Converting Mela Recipes to Markdown to use in Obsidian

Mela.recipes is a recipe manager that I highly recommend to everyone. Yet, I’d like to have the recipes in plain text for safekeeping.

The bash script below converts the .melarecipes export to Markdown. I then use Obsidian bases to display and filter through the recipes.

To have the first image show up in the Obsidian Bases card layout I did the following:

1. Add a custom property, name it cover-image or something similar.
2. Add the following formula: image(file.embeds.filter(value.containsAny("png", "jpg", "gif"))[0]). This will go through the embeds in the markdown file and ‘selects’ the first image.
3. Then, in the Configure View of the Cards layout, choose ‘cover-image’ as image property.

The conversion script makes use of ImageMagick and if that’s not installed, it uses SIPS (MacOS default). I believe it’ll work on Linux and Windows too, but didn’t test it.

EDIT: I have hosted the script on Codeberg. This way I can update it without needing to paste it in this blog. Find it here: https://codeberg.org/geffrey/geffreys-pile-of-scripts/src/branch/main/mela-to-markdown.sh