Official Obsidian Plugin for Readwise | Full Product Walkthrough

Readwise’s official Obsidian plugin is built to turn highlights from books, articles, and even transcribed podcasts into searchable, linkable notes inside an Obsidian “second brain”—with tags carried over so the highlights can plug directly into an existing knowledge graph. The practical payoff is retention plus active reuse: instead of re-digging through old notebooks or margins, users can surface past ideas on demand and connect them to new notes months later.

The walkthrough starts with what appears in Obsidian after syncing. A synced book becomes a structured note containing that book’s highlights, and—newly—tags added to highlights in Readwise also sync into Obsidian. That tag mirroring matters because it enables graph-based discovery: searching for a tag like “mastery” can pull up every highlight ever tagged that way across the entire vault, not just within a single book. The plugin’s export approach is also described as intentionally integrated with Readwise’s templating options. While community plugins exist, the official integration is positioned as smoother and more customizable, including how document tags and topic prefixes are inserted into each synced file.

Beyond formatting, the plugin adds control over what gets imported. A filtering option lets users exclude certain sources—such as tweets or other highlight-heavy categories—so sensitive or unwanted material doesn’t land in Obsidian. Setup then focuses on operational details: choosing a base folder for synced content, setting a resync frequency (the example uses 24 hours to avoid overloading the Readwise server), enabling automatic syncing when Obsidian opens, and using “recent deleted files” to optionally recreate files that were deleted after a sync. Formatting settings can also link highlight dates to daily notes, creating a timeline trail that supports local graph exploration of when ideas arrived.

Once synced, the workflow shifts from passive storage to active thinking. The walkthrough demonstrates creating a new Obsidian note and pulling in inspiration from Readwise highlights—using tags as a starting point for ideation. A “mastery” tag session shows how Readwise-sourced highlights (blue) can sit alongside user-written notes (yellow), with links already established so the graph view becomes a launchpad for drafting and expanding themes.

Podcast highlights are treated as a standout capability. The integration relies on transcriptions produced by a separate app called Air, which lets users capture “best moments” from podcasts on iPhone (Android is on a waitlist). Those captured segments sync into Readwise and then into Obsidian, enabling users to quote or reference specific spoken ideas directly in their notes.

Finally, the broader Readwise system is summarized as the engine behind retention: daily reviews with streaks, recency and frequency tuning to bias what resurfaces, and highlight categories spanning books, articles, tweets, and podcasts. Supplemental books can add highlights from books the user marked as read elsewhere (e.g., via Goodreads), and “Mastery” can turn highlights into flash-card style prompts. The walkthrough closes by emphasizing Readwise’s wide integration ecosystem (Instapaper, Kindle, Apple Books, Goodreads, and more) and a “killer feature” for physical books—photographing pages, selecting text in the image, and importing it as highlights—so the same capture-to-graph workflow can extend beyond digital reading.