Export your Apple Notes with iMazing or Notejoy

Over the last few weeks, I have been in the process of moving from using an iMac (which I love) to a Windows computer which I tolerate. As you may have read the process has already being quite daunting. Mind you, it’s not over yet. I have already rebuilt and have been troubleshooting my Dell Alienware Aurora R12 for several days. I even downgraded to Windows 10 to see if it resolves the sleep issues I’ve been having, no luck. I’m starting to wonder if it is one of my hardware peripherals that is the culprit here, you never know.

In any case, as part of this daunting process, one of the tasks I’ve had to undertake was to start freeing my data from apple’s very closed off ecosystem. One of the apps that I have been using for years and quite heavily is Apple notes. By the way, I still love apple notes, I would like nothing more than to keep using it. However, due to apple being apple, they don’t give us a windows app. Therefore you have to use the web version and I’m not a fan of that aspect of it.

Anyone who’s ever been an apple user knows how hard it is to get your data off of their platform. They really don’t play nice with any other platforms and the same goes for apple notes. I have been testing and trying to find ways to get my notes off and it has been a painstaking process.

Unless you want to manually export each note as a pdf or cut and paste it into a new platform, you’d want to use some sort of mass export function to do it. But guess what, apple doesn’t give you that at all, with them, you only have those aforementioned methods. And in a case like mine, where I have 1,455 notes that include video, pictures and audio, that’s just not going to cut it.

The closest that I came to finding any success was using a product called iMazing to export my notes. It kind of worked, but it named them in a messy way, and you also lose the organization of your data files. It works just fine if you have only text notes as you can use a tool like “bulkrename” to fix file names. However, your images are exported separately and no longer part of the notes structure. I mean, you get your data, but there has got to be a better way.

In the process of trying out all the notes apps that I could come across, I find one called “Notejoy” and I saw that on their website they said “export from notes.” That’s all it took y’all, I downloaded it, hooked up and booted the imac I am replacing and purchased a “solo” license for about $49 for the year. I then began the process of exporting my notes from apple notes into notejoy.

It’s not a perfect working import tool, but I’ll be damned it actually works. In my case, it seems like one of my notes had a very long title and notejoy couldn’t get pass it. It kept crashing and stopping after a certain point. So at first I thought it was because I had too many notes, so I started to create many folders and separated them. After breaking my notebooks into smaller ones I realized that it still kept failing on one folder in particular. By doing a manual comparison of these smaller folders I discovered this very long note title existed and I copied it manually along with all those that failed to copy “after” it. The rest copied fine.

I paid for a year of notejoy, and as it stood, I intended to continue to use this app. However, upon further testing, I noticed that if I put my phone in airplane mode, I can’t access the notes on my phone. I then discovered that offline access doesn’t work on this app yet. For me that is a deal breaker and I will be asking for a full refund. Most of my writing is done on my mobile, especially when I’m commuting on the subway. Not being able to work offline really makes the mobile app nearly useless. It’s nice to know that as I choose to leave, that I can more easily export my data to google drive in a format that will keep everything I currently have.

Over the coming weeks, I hope to clean up my notes a bit. I know that I have some garbage in there that is no longer relevant. Some of them are blog posts that I should actually complete and post as well. So far, it appears that I have found a way to finally export my notes from apple to the world! Sadly, though this app appears to be a great companion, it is missing a very critical component by lacking offline notes on the iPhone and iPad. I am extremely disappointed as I thought my search was over.

So let’s summarize the tools that I used to get my notes out from apple notes.

iMazing

Pros: Back up entire iPhone. You can then export any content that is in the backup to your computer and do with it what you will. Support is responsive and answers my questions.

Cons: The notes export format is not very pretty and you lose the original attachment structure. However, in a pinch this is a great tool to extract your contacts, images, notes, and to simply backup your device.

Notejoy

Pros: Affordable and allows you to properly import your apple notes. Works on both windows and the mac world.

Cons: Doesn’t do well with long notes titles and provides no warning. In order to use offline sync and importing a lot of notes you will be required to get a paid plan. No offline mobile access, deal breaker for me. Also, you need a mac to get the apple notes out. If I didn’t have it anymore, I’d be screwed.

As far as I could find, with the exception of manually exporting or copying your data, these are the only two apps that allow you to pull apple notes successfully. I hope my many hours of trial-and-error help someone out there.