TikTok to Obsidian: Evergreen Notes From Short Videos

A bookmark keeps the video. It rarely keeps the idea that made you save it. In Obsidian you can keep both: the video's words in one note, and each idea worth keeping in its own note, linked back to where it came from.

There is no shinmuscat plugin for Obsidian. The whole workflow is copy, paste and link, by hand.

What "evergreen" means here

Evergreen notes are a method popularised by Andy Matuschak. In his working notes he describes them as "written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects." He argues they should be atomic, meaning "only about one thing", and densely linked.

Obsidian has no evergreen notes feature. It gives you the parts: plain Markdown notes in a folder on your own computer, links between them, backlinks and a graph.

1. Get the words out of the video

Copy the Share link of a public TikTok, paste it into the TikTok script extractor and press Pick every word.

shinmuscat reads the video's own captions. It does not listen to the audio, so a video with no captions gives you nothing to work with. If that happens, see what to do when a TikTok has no captions. It works on public videos up to 60 minutes long that have captions. It's free, with no login.

When the transcript loads, press Copy, or download the transcript as TXT. Either way you get plain text. Timestamps show on the page, so if you want one in your notes, type it in yourself.

2. Paste it into one source note per video

Make a new note for the video and paste the text in. Paste it rather than dropping the .txt file into your vault, because Obsidian's list of accepted file formats does not include .txt.

At the top of the note, add properties for the details you would need to cite the video later. The guide to citing a TikTok lists them: the creator's name, their handle, the date, the caption and the URL. Obsidian's docs confirm a text property can hold a URL. Add the date you saved it too.

3. Check shaky lines before you build on them

Captions can mishear names, slang and fast speech, and the transcript inherits every slip. Replay anything that looks off and fix garbled words in the source note first. A mistake fixed here stays out of every note that links to it.

4. Write one idea per note, in your own words

Read the transcript and pick out the ideas worth keeping. Give each one its own note, titled with the idea itself. Matuschak suggests organising notes by concept rather than by author or source. That's why the video gets one note and each idea gets another.

Inside each idea note, link back to the source: type [[ and pick the source note. To point at the exact line, link to a block with [[Source note#^block-id]]. Obsidian's links guide notes that block links only work in Obsidian, outside standard Markdown.

Then link idea notes to each other wherever one builds on another. If you link to a note that doesn't exist yet, Obsidian creates it when you click the link, so you can sketch a connection now and write the note later.

5. Let backlinks show what each video fed

Open the source note and check Backlinks. Linked mentions lists every idea note that points to the video. Unlinked mentions finds notes that use its name without a link yet.

Graph view draws each note as a circle and each link as a line. The more notes that link to one, the bigger it gets, so a video that fed lots of ideas stands out.

6. Save the source note as a template

Once your property list settles, save it as a template and insert it with the Templates core plugin for each new video. {{date}} fills in today's date and {{title}} fills in the note's name.

---
creator:
handle:
url:
posted:
saved: "{{date}}"
tags:
  - source/tiktok
---

Edit the template in Source mode and keep "{{date}}" in quotes. Obsidian's docs warn that the properties panel in Live Preview can overwrite variables without quotation marks.

When an idea leaves your vault

If you quote the video in something you publish, use the TikTok citation formats and read the line back against the video first.

Limits

• TikTok only. Public videos up to 60 minutes long that have captions.
• One link at a time.
• Copy and TXT give plain text. Add timestamps yourself.
• No plugin. You paste the text in and make the links yourself.
• Independent tool. Not affiliated with TikTok, ByteDance or Obsidian.