Import Existing Content

Your lore doesn’t always start in Inklings. Maybe you’ve been keeping notes in Obsidian for two years, or you have a folder of markdown files you’ve been accumulating since before you had a system. Either way, you don’t have to start over — Inklings can import your existing content and turn it into a proper workspace.

This tutorial walks you through the import dialog from start to finish: selecting your source, reviewing the preview, choosing how conflicts are handled, and verifying the result.

Before you start

The import system reads from a folder on your local filesystem. A few things to have ready:

• A source folder or Obsidian vault at a known path on your machine
• No inklings.db file in the source folder — that means the folder is already an Inklings workspace. Open it directly instead of importing it.

Inklings supports two source types, and it detects which one you have automatically:

• Markdown Folder — any directory of .md files
• Obsidian Vault — a directory containing a .obsidian subdirectory

The import dialog shows you which type was detected before you commit to anything.

Open the import dialog

Open the import dialog via File → Import or the import action in the sidebar. The dialog has three stages: select a source, review a preview, and confirm.

Select your source

Obsidian vault

Navigate to your Obsidian vault directory — the folder that contains the .obsidian subdirectory. The dialog detects the .obsidian marker and identifies it as an Obsidian Vault.

Markdown folder

Navigate to any directory containing .md files. The dialog identifies it as a Markdown Folder.

If you enter a path that doesn’t exist, the dialog shows a validation error and won’t proceed. If you accidentally select a file rather than a folder, the same thing happens. The preview step only appears once the source path is valid.

Review the import preview

Before anything is imported, the dialog analyzes your source and shows you what it found:

• File count — how many .md files will be imported as pages
• Folder count — how many subdirectories (which become parent pages in the hierarchy)
• Wiki-link count (Obsidian only) — how many [[PageName]] references will be converted to Inklings wiki-link format

For Obsidian vaults, the preview shows the wiki-link count because the import converts Obsidian’s [[PageName]] syntax to Inklings’s [[Display|slug]] format. After import, those links resolve and navigate correctly between the imported pages.

An empty folder is valid — the import completes without error but creates zero pages.

Choose a conflict strategy

If your workspace already has pages with the same slug as files in your import source, you need to decide what happens:

Strategy	What it does
Skip	Leaves your existing pages unchanged. Imported files with conflicting slugs are skipped and reported in the summary.
Rename	Imports the conflicting file with a modified slug (e.g., hero-1). Both your existing page and the new import coexist with different slugs.

If no conflicts exist, this choice doesn’t matter — all files are imported cleanly.

Confirm the import

Click Import to start. The dialog shows a progress state while the import runs, then transitions to a completion summary showing:

• How many pages were imported
• How many were skipped (if any)

After import, the new workspace opens with the imported pages visible in the sidebar. If your source had a nested folder structure, the sidebar mirrors it — subdirectories become parent pages containing child pages.

Import creates a new workspace

Each import creates a brand-new workspace. Your source folder is not modified (unless you use the InPlace mode, in which case an inklings.db is written into the source folder). The Copy mode creates an inklings.db at a separate path you specify, leaving the source completely untouched.

Verify your wiki-links (Obsidian imports)

If you imported an Obsidian vault with [[wiki-link]] references, open a page that contained links and check that they resolved.

1. Open a page you know had outgoing Obsidian links.
2. Look for wiki-link pills in the content — they should appear as styled inline elements, not as raw [[...]] text.
3. Click a link to confirm it navigates to the target page.

Links that resolved correctly appear with normal styling. If a link pointed to a page that wasn’t in the import (or didn’t match any imported slug), it appears with ghost styling — the same dimmed, dashed appearance that new unresolved links show. This isn’t an error; it means the target page genuinely doesn’t exist yet in this workspace.

What was imported

After a successful import:

• Every .md file became a page, with the filename as the page title
• Folder structure became page hierarchy — regions/thornwall-keep.md becomes the Thornwall Keep page nested under a Regions page
• The event log records creation events for each imported page, giving you an audit trail of when the content arrived

Coming from Notion?

Notion import is not yet directly supported. You can export from Notion to markdown using Notion’s built-in export feature, then import the resulting folder into Inklings using the markdown folder import described above. Native Notion import is planned for a future release.

Other Import Sources

Support for additional import sources — including AnyType and other tools — is planned. For now, any tool that can export to markdown files can be imported through the markdown folder workflow.

See Also

• Your First World — Organize your imported content with hierarchy, tags, and types
• Page Hierarchy — Moving pages and restructuring after import
• Wiki-Links and Backlinks — How the link system works after conversion