How to Export Apple Notes to Another App, Journal Intact

2026-10-27 · Yesterself

Almost nobody sets out to keep a journal in Apple Notes. It happens by accretion. You type a few lines in a waiting room because the app is one swipe away, then a longer thing at 1 a.m., and four years later there are six hundred notes, eleven of which are actually a diary buried among grocery lists and Wi-Fi passwords.

Then you want to move — to a real journaling app, or to plain files in a folder you control. Either way the problem is the same, and it is not really a software problem. It is a sorting problem with a data-loss problem hiding inside it.

First, separate the journal from the junk

Do not export everything and sort later. Six hundred untitled notes in a download folder is a worse archive than the one you started with.

Spend twenty minutes instead. In Notes, make a folder called something like Journal — to move and drag anything that reads like writing into it. You are not reading the notes. You are glancing at the first line and asking one question: is this a thought or is this a task?

A few shortcuts that speed this up:

• Sort by Date Edited and work backward. Journal entries cluster in time; utility notes are scattered.
• Search for words you only use when writing to yourself: your own name for a person, "I keep", "today I", "I don't know why". Every writer has three or four tells.
• Notes with no title and a lot of body text are usually entries. Notes with a title and four lines are usually errands.
• Leave anything ambiguous where it is. You can do a second pass.

When the folder looks right, count it. That number is your check at the end.

Bulk selection, and what it actually does

On the Mac you can click the first note in the list and shift-click the last to select a whole range, or use Select All within a folder. That much is reliable. What happens when you then export the selection has changed across macOS versions, so verify rather than trust: pick five notes, run the export, open every one of the five files, and only then repeat with the full folder.

Three routes, in rough order of how much they preserve:

1. Export as PDF from the selection. Keeps layout, images, scans, and handwriting. Good as a visual backup, bad as an import source, because most journaling apps cannot pull text back out of a PDF cleanly.
2. Copy and paste into a text editor. Tedious at scale but lossless for words. If you have thirty real entries rather than three hundred, this is genuinely the fastest correct method, and you can type the date at the top of each one as you go.
3. A third-party exporter or a script. This is the only route that gets you one file per note with dates attached, at scale. More on the script below, because it also solves the date problem.

Do this on a Mac if you have one. The iPhone shares one note at a time, which is fine for ten and unbearable for two hundred.

One thing before you start: locked notes will not export while they are locked. Unlock them first, or they will silently be the ones missing at the end. And if your notes sync with iCloud, let the sync finish before exporting, so you are not exporting a half-downloaded copy.

What breaks on the way out

Not everything in a note is text, and the parts that are not text are the parts that go quietly.

Checklists. The item text nearly always survives. The checked state usually does not, and even when it does, it arrives as a character your next app will not read as a checkbox. Ask whether the ticks carry meaning. In a journal they sometimes do — a list of things you were afraid of, with two crossed off, is a different document from the same list untouched. If so, retype those few by hand into sentences. Meaning that lives in formatting does not travel.

Sketches and handwriting. Apple Pencil drawings are attachments, not text. They come through an export that carries images and vanish completely from a plain text export, with no error and no gap where they used to be. If you have drawn in your journal, do a second pass for those notes and export them as PDF alongside the text version.

Scanned pages. Same category. A scanned letter or a photographed page of a paper diary is an image. Export those to PDF, and name the file so it ties back to the entry it belonged to.

Tables, links between notes, and tags. Assume all three are lost. Internal links point at an app you are leaving. Tags are worth writing down as a plain list before you go, because they are often the only index of what you cared about in a given year.

Recovering a real date when the note has none

This is the part people discover too late. A note that begins "I don't know why today felt like that" has no date in it anywhere. Its date lives in the app's metadata, and metadata is exactly what a copy-paste or a plain export throws away. You end up with three hundred preserved paragraphs floating in no particular year.

Every note in Notes carries two dates: creation date and modification date. For journal purposes you want the creation date, with one caveat — if you edited an old entry to fix a typo last spring, the modification date is now last spring, so never sort by it and never treat it as when you wrote.

Two ways to get the creation date attached to the words:

• By hand, at the top of each note, before exporting. Turn on the list view setting that shows the date, then go through and type the date as the first line of the note body. Slow, but it means every export format afterward carries the date inside the text, where nothing can strip it.
• With AppleScript. Notes is scriptable on macOS. A short script can loop through one folder and write out, for each note, its name, its creation date, and its body, one file per note, with the date in the filename. This is the only method that reliably gets several hundred correctly dated files without a week of clicking, and it is a small enough request to hand to someone who writes scripts.

Then name the files so they sort: year, month, day, at the front. 2023-04-11-waiting-room.md sorts correctly everywhere. Anything starting with a title does not.

Landing somewhere better

Whatever you move into, ask one question before you commit: can you get everything back out, in an open format, without paying? An archive you cannot leave is not an archive; it is a lease. That is true of the app you are leaving and equally true of the next one.

We built Yesterself partly around that idea: each morning brings one letter drawn from your own past writing, and your reply that evening becomes tomorrow's mail. It is end-to-end encrypted, with no account and no email address, and export is free forever, including on the free tier. It is not released yet — there is a waiting list on the site and nothing else. The export question is the one to ask of anybody, us included.

If you are coming from somewhere else instead, the same principles apply to Notion and to Google Docs, though the failure modes differ.

The order that works

1. Sort the journal into its own folder and count it.
2. Unlock locked notes and let iCloud finish syncing.
3. Write dates into the note bodies, by hand or by script.
4. Test the export on five notes and open all five.
5. Export the rest, with a separate PDF pass for anything containing drawings or scans.
6. Check the file count against your number from step one.
7. Keep the originals in Notes for a few weeks. Delete nothing until you have read a dozen of the new files end to end.

The point is not tidiness. A paragraph you wrote in a waiting room four years ago is worth something specific, and worth nothing at all if you cannot find out when you wrote it.

Common questions

Can I export more than one Apple Note at a time?

On the Mac you can select a range of notes in the list and export the selection, though what the export produces depends on your macOS version. Check with five notes before you try three hundred.

What happens to my checklists when I export?

The text of each item almost always survives. The checked or unchecked state often does not, so decide in advance whether that state carries meaning worth preserving by hand.

Will my Apple Pencil sketches and scanned pages come out?

Drawings and scans are attachments, not text. They survive an export that keeps images, such as PDF or HTML, and disappear entirely from a plain text export.

My notes have no dates in them. Can I still recover when I wrote them?

Yes, in most cases. Every note carries a creation date and a modification date in Notes itself, and you can read those before you export and write them into the note or the filename.

Should I delete the notes once they are exported?

Not until you have opened the exported files yourself and confirmed the words are there. Keep the originals for a few weeks after the move, then decide.