Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2018/09/06/tipbits-how-to-move-your-evernote-notes-to-apples-notes/
Evernote, the company behind the popular note-taking app, appears to be in trouble. If you’re worried about Evernote going under, now may be a good time to transfer your notes over to Apple’s Notes app for safe-keeping. Here’s how.
This is great advice.
It comes with an important caveat. I was a heavy Evernote user for years. When the company imposed a device syncing limit on free accounts a couple of years ago, I decided to move my Evernote Notes to Apple Notes.
Many of my notes had attached files, like PDFs. They all eventually transferred, but when I use Notes on my iOS devices, the app will frequently stall. I have about 1500 notes, most of which made the journey from Evernote, and it seems to create a performance lag in Notes. I was able to partially solve the problem by pruning some of my notes, but it’s still not great.
Unfortunately, all encrypted text is omitted in the export.
I suggest keeping your notes or copies of them on your own hard drive so they back up with your regular back up plan. Here’s why.
Notes may be better now but it kept losing some of my notes which were all made on an iPhone. I tried but didn’t like Evernote and ended up using Jottings which saves the files to text files in a Dropbox folder. That makes them available on all my devices.
Any idea if I can do it from my iPhone 7+ as I am away travelling for another 7 weeks without access to my Mac
I store all important info like insurances/ferries/manuals for the motorhome. I am a Premium User.
Carol
I opted to move my Evernote notes into DEVONthink Office Pro, and while it took a while to process them all, it was pretty painless.
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My understanding is you can only export one note at a time from the iOS app, so it’d be pretty painful.
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I can confirm, importing Evernote into notes, if you have more than a few hundred, is an exercise in frustration waiting to happen. I imported approximately 3000, and notes would never stop attempting to sync. I gave up and went back and paid for Evernote.
Has anybody tried a newer app called “Keep It Mobile” from Reinvented Software. Federico Viticci has been using the tool for a while now. It’s in the app store.
Tried a 190 document migration to Notes.
- No option to view documents (Word, Excel) “in-line”—only as an attachment?
- Notes has no Keywords/Tags? Evernote has a checkbox to include them in the export, but I don’t see them anywhere in Notes.
- It’s great to have notes synch across devices and platforms, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to eat up a couple of Gigabytes of iCloud storage with my Evernote stuff. Which means it has to sit on a local drive…
This is going to be an adjustment… 
I don’t necessarily recommend Notes as a 1:1 Evernote replacement. It just happens to be handy for Mac users. Though it’s what I use myself.
And thank you for the tip! At least for now, I’ve backed up my 8 Gigs of Evernote data.
…btw, that emoji is fine in this forum, but OVERPOWERING on the web site.
Thanks for suggestions but will keep fingers crossed that nothing happens whilst I’m away until end of October and sort it out then
With limited data abroad I couldn’t do it
Carol
If you’re looking to sync a lot of data you probably would be better off using a more advanced app like DEVONthink Pro over Notes. It can take whatever you throw at it. Right now it has synchronised multiple multi-gigabyte databases for me, one of which is over 60Gb. The iOS app syncs an index and permits download on demand on a per item basis.
It has an import Evernote script and there’s a few other scripts online which purport to improve on it. Might be worth checking out.
I use Notes in addition to DEVONthink Pro Office, but solely for quick or temporary items.
I used an earlier version of this app for years. My wife still does. It has been called KIT and then Together and now its Keep It. The app is great, the developer fantastic. It works with the Finder in a smart way and I’d highly recommend it. I think Don McAllister of screencasts online did a show on it this year.
Yeah, I’ll have to look into how those are rendered differently.
Sad about Evernote. But I’d love to hear about some options besides Apple’s Notes. Mainly because I won’t use Notes again since I’ve had the app make note salad out of my entries. It happened a couple of times, losing data and combining multiple individual notes into a mega-mess. Not going there anymore.
I’d like to mention Standard Notes.
I had to sojourn in the Land of Android for a couple of years, and needed something that would sync my notes with Android, macOS, and my iDevices. I like that Standard Notes stores everything as plain text files, so I’ll never again have to worry about my notes being siloed. One can run one’s own server for sync, which I haven’t done yet, but notes are stored in encrypted form on SN’s servers. The apps and server are open source. The apps are free, but with a subscription you get access to editors (such as various Markdown editors and a checklist editor) and themes. I bought a sub just to support the product, but I have actually found some of the editors to be useful.
The main drawback is that the notes don’t support attachments. You can have any content you like, as long as it’s text. But it seems like a great company and the product has been rock solid for me.
–Ron
Thanks for this article. I hadn’t realised there was an “export all” function.
Sadly, the one feature of Evernote I use a lot – tables – are not supported in Notes.app on 10.12(.6). Does anyone know if later MacOSes fare any better?
(still trying to import these into OneNote – which doesn’t support local note repositories or work well through firewalls)
I had a miserable time during my several months long attempt to import into OneNote. Not to mention that OneNote syncing and searching across devices is slow and incomplete. Spent hours with Microsoft support. Finally gave up.
Other than OneNote, is there anything else you can export from EverNote and import into that is cross platform?