From Evernote to Obsidian

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21

@chriswaterguy - the links between notebooks don’t come across that way.

@ForGe - tags come over perfectly for me with Yarle. I don’t use nested tags. I’m converting from EN 6.25.2. YMMV from v10.

@akos0215 ,

Thanks for the reply and Yarle. I downloaded via Github and tried converting a few of my folders (from EN legacy - v10 is just too horrible). I’m pretty happy with it overall, as far as getting bulk data into Obsidian. The biggest notebook I did was ~1GB. It only took a couple minutes. No links between notebooks is disappointing, but I tag so heavily that I should be able to find what I need.

The thing that’s tougher for me (but again, I do tag heavily, so…) is that alias links don’t come across. I get a ton of files that say “xxxxx.md has not been created yet”. I made a test folder with 4 notes, 1 of which was new, 2 notes that were duplicates of others, 1 an alias of one of the duplicates, then created a Table of Contents note from those 4. Starting on the TOC note, I only get a link to the new test note. What’s really interesting is the duplicated notes are entirely missing from the vault (but the originals did come over in an earlier trial). Obviously I have some things to play with before moving to exclusive Obsidian use. Am I missing a setting? I’ve tried “Add ‘md’ extension of internal links” and done it without.

UPDATE: The welcome screen appears before the program is actually finished installing. ORIGINAL: In a separate issue - when I run Yarle it appears to start up normally. I get the welcome screen, go to step 1 and choose the file I want to convert. When I do, the entire screen disappears, then the Welcome screen reappears. I can choose my file and continue from that point. Not a big deal, just an odd hiccup. I’m on Win10Pro if that helps.

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Do the tags convert as #tags or [[tags]]?

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#tags
Not sure if there is a way to tweak that in the options.

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For anyone who is wondering -
After a bit of testing, it looks like the internal links that don’t work for me (in any given folder) are one or more of the following:

  1. what Obsidian would consider a “pretty link” but I think of as an alias in EN
  2. titles that contain a “#”
  3. titles that contain a “/”

EN allows internal and external links to your own notes. External versions still point to “https://evernote.com/shards/…”

What helped was to make a TOC note in EN right before exporting, then looking at it in Obsidian to see patterns.

I’m working through the notes that I’ll be converting (not all) and removing the characters Obsidian doesn’t like. As for the “pretty links” - I think that conversion just doesn’t work.

Not sure how any of this would work starting from EN v10.

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25

Hi!

Thank you for raising these issues around the UI, I create issue stories for them on Github and try to fix them!

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@akos0215 Thanks for this nice Yarle utility! It seems to be working well for me in Windows except with one strange issue. The output is creating a slash between all of my tags. So for the Evernote tag thisismytag it would be rendered in the markdown as #t/h/i/s/i/s/m/y/t/a/g/. My Evernote tags are in the metadata, not in the note body. I am not changing anything in your tag code block and am not checking the nested tags box or those fields. Thanks.

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Hi @obsidvicious ,

huh, it looks like a bug in the regexp part, thank you for reporting it, i check it soon!

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Hi @obsidvicious !
By default the ‘’ will be recognized as separator of nested tags(separatorInEN property), and replaced by ‘/’ (replaceSeparatorWith).
But in your case it looks like that separatorInEN is set to empty.
Could you please try to set separatorInEN to '’? Or if it has already been set,
could you please try to replace the default setting of ‘replaceSeparatorWith’ within nestedTags option by an empty string? It should eliminate the slashes from the generated tag strings.

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@akos0215 Thanks for your amazing work on Yarle. I have been an Evernote user since 2010 and I’m excited to move everything over to Obsidian. I have been testing the configuration and templates and everything seems to be working but importing notes with images. I can import notes with attached files like pdf and xlxs. I have not been successful in moving any notes with images into Obsidian. The images end up in resource folder named after the notes, but the notes are not created.

This is a typical log entry.

Conversion started at Sat Jan 08 2022 08:28:10 GMT-0700 (Mountain Standard Time)
Converting note “2017 Study Journal LARGE ATTACHED PNG”…
relative resource work dir: ./_resources/2017_Study_Journal_LARGE_ATTACHED_PNG.resources
absolute resource work dir: C:\Users\derek\YARLE\drh\evernote-notebooks\notes\notes\Obsidian-test_resources\2017_Study_Journal_LARGE_ATTACHED_PNG.resources
resource SWTC3_116112813280.jpg addid in hash 6b11a9fc6d7ff3e4ea7dc5df82558bf2
mediaReference src ./_resources/2017_Study_Journal_LARGE_ATTACHED_PNG.resources/SWTC3_116112813280.jpg added
Failed to convert note: 2017 Study Journal LARGE ATTACHED PNG, {}
Conversion finished at Sat Jan 08 2022 08:28:11 GMT-0700 (Mountain Standard Time)
Note “2017 Study Journal LARGE ATTACHED PNG” converted successfully in 0.313 seconds.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

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Hi @scuds !

