Migrating your Apple Notes to Evernote

Recently I had to update my network id at work because since getting married my last name has changed. Little did I know that requesting this change would break everything. The IT team didn’t do the update correctly because “they don’t know about Macs” and I was left locked out of my work laptop due to an outdated profile on my computer. After much frustration and the creation of a brand new mac profile, I realized I had lost all my data. Good thing I save everything to a cloud so little was lost.

However I realized, I had lost a bunch of notes written in Apple Notes, to my salvation a really great guy at work helped me to retrieve them and I made sure to store my notes on the cloud going forward. I got Evernote and the journey to migrate was ON. Of course this feature doesn’t exist because Apple Notes only exports to .pdf. Yea I couldn’t believe it either. Super useless.

In searching for my own solution I came across Apple Script. I found a post with sample code which I made some edits to. https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/4046-importing-from-apple-mailapps-notes/

Below is my version, worked like magic and was done in minutes. Just open up AppleScript, paste in the code, and hit the play button. DONE! I have never used AppleScript before but it is something I will be digging into. AUTOMATION POWER! Also, Apple should really create better export options like CSV and ZIP files.

Hope this helps someone. =) (Sorry I don’t know how to quote code in Medium yet)

tell application “Notes”

set theMessages to every note

repeat with thisMessage in theMessages

set myTitle to the name of thisMessage

set myText to the body of thisMessage

set myCreateDate to the creation date of thisMessage

set myModDate to the modification date of thisMessage

tell application “Evernote”

set myNote to create note with text myTitle title myTitle notebook “Apple Notes” tags [“Apple Notes”]

set the HTML content of myNote to myText

set the creation date of myNote to myCreateDate

set the modification date of myNote to myModDate

end tell

end repeat

end tell