How to Export Apple Journal App Entries Without Losing Photos

2026-09-12 · Yesterself

A phone journal is a pleasant place to write and an awkward place to leave. There is no folder to copy, no file with your name on it. The writing lives inside one app, arranged the way that app prefers, and the only way out is whatever door the developer decided to build.

Apple's Journal app, which arrived with iOS 17.2, is that kind of app. This is a practical guide to getting entries out of it and into something you can keep: what to check first, what to do when there is no file-based path, and how to keep photos attached to the day they belong to.

Check what your phone offers today

Export features appear and change across OS releases. An article written a year ago may describe a menu you don't have, or miss one you do. Before doing anything by hand, look in three places, in this order.

1. Inside the app. Open a single entry and look at its share or more menu, then at Journal's own settings screen. A per-entry share is the fastest route to a readable copy.
2. iOS Settings, in the section for the Journal app. Some data controls live there rather than in the app.
3. Apple's Data and Privacy site. Signing in with your Apple Account lets you request a copy of the data tied to it. You choose categories from a list and Apple prepares a download over a few days. Check whether Journal appears on that list the day you look.

Take your own phone's word for this rather than mine.

One thing that is not an export: an iCloud backup. A backup exists to restore onto an iPhone. It is not a set of files you can open and read, and if it is your only copy, you cannot reach one entry without rebuilding a whole phone.

Decide what you actually need out

The word "export" hides three different jobs, and they cost very different amounts of effort.

• A readable copy. PDFs or printouts. Human readable, layout intact, media shown inline. Not searchable in bulk, not re-importable anywhere.
• Structured text. Plain text or Markdown, one file per entry or one per month. Searchable, movable, still openable in thirty years, but media usually falls out.
• A full archive. The text, plus the original media files, plus a record of which photo belonged to which entry.

Get the readable copy first, this week, even if it is rough. It is cheap insurance. The structured archive can be a slow project, a month at a time.

The paths, roughly in order of effort

1. Any built-in export. If it exists, use it — then open what it produced before assuming it is complete.
2. Print to PDF. If Print appears in an entry's share sheet, use the share button on the print preview to save the result as a PDF into Files. This works in plenty of apps that have no export command.
3. Select and copy the text. Where an entry lets you select text, copy it into a text file. Text stays searchable; a picture of it does not.
4. Screenshots. A fallback, not a plan. Full-page capture is offered in some apps and not others; elsewhere you scroll and shoot with overlap. An iPhone or a Mac can pull selectable text back out of a screenshot, but you will be fixing small errors.
5. Retyping or dictation. For a hundred entries this is not absurd. Dictate one at a time straight into a text file.

Capturing by hand without wrecking the dates

The most common damage in a manual export is not lost words. It is lost dates. Every entry ends up stamped with the afternoon you exported it, and a decade of writing collapses into one Tuesday.

A few habits prevent that.

• Name files with ISO dates. 2024-03-17.md sorts in date order in a file browser and reads the same in any country. If you had two entries that day, add -1 and -2.
• Write the date inside the file too, on the first line. File names get renamed by well-meaning software. Body text rarely does.
• Pick one shape and keep it. Either one file per entry, or one file per month with ## 2024-03-17 headings above each entry. Both are fine. Switching halfway is what hurts.
• Watch time zones. An entry written at eleven at night, or while traveling, can carry a timestamp from the next day. If the date matters, trust what the entry says over the metadata.
• Batch by month. Twenty-five minutes, one month, then stop. This is dull work and dullness is what makes people abandon it at 2019.

Keeping the media attached to the right day

This is the part people discover too late. Photos, videos and audio inside an entry are often references to items that live elsewhere on your phone, not copies bundled with the entry. Export the text and you can end up with a sentence about a photograph and no photograph.

Handle it deliberately.

• For every entry with media, add a plain line in the text file: photo: 2024-03-17 14:22 IMG_4821. Three seconds, and it is the map back.
• Export originals from the Photos app rather than saving them from a preview. In the share sheet, open Options and turn on All Photos Data so the timestamp and metadata travel with the file.
• Avoid routing photos through messaging apps, which re-encode them and can strip that metadata. AirDrop, or a cable into a computer, treats originals more gently.
• Store media beside the text, named to match: 2024-03-17-01.jpg, 2024-03-17-02.jpg. Someone with no software at all can line those up with the entry.
• Voice recordings are the hardest thing to move. If one matters, play it and transcribe it. A transcript survives format changes that an audio file may not.

This is also the moment to ask what you want from the next journal, because it comes down to one question: can you leave whenever you want? Yesterself is built around that answer. Export is free forever, on the free tier too, in open formats, and deleting the app doesn't hold your writing hostage. It isn't released yet; there is a waiting list rather than a download.

Verify the export before you trust it

An export you have not opened is a rumor.

• Count. If the app said 412 entries, count roughly 412 files.
• Spot-check the oldest entry, the newest, and three at random.
• Open the archive on another device, ideally a computer, with software that has nothing to do with the original app. If it needs that app to be readable, it is not an archive yet. If the pile is heading for a desktop, think about where it will live there before you dump a thousand files into Downloads.
• Search the archive for a word you know appears in a 2019 entry. If the search fails, your text is probably still trapped inside images.

Only after that should you delete anything from the phone.

Where the copy should live

Keep at least two copies, on two kinds of storage, one of them somewhere other than your house. Sync alone is not a second copy: sync faithfully reproduces deletions and corruption. A folder that is never overwritten is worth more than three synced ones.

If the contents are private, put the archive in an encrypted disk image or archive file, not a bare folder, and keep the password somewhere you will still find it in ten years. No storage choice makes anything risk-free; it makes some risks smaller.

Ask the next app to prove it first

Whatever you write in next, test its export on day one with three entries, not in year four with a thousand. Ask four things:

1. What formats does it produce, and can you open one without the app?
2. Does the export include photos and recordings, or only text?
3. Is export available on the free tier, or does leaving require a subscription?
4. Can you set an entry's date, so imported writing lands on the day it happened?

An app that answers those clearly is telling you how it plans to treat you later. An app that cannot answer them at all has already answered.

Common questions

Does Apple's Journal app have a built-in export?

That has changed across iOS versions, so check your own phone rather than an article. Look in an entry's share menu, in Journal's settings screen, and in the category list on Apple's Data and Privacy site. If none of those offers a file, printing an entry to PDF is usually still available.

Is an iCloud backup the same as exporting my entries?

No. A backup is built to restore onto an iPhone, not to be opened and read by you. If a backup is your only copy, you cannot read a single entry without restoring an entire phone first.

What file format should I export my journal to?

Plain text or Markdown files named with ISO dates like 2024-03-17 for anything you want to search or move again later, plus PDFs if you want a readable copy that preserves layout. Both stay openable for decades without special software.

Will my photos and voice recordings come out with the entries?

Often not, because media in an entry is frequently a reference to something stored elsewhere on the phone. Export photos separately from the Photos app with All Photos Data turned on, name them with the entry's date, and transcribe any recording you would hate to lose.

Can I import Apple Journal entries into a different journaling app?

Only if that app has an importer, so ask before you commit to it. If it doesn't, you can paste entries in by hand, but check first that the app lets you set each entry's original date instead of stamping everything with today.