Moving your notes · Updated October 6, 2026

Get your notes out of Apple Notes

Apple Notes keeps your notes in a database only it reads, and for years offered no way out but PDF. On a Mac, there are now good ones.

Why people leave

Apple Notes is good enough that most people never think about leaving, until they try. For years its only export was a PDF, one note at a time, and the notes live in a database only Apple reads: a SQLite file whose note bodies are compressed protocol-buffer blobs, in a format that has changed under every tool written to read it. There is no Windows or Android app; iCloud.com shows your iCloud notes and lets you copy text out, and that is all. Sync goes wrong rarely, but when it does there is no way back, and Apple’s own forums carry stories of notes gone after an update that support could not recover. macOS 26 and iOS 26 finally added an export to Markdown, and it is welcome. But it drops the dates and the folders, two notes with the same title overwrite each other, and in its first releases large batches came out garbled, with lines repeated or files blank.

What the export gives you

On a Mac running macOS 26 Tahoe or later: click a folder, click a note, press ⌘A, and choose File › Export as › Markdown (Apple’s newest documentation words it “Export To”). You get one .md file per note, named from its first line, and an Attachments folder of its pictures and files, linked from the notes. Headings, lists, checklists (as - [ ] and - [x]), tables, links and images survive. Colours, highlights and fonts don’t, and neither do links between notes. Two things to know before relying on it: it keeps no dates, and it keeps no folders, so export each folder separately into a folder of its own, and check the files afterwards. On an iPhone, open a note, tap Share, then Export as Markdown (under View More if you don’t see it), one note at a time. Before macOS 26 the only export was PDF, and a locked note has to be unlocked first.

The easiest way

Use Obsidian as the converter, even if you don’t mean to keep it. Its Apple Notes importer reads the Notes database directly, so it works on any version of macOS, keeps your folders (nested ones too), your created and modified dates, and your attachments, and it needs no export from Notes at all. It runs only on a Mac.

1. On the Mac, open Notes, signed in to the same account as your other devices. Browse through the folders so that everything has downloaded from iCloud: an attachment never opened on this Mac is skipped. Unlock any locked notes you want to keep; locked notes are skipped too. Then quit Notes.
2. Install Obsidian and create a new vault in an ordinary folder. In Settings › Files and links, turn off Use [[Wikilinks]], so that attachments are linked the standard way.
3. In Settings › Import, choose Apple Notes. When asked, select the group.com.apple.notes folder in the dialog that opens: that is how macOS lets Obsidian read the Notes data. Choose the folders to import. In the template, add the created and modified dates as properties, so they are written into each note and not only onto the file. Import.
4. Review the summary. Locked notes and attachments not yet downloaded are listed; open those notes in Notes and run the import again, which skips what it already has.
5. The vault folder, minus its hidden .obsidian folder, is your notes as Markdown files. Checklists are task lists, tables are tables, drawings are PNG files (with the recognised handwriting as text, if you tick that), and scans are JPEG or PDF.

Without Obsidian: Exporter, free on the Mac App Store (with a $4.99 purchase to export only some folders), writes Markdown or HTML into folders named after your Notes folders, keeps each note’s dates on its file and, since version 4, brings the attachments. Some reviews report trouble with nested folders; check yours came through. And if you have only a few folders and macOS 26, Apple’s own export, one folder at a time, is fine, as long as you can live without the dates.

With a terminal

The Obsidian route is the better one even for people who live in a terminal, because the Notes format is hard and the importer is the best-maintained reader of it. The alternative is apple_cloud_notes_parser (Ruby 3 or newer), which reads the same database and writes HTML for each note in folders that mirror yours, plus CSV and JSON with every note’s dates, and the pictures as files. Give Terminal Full Disk Access first (System Settings › Privacy & Security), and quit Notes.

git clone https://github.com/threeplanetssoftware/apple_cloud_notes_parser
cd apple_cloud_notes_parser
bundle install
ruby notes_cloud_ripper.rb -m ~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.apple.notes/ --individual-files

Then convert the HTML to Markdown with pandoc, from inside its output folder, and write the dates from the CSV into each note’s front matter yourself:

find html -name '*.html' -exec sh -c 'pandoc -f html -t gfm --wrap=none "$1" -o "${1%.html}.md"' _ {} \;

Without a Mac

On an iPhone or iPad alone, it is Apple’s export, one note at a time (an iPad with the menu bar showing can select several). From Windows or Android, the choice is a copy of your data from privacy.apple.com, which arrives after some days as plain text files with the attachments beside them, formatting and handwriting lost, or an hour on a borrowed Mac signed in to your iCloud account, following the steps above.

What to check afterwards

• Locked notes are skipped by every tool, and a note locked with the device passcode rather than a password can be read by none of them. Unlock before you start.
• Attachments still in iCloud. A picture never opened on the Mac has not been downloaded, and the importer says so. Open the note and run it again.
• Tables. Markdown cells hold one line, so a cell with several comes out with <br> between them.
• Drawings and scans become pictures. The strokes are no longer editable.
• Duplicate titles. The first line is the title and the filename. Make sure both “Groceries” notes survived.