Apple Notes Handwriting to Obsidian Daily Notes
This shortcut allows you to edit and draw in Apple Notes, and keep an image of those drawings synced and updated in Obsidian. It will also automatically append an imbed to the daily note that corresponds to the creation date of the handwritten note. Add this shortcut to your shortcuts, fill in the preamble questions about structure and folder saving, and then add it to run on closing the Notes app. The best part is no plugins or extra apps required!
Requirements
-
Folder structure of something like /Daily Notes/year/month/mm-DD-yyyy.md . It currently won’t work if all your daily notes are in one folder, although you can edit the shortcut to make it work
-
This shortcut also relies on saving a temporary file, it will just keep on overwriting this file if needed, but to make it neat I have it delete it as soon as it’s done. However Apple doesn’t really like this and if you don’t want to be warned about deleting the file every time the shortcut runs you need to allow file deleting in system preferences/shortcuts/advanced
Issues
- Currently it will only sync one note (the most recently modified note) but I am sure the potential is there to sync multiple, I just haven’t got around to it.
- I have not tested it with Notes that have multiple handwriting sections, and it likely won’t work with them yet. Not my use case. But I am sure it can probably be adjusted to work.
Future planning
- I am happy with the shortcut in it’s current state, but if there is interest I may look at solving the issues above, and I also think it could be possible to include Apples OCR in some way to export alongside the image; making searching in Obsidian easier.
- Also really happy for anyone to edit and add these features too! Just credit me somewhere
Hope this helps someone! Getting prepared for auto hand-writing refining and math notes in iOS 18!