields and sections on or off in Settings

Installation

Community plugins

1. Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search File Metadata
2. Install → Enable

Manual

1. Grab main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release
2. Drop them into .obsidian/plugins/file-metadata/ inside your vault
3. Settings → Community plugins → enable File Metadata

Usage

Click the ⓘ icon in the left ribbon, or run File Metadata: Open File Metadata panel from the command palette.

The panel lives in the right sidebar and updates as you switch files or edit.

Collapsible sections

Click any section header (File, Statistics, Outline) to collapse or expand it. The collapsed state is remembered for the duration of the session.

Context menu

Right-click any row to copy just the value, or copy the full "Label: Value" pair.

Settings

Settings → File Metadata

File

Setting	Default	Description
Show file name	On	Display the file name (click copies full path)
Show file path	Off	Display the full vault path
Show folder	On	Display the parent folder
Show created date	On	Creation date and time
Show modified date	On	Last modified date and time
Show file size	On	Size on disk
Date format	Short	Choose Short (5 Mar 2026, 14:30), Long (Wed, 5 March 2026, 14:30), or Relative (3h ago)
Folder click copies	Vault path	Choose Vault path or Obsidian URI (obsidian://open?vault=…)

Details

Setting	Default	Description
Show Details section	On	Toggle the entire section
Show tags	On	Frontmatter and inline tags
Show backlinks count	On	Number of notes linking to this file
Show properties	On	All frontmatter key-value pairs

Statistics

Setting	Default	Description
Show Statistics section	On	Toggle the entire section
Show sentences	On	Sentence count
Show paragraphs	On	Paragraph count
Show estimated pages	On	Estimated page count
Words per page	300	Used for the page estimate
Show reading time	On	Estimated reading time based on word count
Reading speed (wpm)	200	Words per minute for the reading time estimate
Show readability score	Off	Flesch reading ease (0–100); higher = easier to read
Show link counts	Off	Internal ([[wikilinks]]) and external link counts
Show code block count	Off	Number of fenced code blocks

Outline

Setting	Default	Description
Show Outline section	On	Toggle the heading outline

Behaviour

Setting	Default	Description
Click to copy	On	Click any row to copy its value

Style Settings

If you have the Style Settings plugin installed, File Metadata exposes the following customisation options under Style Settings → File Metadata:

Option	Type	Default
Section header colour	Themed colour	Text normal
Row label colour	Themed colour	Text muted
Row value colour	Themed colour	Text normal
Outline item colour	Themed colour	Text muted
Section divider opacity	Slider (0–1)	0.5
Spacing above divider	Number (px)	12
Label column width	Slider (20–60%)	40%

Without Style Settings installed, the plugin uses sensible defaults and looks identical.

Future improvements

• Reveal file/folder in system file explorer (Finder/Explorer)
• Configurable section ordering in settings

Attribution

Sidebar styling draws on the approach used by Simple File Info (Lukas Capkovic), which uses Obsidian's built-in tree-item components. EXIF parsing is handled by exifr (Mike Kovařík).

License

MIT