Moving your notes · Updated October 6, 2026
Get your notes out of Joplin
Joplin stores notes in its own database but exports them as Markdown in a folder per notebook, with every attachment beside them. It is one of the easiest moves there is.
| Official export | File › Export all › MD - Markdown + Front Matter: a folder per notebook, a file per note, dates and tags in the front matter. Free. |
|---|---|
| Pictures and files | All of them, in a _resources folder at the top, with every note’s links rewritten to point there. |
| Dates | created and updated in the front matter, exactly the keys Skysa Notes reads. |
| Best free tool | Joplin itself. Nothing else is needed. |
| Time | Minutes. |
Why people leave
Joplin is open source, free, and honest about being yours, which is why it is on this list at all: people leave it for comfort, not for fear. Its notes live in a database rather than as files on disk, so the plain-files promise is one export away rather than already true. Sync to a cloud folder of your own has a long thread of conflicts and vanished notes, which its maintainer puts down to the storage services involved, and which is uncomfortable either way. And the apps, the mobile ones especially, feel a generation older than the notes deserve. Moving on is easy, because Joplin made it so.
What the export gives you
On the desktop, choose File › Export all and then MD - Markdown + Front Matter, and pick an empty folder. Each notebook becomes a folder, nested as your notebooks were, and each note a Markdown file named after its title. Every attachment goes into one _resources folder at the top, and every note’s links are rewritten as relative paths to it, so pictures show wherever the folder goes. Each note opens with front matter: title, updated, created, tags when it has any, and, for a to-do, completed? and due; dates are UTC, written like 2024-01-01 00:00:00Z. You can export a single notebook or note the same way from its right-click menu. Plain MD - Markdown is the same layout without the front matter, which is to say without the dates and tags, so choose the one with. And keep a JEX export too: it is Joplin’s own lossless archive, good for getting back in.
The easiest way
- File › Export all › MD - Markdown + Front Matter, into an empty folder.
- Open the folder. Check that
_resourcesis there and that a note with a picture still shows it in any Markdown viewer. - Check a to-do note: its state is in the front matter, not as a checkbox in the text.
- Export a JEX as well, and keep both.
There is no terminal step to add. Joplin’s own command-line app can do the same, if you have it: joplin export --format md_frontmatter ~/notes.
What to check afterwards
- Links between notes. Joplin writes them as
joplin://addresses and the export does not rewrite them into relative links, so they are dead in the files. Fix the ones you need by hand, or search forjoplin://to see how many there are. - Line breaks. Joplin shows a single line break as one, where standard Markdown runs the two lines together into a paragraph. Notes written as lists of lines may need a blank line between them.
- The
_resourcesfolder. It sits beside your notebooks, so an app that treats every folder as a notebook shows it as one, Skysa Notes included. Leave it where it is; every link points there.
Then bring them into Skysa Notes
Once you have a folder of Markdown files, the rest takes a minute, and it works the same whether you use the free app on one device or have storage connected.
- Open Skysa Notes. In the storage panel, open the menu (the gear, or the ⋯ beside a source) and choose Import a folder, then pick the folder the converter made. Import files takes a zip or loose .md files instead.
- The app shows what it will add and asks first. Nothing already there is changed or replaced; a name that is taken gets a number.
- The folder’s subfolders become notebooks, as deep as they nest. Every .md file becomes a note. Every other file, pictures and PDFs included, is kept beside the notes at its own path, so a note’s
still shows the picture.
Titles and dates. A note’s title is the title in its front matter, else its first heading, else its filename. Its dates are the front matter’s created and updated (modified, date created, date modified and lastmod are read too), which is why the guides favour converters that write them: a note without them is dated the day you import it. A tags list in the front matter is searchable. Front matter and the rest of the file are kept byte for byte until you next edit the note.
What renders. CommonMark and GitHub-flavoured Markdown: headings, lists, tables, task lists, strikethrough, footnotes, code, and HTML left as written. Not rendered: [[wikilinks]], math and Mermaid diagrams, and a note with reference-style links opens as raw Markdown. Callouts show as plain quotes. Files larger than 25 MB, and hidden files and folders (names starting with a dot), are left out.
On Dropbox there is a second way in: copy the folder into Apps/skysa-notes with the Dropbox desktop app, and the notes sync in. On Google Drive the app can see only the files it made itself, so use Import there.