To migrate from Apple Notes to Obsidian you need to export Apple Notes to Markdown text files and copy paste those files to the Obsidian folder (vault). To retain your Apple Notes folder structure the export needs to be organised in filesystem folders. To retain your images (and other attachments) they have to be exported to an images folder and referenced in the exported text files using Markdown. The only way to do this that I could find is using a MacOS App Store app to export Apple Notes. Other methods were not reliable and did not retain the folder structure. Since I have over 2k of notes about a wide range of personal and professional topics , structure was a must for me. This is what I did:
- Install the Exporter app by Chintan Ghate from the Apple Store on your MacOS device.
- Create a subfolder called ‘Notes’ in your ‘Documents’ folder or any other folder
- Open the app, choose Markdown as export format and hit export
- After the script has finished (about an hour fro 2k+ notes on a fast MacBook Pro) check out the failed exports and manually create md files for them.
- Install and open Obsidian and either choose ‘Open folder as vault’ and point it to the folder containing the exported notes or choose ‘new vault’ and copy the exported notes into the newly created folder
- Manually copy attachments other then images from Apple Notes to Obsidian notes.
For me this worked well. The only thing that could be better is support for exporting attachments other than images in the otherwise excellent Exporter app…