6 Strategies for Linking your Visual Thoughts with Obsidian, Excalidraw & ExcaliBrain

Linking sketches to text in Obsidian becomes far more useful when images carry searchable metadata and relationships—not just when they’re pasted into a canvas. The core idea behind these six strategies is to treat drawings as first-class knowledge objects: embed images, tag them, link them to existing notes, and let Excalidraw/Excalibrain surface those connections as children, backlinks, and visual “friend” relationships.

A straightforward starting point is inserting an image directly into an Excalidraw sketch. In the example workflow, a video thumbnail lives as a separate Excalidraw drawing, then appears inside an Excalibrain view as a linked node. The same sketch can also embed other images (like a copied airplane) and reuse iconography across multiple places—so one visual element can function like a reusable concept rather than a one-off decoration. Excalibrain then reflects these embedded relationships in its graph.

To make library images reusable without losing discoverability, the transcript emphasizes adding text fields—especially tags—so the system can find the drawing later. When an icon is added from the stencil library, it may be hard to locate later because the item itself lacks context. The workaround is to attach tags, links, or Dataview fields to the image element. One example uses a transparent text element: the label is hidden in the drawing for visual cleanliness, but the Dataview field still stores a link (e.g., “example” mapped to a concept like “combining components”). That hidden metadata then drives Excalibrain’s visual grouping and shows where the concept is used.

Another approach flips the pattern: instead of tagging the embedded image, add text elements to the drawing itself. Creating a text element like “#example” automatically adds “example” to the tags list, and adding a double-bracket link creates an Excalibrain child node. The transcript also notes how unresolved links appear when the referenced note doesn’t yet exist in Obsidian—useful feedback for building out the knowledge base.

Beyond element-level tagging, the workflow can preserve structured metadata by writing in Markdown mode. Anything above the text elements—front matter, Dataview fields, tags, descriptions, and links—gets copied into Excalidraw and retained, enabling consistent linking to topics (like a YouTube content map) and relationships (like marking an icon as a “friend” of the drawing).

Finally, drawings can connect to the rest of the vault through backlinks and templates. Backlinks let other notes “point back” to a sketch, turning active work (like a daily note tagged “working on” a topic) into a richer relationship graph. Templates add another layer: right-click locking prevents template artwork from being accidentally selected, while editable overlays let users fill in resources and dates that become automatic links. The result is a set of composable strategies—metadata, relationships, backlinks, and templating—that together make visual thinking searchable and interconnected inside Obsidian’s note system.