It is no secret that I love Capacities and have written a lot about it. Of all its wonderful features, there are two that are just so much better than what other PKM apps offer and I’m reminded every time I use them:

1. Visual embedding options

2. Media/asset annotations

Visual embedding options

If you create references to other pieces of content in Capacities, there are nearly always various ways to view this reference.

You can create references through the ‘@’ or ‘[[]]’ command, which allows you to search and link all of your content. As long as you are not mid-block, you will be able to embed in various ways by clicking on the three dots on the right hand side of the reference.

This gives you more ownership over how the page looks and how you interact with the information. Sometimes I use wide cards as dividers, or use two columns and have small cards on one side and text on the other. The small cards are especially good as you can see the text through it, which is great for quick looks at content.

My favourite embeds are the small and wide cards. These are available for page embeds, images, weblinks, PDFs etc.

Searching for these links is also fantastic, you can open the databases in line, filter, search and select multiple at once. This way of linking makes so much sense and now I find myself wanting it in other apps, but similar features just don’t exist.

I think these features take connection to the next level, and make working with your notes more enjoyable. This, combined with the page layouts you get on the Capacities Believer plan, means my whole page of notes is useful and customisable, I am not stuck with just text links between brackets in an outline format.

It’s allowing me to create my own, better textbook and it makes me want to work everyday, which is a must as someone who studies on top of a full time job!

Media/asset annotations

Another feature I now can’t live without is media/asset annotations.

Capacities has automatic content types, which are databases that are automatically created for you as soon as you paste/upload an example of it into your space, such as images, tweets, URLs. The media will be pasted where you want them, but then also uploaded to their own databases. That gives you multiple places to resurface that content.

Unlike personalised ent types, the properties in automatic content types are not editable. One thing the Capacities team has included though is the ability to add notes to the media itself. This doesn’t mean adding notes on a page that has features media. It’s a note on the media itself.

In Notion, Logseq or Obsidian, if I paste an image, it lives within the page I’m in. In Capacities, it technically lives in an image database but shows up in the page I’m in too. Because it belongs to the image database, it gains extra functionality. I can rename the image, tag it, link to other content in the notes, add it to a collection etc.

You can do this to ts too, which lets you take literature notes to the next level and really extract the value out of them. Media notes/annotations no longer need to be nested bullets or blocks, they’re attached to the actual media. It makes so much sense. I was searching for PKM style image annotation for literallars and now I have it.

So once again, I conclude that Capacities is phenomenal and ticks boxes I have wanted a note-taking app to tick for years. It is a genuine joy to use.

Have you tried Capacities yet? Is there anything holding you back that you’d like advice on? Let me know and I’ll do my best to help show you how great the app is!