Could you please send me the full config settings? I need it to try to figure out the problem, it looks really strange, so i have to investigate it further.
The config is logged at the beginning of the conversions. here is my email address if you wouldn’t like to share ot with others:
[email protected]

thanks,
cheers,
akos

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@akos0215 I tried just had a really great experience with Yarle. Thank you! There was a lot of installs with the nodejs, but it was worth it. Can you explain why it needs those tools?

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Hi @akos0215 I try to transfert my evernote notes with Yarle in MD / obsidian.
The template is perfect and the management of tags.
But the the link , like you @EggToastie don’t work for me. Obsidian identify them as a link, but they still point to “https://evernote.com/shards/…
Even if the line : “generateNakedUrls”: is NO in the config. of Yarle.
Have you solve this issues?
Thanks a lot

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hi @Fifof ,

Could you pls send me your Yarle config? It is logged at the beginning of the output.

Thank you!
akos

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hi akos… I just did a small test on the conversion of internal Evernote links using Yarle 5.0.4. It seems that none of the internal Evernote links were converted. Maybe I didn’t choose the right options in the config (?).
The config settings (from the log) and the list of internal Evernote links are attached.

2023-02-20 - Unconverted EN links.zip (34.5 KB)

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Akos fixed the issue mentioned in the above post and has released Yarle v5.0.6. I have tested this version on a set of notebooks containing many internal Evernote links and all were successfully converted.
If you have converted your Evernote notes recently using v5.0.4 and wish to have internal Evernote links converted, it would be a good idea to redo the conversion.

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36

Sorry folks, been doing some more tests and we may still have an issue with some Evernote internal links converting to Obsidian compatible links successfully. But I’m not sure yet. Need to expand the sample of notebooks being converted and check the results. Suggest holding off on further conversions until we get this figured out.

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OK, after further testing it looks like Yarle 5.0.6 is converting internal links successfully. The problem I found was a user error (ie me!).

Here is how to avoid that error during your own migration from Evernote to Obsidian.

Short version
During the conversion process, while checking that notes are being converted OK, do not click on internal links in Obsidian that point to notes that are yet to be converted.

Explanation
If you have a lot of notebooks to convert, your workflow may involve converting several batches of multiple notebooks. So if you have 50 notebooks in total to convert, you may choose to do this in 5 batches of 10 notebooks each.

If you have internal links either manually created, or automatically created by an Evernote Table of Contents operation, and some of those links refer to notes in notebooks that have not yet been converted, you need to be careful.

Let’s say you have converted the first batch of notebooks and you want to check that everything is going OK. This is where things can get messy. Do not click on an internal link to a note that has not yet been converted.

While Yarle has created the internal link successfully, Obsidian has no note of that name yet, because it has not yet been converted. The linked-to note will be converted in one of the remaining batches of notebooks.

If you do click on it, Obsidian will open a new blank note using the name contained in the link. That operation also creates a new empty file on your hard drive using the same name and in the location you have set in the Obsidian settings.

This then gives the impression that Yarle has not worked properly, because it has opened a blank note with no content.
The empty files on your hard drive further add to the confusion and create a mess in your nice new Obsidian vault.

If you avoid clicking on internal links to notes that are not yet converted, you can avoid these issues. When you complete all batches of the Yarle conversion process, the linked-to note will be in place, Obsidian will open it normally and everything will be OK.

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38

Im trying Yarle from EN v10 with some success… but having some strange issue with the tags

The tags are placed in the frontmatter (in between the —). Hence they arent read by Obsidian.
These are normal tags, dont think they are nested.

Whats the proper setting for Yarle to move these right?

thanks!

____ as an example, they show up as…

Created at 2023-01-31.
Last updated at 2023-01-31.

Tagged

#Problems
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I think you want

  • No # symbol on tags

I use this template:

---
{created-at-block}created: {created-at}{end-created-at-block}
{updated-at-block}updated: {updated-at}{end-updated-at-block}
{source-url-block}url: {source-url}{end-source-url-block}
{tags-block}tags: {tags}{end-tags-block}
---
{content-block}{content}{end-content-block}

They are read by Obsidian there but I think they are ignored if they have illegal chars (like #). You can use #tag inside the text in Obsidian but not with Evernote.

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Hi @akos0215 sorry for my no reply! …
I fist solve the good syntax to transfert the tag in YAML and reuse it in DVTK :
Now the links works well now like @chookster said, the new version 5.04 seems working well (on test)
When I finalise my transfer (13K Notes) Il will publish my process to recuperate everything that I had in Evernote V10 on Obsidian, DVTK.
YARLE is the central tools, Best in class! …with Linter plug in and Hazel to manage the title.

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