#8

Can I ask personally?
Are you quitting the DayOne and shifting purely to Obsidian for journaling?

#9

Can I ask personally?
Are you quitting the DayOne and shifting purely to Obsidian for journaling?

Yes is the short answer. Here’s why.

I’ve been a DayOne user for many, many years. When I first started I did the opposite of what I’ve just done here and converted my existing text entries into DayOne. I had a year’s worth of handwritten diary from my time in Denmark as an exchange student that had been typed and even spent time as a wiki at some stage.

DayOne has a great interface and I like being able to see where everything was written physically but as time has gone on I find that I don’t write in it much unless I’m going through a bad patch in life and I need that thinking.

It’s simply because it’s a Mac based app and I don’t always have a Mac nearby. I’m mostly on Windows and with Obsidian it doesn’t care if I’m on Windows or a Mac. What I lose in terms of entry on my phone I can handle with Drafts and shortcuts to save direct to my Obsidian vault on OneDrive, and the YAML content at the top will make its way into my daily notes template. As a result of Obsidian being cross-platform it is easier to make notes on my day as i go along.

Leaving permanently is what drove the script development. Wouldn’t have put the time in otherwise.

As with any software, needs change over time and from person to person. At the moment I’m going with Obsidian and text files.

#10

Ok I see!

I’m just thinking aloud… it will be amazing if there is some plugin that will pull the GPS from photo and add it as on of the YAML fields… later there will be for sure some plugin to show it on top of the open-maps.

1 Like
#11

Thank you so much for making that! Now I can switch.
(journaling in DayOne since 2012)

2 Likes
#12

This is EXACTLY the script I’ve been looking for ever since I was introduced to Obsidian! Thank you SO MUCH—I have eighteen years of handwritten and digital journals that I consolidated into Day One, but Day One doesn’t allow for accidental discovery or any real exploration of thought. This is AMAZING!

1 Like
#13

Thank you for saying so.

#14

I would really love to get this to work, but I have no python experience and can’t seem to things set up correctly.

Is anyone willing to help me get my Day One Archive converted. That would be so amazing to have in my Obsidian Vault.

Thanks so much!

1 Like
#15

What OS are you on?

Do you have Python installed at all?

Don’t necessarily need GIT. Can get you the script another way.

#16

Hey there @dcb, thanks!

I am on macOS Big Sur. I do have Python installed, it’s just that I just didn’t actually know how to run the script itself. I tried downloading the Python DMG, but it just confused me and I wasn’t sure how to actually execute the script.

Thanks for your response.

#17

Did you try

python script name?

#18

I should have! Thankfully @joebuhlig knows what he is doing and helped me out like a champ.

1 Like
#19

Oh my god. It has been a long time since I wanted something like this. I tried many, many scripts and none worked for me. This looks good from the description, I have been looking for months for something like this, and finally it is here! I created this account only to reply to you, because I am a complete ignorant od python and all these things. I think I have python on my Mac, how do I run the script? I am really bad at those things :frowning: but I want to move my journal here because I started using markdown and never gonna get back.

#20

Can I politely ask if @joebuhlig can help me as well? I am like a grandma when it comes to python and scripts but I was looking for something like this since a long time. Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

#21

Hi @dcb

Would you be willing to help another Day One deserter migrate journal entries to Obsidian?

I’m also running macOS Big Sur.

I also have python installed and likewise don’t know how to run the script…

Any guidance would be appreciated.

#22

Sorry that I haven’t seen this until now. Did you get it working? Not sure I can add much more than the instructions already given.

In a terminal window, CD to the folder where you have the script then “python script name”

#24

I used this the other day to import approximately 500 entries from Day One.

A few posts with images ended up with links to non-existent files, but no big deal and easy to fix manually.

Thanks for sharing.

#25

Hi,

I’m trying to use this script but I get errors. I have been able to fix some (I don’t know Python really) but am stuck at
File "splitfile.py", line 40, in <module> with open(fn, encoding='utf-8') as json_file: TypeError: 'encoding' is an invalid keyword argument for this function

Any ideas how to fix this? I’m on a M1 MacBook Pro with the lastest release of Big Sur.

Best regards,
Björn

#26

I think my python installation was messed up somehow. Running the script using Thonny it works fine.

Best regards,
Björn

#27

this script was a lifesaver, thank you VERY much.

The only gotcha I found was that it imported all of my images as JPG files. Since they are primarily PNG, this meant that Obsidian can’t find them. They are IN Obsidian, but whenever a note references them, it uses some other (random, AFICT) string followed by a JPG extension. So I then open DayOne, get the actual file name and replace it in Obsidian. I’m sure there’s a better, faster, more scripted way to fix this, but it works for me.

Thank you again for making this script as I was able to import something like 12,000 entries from DayOne and no longer have to pay their subscription fee. Plus my data is MINE on my machine and backed up by my backup.

Thank you!

1 Like
#28

What you could possibly do – very, very carefully – is use an editor that can replace text across multiple files and replace all .jpg with .png.