Obsidian Archive

Status: released

Last Updated: December 29, 2025

chrome-extension obsidian productivity javascript claude-code
Obsidian Archive
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Obsidian Archive

Obsidian Archive is a Chrome extension that archives web pages to your Obsidian vault with rich metadata for search and citation. One click saves any article, tweet, or page as a well-formatted markdown file.

Features

  • One-click archiving - Click the extension, select a category, archive
  • Smart metadata extraction - Automatically captures title, author, publication date, source
  • HTML to Markdown conversion - Preserves headers, links, blockquotes, lists, images
  • Twitter/X support - Special extraction for clean tweet archives with quoted tweets
  • Citation-ready - Generates both markdown links and academic-style citations
  • Category organization - Sort into Articles, Videos, Tweets, Papers, Recipes, Reference, or Misc
  • Dataview-friendly - Frontmatter designed for Obsidian queries

How It Works

The extension uses a Chrome native messaging host to write directly to your vault:

  1. Content script extracts page content using Mozilla’s Readability library
  2. Popup lets you edit metadata and select category
  3. Native host writes the markdown file to your vault

Each archived page gets frontmatter like:

---
title: "Article Title"
url: https://example.com/article
author: John Smith
source: example.com
date_published: 2025-01-15
date_archived: 2025-12-29
category: Articles
tags: []
summary: ""
citation_md: "[Article Title](https://example.com/article)"
citation_full: "Smith, John. \"Article Title\". example.com, 15 Jan 2025."
status: raw
---

Claude Code Post-Processing

The real power comes from combining the archive with Claude Code. The extension deliberately captures content without AI processing to save API costs - you run summarization manually when you want it.

The /summarize-archive Skill

A Claude Code skill that batch-processes your archived files:

  1. Finds unprocessed files - Looks for status: raw in frontmatter
  2. Reads and analyzes - Understands the content in context
  3. Generates summaries - 2-3 sentence abstracts capturing key points
  4. Adds tags - 3-5 relevant tags for discoverability
  5. Updates status - Changes to summarized so it won’t reprocess

Run it from your Archives folder:

cd Archives
claude
/summarize-archive

Other Claude Code Workflows

Since everything is markdown with structured frontmatter, you can ask Claude Code to:

  • Find related articles: “What have I saved about childhood development?”
  • Generate citations: “Give me citations for my sources on AI regulation”
  • Create reading lists: “What’s in my archive that I haven’t reviewed yet?”
  • Cross-reference: “Do any of my archived articles cite each other?”

The status field (raw → summarized → reviewed) lets you track your reading workflow.

Installation

Requires Node.js on Windows and Chrome.

  1. Download the extension files
  2. Run install.bat to register the native messaging host
  3. Load the extension in Chrome (chrome://extensions → Load unpacked)
  4. Update the native host manifest.json with your extension ID

Why I Built This

Inspired by a tweet from Andy Masley about using Claude Code to build a “personal panopticon” of everything you read. I wanted easy archival with proper metadata for later citation in blog posts and talks.

The whole thing - extension, native host, summarization skill - was built in a single Claude Code session.