Moving your notes · Updated October 14, 2026

Get your notes out of Google Keep

Keep has no export of its own. Google Takeout hands you one HTML and one JSON file per note, a free converter turns them into Markdown in your browser, and the Skysa Notes scratchpad takes them back as cards.

Why people leave

Keep is a very good place to put something down and a poor place to keep it. Past a few dozen notes there are only labels and colors to find things by, and the wall of cards becomes, in one reviewer’s words, a digital junk drawer. The editor has gaps that never close: adding one checkbox turns the whole note into a checklist, pictures can sit only at the top, and the web app lacks the bold, italic and headings the Android app has. Google moves pieces of it around (reminders went to Tasks) and otherwise seems to leave it be. And there is no export at all inside Keep; the only way out is Google’s general-purpose Takeout, which hands you a format nothing else reads.

The Skysa Notes scratchpad is the same kind of place: quick notes as cards above the notebooks, pinned and colored, with checklists and pictures. So your Keep notes can land there as they were, and the ones worth keeping can move into a notebook later, one at a time.

What the export gives you

Go to Google Takeout, choose Deselect all, check Keep, then Next step and Create export. Google emails a link when it is ready, usually within the hour; the link works for about a week, and a large export (many photos or recordings) comes as several numbered zips. Inside, under Takeout/Keep/, every note is two files: an HTML page you can look at, and a JSON file that holds the truth: title, the text, or for a checklist each item with its checked state, the labels, the color, whether it was pinned, archived or in the trash, the created and last-edited times, the attached files’ names, and any web links saved to the note. Archived and trashed notes are all there, flagged. What the JSON does not carry is the indentation of checklist items: every item comes out at the top level.

The easiest way

KeepExport is a free web page that turns the Takeout zip into one Markdown file per note. It runs in the browser tab: your notes are not uploaded anywhere, and there is nothing to install. Each file’s front matter gets the note’s title, its created and updated dates, its labels as tags, and pinned: true and its color where it had them, which are the same keys the scratchpad writes for its own cards.

1. Open KeepExport’s Google Keep to Markdown page, choose Choose zip or files, and pick the Takeout zip. If Takeout made several numbered zips, pick them all at once.
2. It counts the notes, checklists and labels it found, with Markdown chosen under Export as. Leave Folder per label off: the scratchpad takes only the notes at the top of the zip. Archived notes is on and puts them in a folder of their own; Notes in trash is off.
3. Choose Download Markdown export. You get a zip named like google-keep-2026-10-14-markdown.zip: one .md file per note, and the pictures and recordings in an attachments folder beside them. Keep it zipped; the scratchpad takes the zip as it is.

What comes across

Imported into the scratchpad, each Keep note is a card, much as it looked in Keep.

• Pinned notes are pinned, at the top of the scratchpad.
• Colors carry over: red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, purple and pink. Keep’s dark blue, brown and gray have no match, so those cards come in with no color; the color stays in the file.
• Checklists are checklists, with the checked items checked.
• Labels are tags in the front matter, which search finds.
• Pictures show on their cards. Web links Keep saved under a note are a list at its end.
• A note with no title is named by its first line, since KeepExport names the file after it.

If you would rather have notebooks

Turn on Folder per label on KeepExport before you download, and use Import notes with the zip instead of Import to scratchpad. Each label becomes a notebook (a note with several labels goes under its first), the notes with no label go to Loose notes, and the archived and attachments folders become notebooks too. Pins and colors stay in the files but mean nothing outside the scratchpad.

Two other free converters read the same Takeout zip. Jimmy, one program run from a terminal, writes each note’s dates into its front matter; its Keep page lists what it carries. Obsidian’s importer makes a note’s color and pin into tags, which the scratchpad does not read as either. Both are better suited to notebooks than to cards.

What to check afterward

• Archived notes are in the zip’s archived folder, which Import to scratchpad leaves out and names. To have them as cards too, unzip the download and run Import to scratchpad again, with Choose folder on its archived folder. To leave them behind, turn off Archived notes on KeepExport.
• Lines. Keep puts each line of a note under the last with no blank line between, and in Markdown lines with no blank line between them are one paragraph. The card shows them as lines, but opened in rich text they run together. A blank line between them, or a list, keeps them apart.
• Checklists are flat. Any indentation you had is gone, because Takeout never wrote it down.
• Recordings. An audio note is its transcription, where Keep made one, and the recording as a file linked from the card.