Thoughts on handling assets in a digital garden §

Avoiding inserting images, or more generally, assets into notes is impossible. No need to get into the use-cases of having them in the second brain. However handling them is a big issue.

Till now I was just dumping everything in a single folder on a git repository hosted in GitHub. The problem was cloning the repository, which took really long and made impracticable for using mobile. Also, I reckon that non-text assets don’t belong together in a versioning system; they don’t profit at all from its tooling.

I look at some solutions and found git LFS could solve some of my issues. It’s basically a separate server for handling large files. Your assets are replaced with a pointer, and the pointer are the stuff being managed by git, not the files themselves. It’s neatly integrated with most common git hosting platforms and works seamless with the cli. I wouldn’t have to change my workflow at all.

However, after setting up, I quickly realize I forgot to check an important detail: GitHub’s quota limit. It took less than I day for me to receive an email telling me that I surpassed the 1GB free bandwith quota limit, also providing me with the option to buy data packages - or whatever they are called, for increasing them in steps of 50GB.

I don’t want another expense. Specially a recurring one. But I also realize I don’t have a plan B. Scavenging the web I found some other solutions.

Imgur §

None of my assets were sensitive. That’s why I was willing to store them in GitHub. So Imgur could be a decent option. Furthermore, there is a Obsidian plugin that could offload me some of the work of uploading new pictures into there. Looking into the issues list I see two relevant features aren’t there: mass-uploading existing pictures and mobile integration. Although this last one I couldn’t grasp how well is the plugin implemented mobile just by reading the repo. I’d have to test it out.

I have initially two concerns in adopting it as storage provider: long-term storage and offline support. Both are not a deal-breakers for me; but they would be really nice to have.

Most important for me is the mass-conversion of the links. For that, I would have to write a script to (i) scrape my vault, (ii) upload everything into Imgur, and (iii) replace the links with the correct references. Maybe a half-day effort ☕

Keep using git without LFS, I guess..? §

That’s something I could do. It is definitely the easiest one, and the one that was working before I decided to switch to LFS. The good thing about this options is that it just works, it’s free and it is the easiest to capture information. Provided I save stuff in the assets folder, it will preserve the information.

I’d still have the problem with cloning taking long and some issues with mobile, but for the short-term it the easiest solution.

Btw, reverting back is as easy as it should be.¹

Setting my own server §

First thing that comes to mind is security. I don’t want to deal with this. This could be the coolest solution, but easy the one that would cost me the most effort.

Paying a service? §

Hm. This could be an option. Setting all with GDrive/Koofr permalinks.

Footnotes §

1. Actually, it was not so easy. This didn’t work. ↩