Moving your notes · Updated October 6, 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, and a small free tool turns them into Markdown.

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 colours 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.

What the export gives you

Go to Google Takeout, choose Deselect all, tick 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 colour, 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

Jimmy is a free, open-source converter for some fifty note formats, Keep among them, delivered as one program for Mac, Windows or Linux that needs nothing installed. It reads the Takeout zip whole and writes one Markdown file per note with the labels as tags and the pictures beside it; with --frontmatter joplin it also writes each note’s created and updated dates into the front matter, where Skysa Notes reads them. It runs from a terminal, but one line is all it takes.

1. Download Jimmy from its releases page. The file is named for your system, such as jimmy-darwin-arm64 or jimmy-windows.exe; the commands below call it jimmy.
2. Put the Takeout zip beside it and run:

   jimmy cli takeout-20261006T160516Z-001.zip --format google_keep --frontmatter joplin

3. It writes a folder named for the moment it ran, with your notes in it. Open a checklist note and a note with a picture. Jimmy’s Keep page lists what it does and doesn’t carry.

If you would rather click than type, Obsidian’s importer has a Google Keep option that takes the same zip. Turn off Use [[Wikilinks]] in Settings › Files and links first, so that pictures are linked the standard way. Labels become tags, as do a note’s colour and its pinned, archived or trashed state, with switches to leave archived and trashed notes out; checklists become task lists; saved web links become a list at the end of the note. It sets each note’s dates on the file rather than writing them inside, so add them as properties in the template step if they matter to you.

What to check afterwards

• Archived and trashed notes came along. Decide whether you want them, and delete or move them before importing anywhere.
• Checklists are flat. Any indentation you had is gone, because Takeout never wrote it down.
• Titles. Most Keep notes have none. The converters name the file from the first line or the date; a note that was only a picture gets a filename and little else.
• Recordings. An audio note is its sound file and, where Keep transcribed it, the transcription as text.