Pasting the Teams Copilot Recap into Obsidian

For the last few weeks, I’ve had a bit of a challenge when copy/pasting the meeting recap from Teams Copilot into Obsidian. Obsidian would lock up. I had to stop the app and restart it…and even then it would be slow whenever I tried to work with the meeting recap note.

My initial workaround was to paste plain text into Obsidian, then manually add in the bullet outline formatting that was dropped. This quickly became annoying.

This didn’t happen with every meeting recap, but it has been happening more often. After some investigation, I narrowed the issue down to an update to the recap, which includes screen-grabs as images from various points in the meeting.

Obsidian handles images just fine, but it turned out that the images weren’t objects, but the full base64 content that sits behind the image.

- Topic summary detail is here
![Related image included inline](data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSKZJRgABA...)

This is valid markdown, but adding a bunch of images this way was overwhelming the engine in Obsidian that makes things look nice on screen. I messed around with the Power Toys Advanced Paste, but it didn’t solve the issue because it didn’t target only the base64 image content in the link.

I don’t strictly need these, so for now my workaround is to use the Paste Reformatter plugin to strip the image content. Specifically, I’m using the markdown regex replacement feature

In case you’re looking for the same pattern, here’s the specific regex:

!\[[^\]]*\]\(data:image\/[^;]+;base64,[^)]+\)

Works like a champ!