Movie Posters Grid in Obsidian With Dataview

With the upcoming Bases update in Obsidian, this may become obsolete, but for the time being I am still quite happy using Dataview to embed little graphical elements in my notes.

For example, I have a note summarizing all the movies I watched each month. For that I use a combination of CSS and a Dataview query to generate a grid of movie posters. Until recently I used a very simple Dataview query, but I had a problem: if I watched a movie twice in a month, I got only one entry in my poster grid. This is not what I wanted, so I had to do something more complicated.

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const results = [];
const from = dv.date("2025-07-27");
const to = dv.date("2025-08-28");

for (const page of dv.pages('"03 - Literature/Movies"')) {
    const watched = page.Watched;
    if (!watched) continue;

    // Handle both single dates and arrays of dates
    const watchedDates = Array.isArray(watched) ? watched : [watched];

    // Add an entry for each watch date that falls within the range
    for (const date of watchedDates) {
        const watchedDate = dv.date(date);
        if (watchedDate &&
            watchedDate < to &&
            watchedDate > from) {
            results.push({
                poster: page.Poster,
                date: watchedDate
            });
        }
    }
}

// Sort by date descending and display just the posters
dv.list(
    results
        .sort((a, b) => b.date.ts - a.date.ts)
        .map(item => item.poster)
);

So in short, I have a Watched property on my movie notes that can take multiple values, and for each date in the property I add a “poster” entry to the results array. Finally, I sort the results by date descending and display the posters.

Problem solved.

(Btw, let me know if you want the CSS for the grid.)

July 25, 2021 ·

Workflow

Use Obsidian's Plugin Responsibly

This is just a reminder for an undesirable side effect of some Obsidian’s Plugin: they make your notes Obsidian-dependent. Here I will describe what is the problem and how can you easily avoid it to keep your note really futureproof.