Obsidian Bases Made Simple: Visual Use Cases

8 min read

In a Nutshell

Useful

This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on Obsidian Bases. Part 1 covered the fundamentals — enabling the plugin, understanding views, and building progress bars. Here you will put that knowledge to work with four visual use cases: browsing recipes as image cards, plotting trips on interactive maps, working with dates in formulas, and building a birthday tracker that counts down automatically.

Part 3 covers advanced techniques like visual star ratings, using the first image as a card cover, dynamic Maps of Content, and quick tips.

Cards View: Recipes

Tables are great for structured data, but sometimes you want something more visual — a way to browse a collection like a gallery. That is where the Cards View shines.

Recipes are the example here, but this approach works for anything with an image: books, films, collections, mood boards, or inspiration notes.

Setting Up Recipe Notes

Each recipe note needs frontmatter properties that describe the dish. A typical set looks like this:

  • difficulty — how hard the recipe is
  • rating — your personal score
  • lastCooked — when you last made it
  • totalTime — how long it takes
  • featureImage — the filename of the image to display

That featureImage property is the key to making cards work visually. It should contain the name of an image file stored in your vault (for example, pasta-carbonara.jpg).

Building the Cards View

Start with a new view in your Base and filter it to the relevant notes — by tag, folder, or any other property. Add the properties you want to display on each card: difficulty, rating, lastCooked, totalTime.

At this point, you are looking at a table. To switch to cards, right-click on the view name and change the layout from “table” to “cards”. The Base immediately switches to a card layout, but you will not see images yet.

To fix that, scroll down to the “image property” field and select featureImage from the list. You can choose your preferred image fit — “cover” works well for most cases — and adjust the aspect ratio to taste.

Just like tables, cards support grouping, sorting, and filtering. Group recipes by mealType and sort by lastCooked to see what you have not cooked in a while. You are only changing how the data is presented — the notes themselves stay untouched.

Map View: Travel Planning

Before using Obsidian for travel, planning a trip and reviewing it afterward meant scattered notes across different apps. The Map View in Bases changes that by giving you a spatial overview of trips, places, and locations — all connected and visible on an interactive map.

Downloads

There are two ways to use maps:

  • Overview map — shows all trips at a glance
  • Contextual map — shows only the locations related to one specific trip

Frontmatter for Maps

The key properties for map markers are:

  • location — latitude and longitude coordinates
  • icon — a Lucide icon name for the marker
  • color — the marker color

These three properties control how Bases places and styles markers on the map.

Building an Overview Map

Create a new view and filter it to notes in your travel folder. Start with a table to verify the data looks right, then right-click the view name and change the layout to “maps”.

You can zoom, pan, and center the map to the region that makes sense for you. Right-click and hold to tilt and rotate the view. Once you are happy with it, right-click the map and select “set default center point” and “set default zoom” so it always opens this way.

Next, configure the markers. Right-click the view name, open the “Markers” section, and assign each property:

  • Location → your location property
  • Marker icon → your icon property
  • Marker color → your color property

If the map shows too many items, add a filter — for example, notes containing a tag like Travel/Trip — to show only trips on the overview map.

Building a Contextual Map

A contextual map shows only the locations linked from a specific trip note. Duplicate the overview map view, rename it, and change the filter to:

this.file.hasLink(file)

Now, whenever you open a trip note that embeds this Base, the map automatically updates to show only the locations linked from that note — cities, landmarks, restaurants, museums.

Map Backgrounds

You can customize the map background by right-clicking the view, expanding the “Background” section, and pasting a style URL. Three options are available on the Obsidian map view documentation:

Light background:

https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/positron

Standard background:

https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/liberty

Dark background:

https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/dark

Each view can have its own background, so you can match the style to the content.

The big takeaway: maps are just another view on top of structured data. Once your notes have consistent location properties, you can reuse this approach far beyond travel — site visits, research locations, real estate, events, or anything tied to geography.

