Wholesale migration from Drafts to Obsidian

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1

Hi, all. I’m attempting to move my legacy notes from Draft to Obsidian. I’ve searched, tested, and had various LLMs cook up homegrown scripts to preprocess and/or fully convert my Drafts .json export into Obsidian, but all have fallen short.

Does anyone have a script or workflow that’s reliable? I have about 1500 notes to import.

Thanks.

2

Hello.

I know nothing about Drafts, but with that caveat out of the way, is the JSON > Bear > Obsidian route mentioned in the link below feasible for you and your devices?

3

No sooner did I post this than I cracked it. Your mileage may vary, but here’s my python script:

gist.github[dotcom]/shawnyeager/ee5b4394c24ba9426782a11580d51cd4

Steps:

  1. Export .json from Drafts app
  2. Copy script into folder with exported file
  3. `python convert_drafts_to_obsidian.py {exported file} {target directory of converted files}
  4. Copy all resulting files into your Obsidian vault (best in a dedicated folder)
  5. Optionally run linting and import conversion
4

FWIW, I added support for Drafts to Markdown in Jimmy recently:

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5

Brilliant. Thanks, @marph. Now, if I’d just found this last week. :laughing:

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6

@marph Quick follow up: I don’t see an apparent way to get a created date into the front matter during conversion. I see --frontmatter obsidian, but this just pulls in tags, it seems?

7

You might try --frontmatter joplin. It adds some more information.

--frontmatter obsidian adds only tags, since it’s the only intersection between the default front matter properties and the data Jimmy can provide :smiley:

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