Tolga

On sizing, since it is the difference between a usable table and a wall of pictures: the embed syntax accepts a width, and you want something small — thumbnail scale.

Also be aware that a table of many images is genuinely heavy to render. Fifty covers in one view is noticeably slow to open on a phone, and if you keep the view pinned it recomputes when the vault changes.

Paginate it, filter it to a subset, or accept the delay. A book list is usually better as "currently reading" plus a separate archive query nobody opens daily.

The setup is two settings that have to be on together, and the surprises you hit are real and worth understanding rather than working around blindly.

The setup:

1. Enable the trigger on new file creation. This is the master switch. Without it, folder templates do nothing at all.
2. Define folder templates, mapping a folder to a template file. Now a note created in your meetings folder gets the meeting template, one created in your daily folder gets the daily template.
3. Set a default template for anything outside a mapped folder, or leave it empty so those files stay blank. I would leave it empty — a template applied to a quick scratch note is more annoying than no template.

Now the side effects, which are what sent you back.

It fires for files created by anything, not just by you. That includes:

• files arriving through sync from another device
• files created by other plugins
• files created by an importer

The sync one is the significant hazard. A note created on your phone syncs to your desktop, the desktop sees a new file appear, and the template runs against it — inserting the template into a note that already has content, on the other machine. This is the reported cause of duplicated headers and mangled notes and it is why the setting has a reputation.

In practice modern versions handle the common cases, but the failure mode is bad enough that it is worth verifying deliberately: create a note on one device, watch what arrives on the other, before you trust it with a month of meetings.

Dynamic content runs at creation time, which is the point but has a consequence. If your template inserts today's date, it inserts the date the file was created. Fine for a daily note. Not fine if you create tomorrow's note tonight, which the daily-note feature does — there is a separate setting to make the date-aware behaviour line up with the intended date rather than the wall clock, and getting it wrong produces notes titled one day and dated another.

It can interact badly with other plugins that create files. Anything that generates notes in bulk now generates them with a template applied. Usually harmless, occasionally not.

The safer variant, if this makes you nervous: skip automatic creation and bind a hotkey to "create note from template" instead. You lose the guarantee and you keep total control over when it fires. Given that your actual problem is forgetting, that trade may not suit you — but it is what I would suggest for a vault that syncs across several devices.

A middle path that works well: enable it, but keep templates minimal — front matter and headings only, nothing dynamic beyond the date. A template that only adds structure is nearly harmless if it fires unexpectedly, and it still solves your missing-metadata problem, which is the actual goal.