Importing from Evernote via Joplin - confused about ''resources'

I’m on day one of setting up my Obsidian vault (on iCloud, Windows 10). I’m bringing over my first smaller Evernote folders via Joplin. The notes look fine and the markdown is fine but the images in my notes aren’t showing.

The images are there in ‘_resources’ and the page in Preview mode has links to them, but each one says ‘…/_resources/058945849whatever’ is not created yet. Click to create.

When I click it it a popup says ‘Folder already exists’.

In Settings > Files and Links I have ‘Attachment folder path’ set to ‘_resources’

I’m not sure how this all works. Each time I export a folder from Joplin it creates a new _resources folder. Should I bring each one across into Obsidian or should all resources from every note go in the same _resources folder? That’s how I have it, but it’s clearly not working.

Can someone please advise?

Things I have tried

What I’m trying to do

I imported notes from Joplin to Obsidian recently, and I had the same issue. Nothing to do with Evernote, per se (I never used Evernote).

I didn’t document every single step I took to fix the issue, but it should be pretty simple.

If I remember rightly, I think the “_resources” folder is inside the Joplin folder that you are moving to your Obsidian vault folder, and I think you just need to move it up one level, to the root of your vault.

In other words, you just need to make sure the directory structure pointed to in the Markdown text is actually pointing to the folder you want it to point to.

I don’t know the syntax off the top of my head for what one dot or two dots or three dots in the address (the “…/” at the beginning of your directory address for each image) means, but I believe two dots means “go up one level” and one dot means “start on the same level.” Three dots is a new one to me.

Either look it up or just experiment with one particular address in one of your imported Markdown notes…you’ll get it figured out. It wasn’t that difficult to fix.

Alternatively to actually moving the “_resources” folder, you can use Notepad++ to search through all the notes in a particular folder and replace the bad address with whatever the right address should be. Use Ctrl-H and there’s a tick-box to replace in all files in a directory.

Try the above suggestion to move the directory first.

If you go into edit mode of an individual note, click on the image link, backspace a couple spaces, and it’s likely Obsidian will find the file and suggest it.

My windows installs had an issue with those resources folders anyway.

What I ended up doing is creating a separate Joplin Notes vault and then bringing them over and editing them manually to get them into my regular vault.

Thanks.
I can see what the issue is now, the links begin with …/ which means the next level up. But my project folders are in a subfolder of the folder ‘Projects’. I can manually change the links to start …/…/ or take up the suggestion of using Notepad ++ to change them in bulk. Thanks for helping with that. For now I want to experiment with different ways of importing into Joplin following the folder structure there that I want to have in Obsidian. That might mean the export will bring the folders into Obsidian in the right relationship.

If I find anything useful I’ll report back.

Thanks for your suggestions

Hello again. I’ve just confirmed that if I have the folder structure in Joplin the same as I want in Obsidian, the resources links work OK.

So my process is

  1. from Evernote folder, export ENEX
  2. import ENEX into Joplin
  3. move resulting folder to level I want it under ‘Projects’
  4. export as Markdown to ‘exports’ folder
  5. move any resulting resources into the Obsidian resources folder
  6. move my notes folder into the Obsidian ‘Projects’ folder
  7. delete all files in the exports/_resources folder - this is so that with the next export I see only the new ones created for that export

Hope this is of use to someone, and I’m more than happy to pick up better suggestions.

4 Likes

Thanks, this is helpful. My resources are being renamed with a GUID by Joplin. Ideally, I’d like to keep the resource, with the original file name, with the note in one folder. Does anyone see a way to accomplish this?

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