TipBITS: How to Move Your Evernote Notes to Apple’s Notes

Ever since this article appeared I’ve been trying Notes more and more because I’ve always had some dissatisfaction with Evernote and was wondering whether to renew my premium membership or not this year.

Recently I found a bug with the latest version of Evernote. It seems if you copy text from Evernote and then paste it (e.g. into a database, or BBEdit) it adds an extra linefeed. This didn’t happen before, and I was seeing weird things happen in my FileMaker database as a result, and it took a while to figure it out, but I traced it back to Evernote. I reported the bug to them, and they said they knew about it and were working on an update. Still waiting for that.

The same issue doesn’t happen with copy/pasting from Notes.

Then last night I created an Evernote note with some photos of the electric meters on the side of my house. I did this from Photos on my iPhone and expected it to sync right away with Evernote, but it wasn’t showing up for a long while, either on my Mac or at Evernote on the web or Evernote on my iPhone.

While waiting I tried the exact same thing in Notes and within about 1 minute it had synced to my Mac, where I added my text comments to the note, which also synced back to my iPhone right away.

I was about to contact Evernote support when finally, about 1 hour later, it did sync in Evernote. But the photos came in sideways!

I know there are limitations to Notes. There isn’t tagging, I don’t think. And I don’t know how well the search works yet. And it’s not cross-platform, though I am a Mac/iPhone/iPad user.

Notes also has advantages. If you have a Mac, iPad and iPhone you don’t have to pay to sync between all the devices. I was teaching it to my volunteer class for seniors that I do on Sundays. They all have iPhones and/or iPads. I was trying to move them away from paper notes on which they’e been writing all their passwords, etc. The scanning is super simple in Notes, and the editing of the resultant PDF scans works really well; you can add pages, delete pages, rotate pages, re-arrange pages, etc., really easily. And the sharing features for created documents works well. And the sync works great between everybody’s devices. I think in one afternoon I got everybody in my class to give up paper!

I might try moving to Notes and letting my subscription with Evernote expire and see how much I miss it. I still retain my Evernote notes in case I want to subscribe again after all.

I’m trying an experiment of this now. Some notes:

  • I have about 2500 notes. The export file was about 1.5 GB. It took about 1/2 hour to import them all.
  • There was an initial performance impact when import started, but performance returned to normal right away.
  • They seemed to sync across iCloud pretty quickly.
  • Search seems nicer than Evernote because search results show up as you enter search phrases. In Evernote you don’t see search results immediately.
  • On iOS devices you can see how many notes you have in each folder. But for some reason on the Mac they don’t show the number of notes. It seems people have been requesting that for a couple of years. A strange omission.
  • While you can add people to individual notes for collaboration, there doesn’t seem to be a way to add people to a folder of notes for collaboration. Evernote allows that.

That’s all for now.

doug

One more!

  • In Notes there is no easy way to add a horizontal rule to a note. And horizontal rules imported from Evernote don’t appear in the imported notes.

There is one additional consideration, now that a searchlight-type ability has come to IOS devices. Note that when you invoke a Siri search (on my iphone I swipe down from the lower half of a main icon page) as you type in the search field, every character is revising the search results of all the files on your device or in your iCloud. (If you haven’t noticed, type a word at a time, don’t let the keyboard hide what’s going on, and don’t start a web search right away.) This is hugely valuable, but the files in your Evernote account are not included. I’m a long time content Evernote customer, but this might convince me to move into notes. I didn’t want to lose Evernote’s excellent Handwriting recognition feature, but I just noticed today (In 2020, with Mac Safari) that Notes is claiming the same ability. I’m going to verify that before I take the plunge, but I am tempted. Perhaps some of the other warnings here are no longer valid?

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