Working with Dates

Dates can feel tricky in Bases, but they are straightforward once you know a few go-to formulas.

Today’s Date

The today() function returns the current date. The format depends on your system settings.

For a consistent YYYY-MM-DD format, add toString():

today().toString()

For a custom format, use format(). This example extracts just the year and month:

today().format("YYYY-MM")

Extracting a Date from a Filename

If you work with daily notes named YYYY-MM-DD (or YYYY-MM-DD Some Title), you can extract a real date by taking the first ten characters of the filename:

date(file.name.slice(0,10))

If the filename matches the pattern, you get a valid date. If not, Bases returns nothing.

This unlocks views like “this day in history” — notes from previous years that share the same month and day. Filter for files where the filename contains the current note’s date formatted as MM-DD:

file.name.contains(date(this.file.name).format("MM-DD").toString())

Optionally exclude the current file:

file.basename != this.file.basename

Using a Dedicated Date Property

For notes without a date in their filename, you have two options: the file system’s created timestamp, or a dedicated frontmatter property like created. A frontmatter property is the better choice — sync tools and backups can change file system timestamps.

If you do not have a created property, you can substitute the system property “created time” in any of the formulas below.

Relative Date Views

Here are the formulas for common date-based filters. Each one is a formula property — set its filter to “true” to activate the view.

Notes created today:

today().format("YYYY-MM-DD") == note["created"]

Notes created yesterday:

(today() - "1 d").format("YYYY-MM-DD") == note["created"]

Notes created on the same day as the current note:

this.created.format("YYYY-MM-DD") == note["created"]

Notes created this week:

today().format("Yw") == date(note["created"]).format("Yw")

Notes created last week:

(today() - "1 w").format("Yw") == date(note["created"]).format("Yw")

Notes created this month:

today().format("YYYY-MM") == note["created"].format("YYYY-MM")

Notes created last month:

(today()- "1 M").format("YYYY-MM") == note["created"].format("YYYY-MM")

Notes created this year:

today().format("YYYY") == note["created"].format("YYYY")

Notes created last year:

(today()- "1 y").format("YYYY") == note["created"].format("YYYY")

All of these snippets — and more — are available on the wiki.

Birthday Tracker

Birthdays, deadlines, anniversaries — whatever the date, it is easy to let them slip. Here is how to build a tracker that counts down the days and auto-calculates ages.

The same method works for contract renewals, event countdowns, or any recurring date.

Setup

Create a new view and filter it to notes with a tag like person where the birthday property is not empty.

Days Until Next Birthday

Add a formula property called fRemainingDays. This formula converts today’s date and the person’s birthday into numbers, calculates the difference, and returns the result in days:

((number(
  date(today().format("YYYY") + "-" + birthday.format("MM-DD")) +
  if(date(today().format("YYYY") + "-" + birthday.format("MM-DD")) < today(), "1y", "0y")
) - number(today())) / 86400000).round()

It looks dense, but the logic is: take the birthday’s month and day, set it to the current year, check if it already passed (if so, add a year), then subtract today’s date and convert milliseconds to days.

Sort the results by fRemainingDays to get a clean overview of upcoming birthdays.

Calculating Age

Add another formula property called fAge:

if(birthday.format("MM-DD") <= today().format("MM-DD"),
today() - birthday, today() - (birthday + duration("1 year")))

This checks whether the birthday has already occurred this year and returns the correct current age.

Beyond Birthdays

You are not limited to birthdays or durations in years. The same approach lets you:

  • Count days until a deadline
  • Track contract renewals
  • Calculate how long something has existed
  • Show how much time is left until an important event

What’s Next

This was the visual side of Bases: recipe cards, travel maps, date formulas, and a birthday tracker. In Part 3, you will learn how to turn numeric ratings into visual stars, use the first image in a note as a card cover, build dynamic Maps of Content, and pick up a collection of quick tips and answers to common questions.

If you missed the fundamentals, Part 1 covers enabling the plugin, understanding view types, and building progress bars.

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