Farewell to Evernote

  1. Download the Legacy Evernote program. ← It can be found at that link or on this page.
  2. Log into your Evernote account. I remember there being some warnings about this being an older version. Just ignore all that.
  3. Export all your notes to an .enex file and save it on your desktop.
  4. You don’t have to use GitHub and compile your own programs. There’s a link to the binaries about 1/3 of the way down the page. This link may work to download the binary.

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  1. Double click that .zip file and you’ll get yarle-evernote-to-md on your desktop.

  1. Then run that program and it pretty much walks you through the steps.

    • STEP ONE: Select your .enex file
    • STEP TWO: Under configuration, I left everything pretty much the same. All the “attachments” went into a _resources folder.
    • STEP THREE: You can set up a template to format how all the files will be generated in Markdown. I just left it as is, but there are instructions on how to edit the template.
    • STEP FOUR: Set your output location. I picked desktop.
    • STEP FIVE: Start conversion.
  2. Then do what you want with the markdown files. I dragged them all into my Obsidian vault.

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Wow. Thanks soooo much !! I’ll will set on this tomorrow!!

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A small positive for Evernote. Like many, I’m migrating away from proprietary formats to PDF and Markdown. Stored in DevonThink and Obsidian.

The old legacy application had become a mess of different features on different platforms, it was an unmaintainable nightmare. V10 killed off many things we loved about Evernote, but from a long term perspective they had little choice but do something like that. Further credit, they seem to release a new update about once a week and the updates seem to be reliable. From a technical perspective that is challenging. Given time, Evernote the platform will get much much better again.

I think the key thing that turns power users off is that they’re not targeting us with automation etc. They’re targeting the general audience. My wife has look at my use of Obsidian and just doesn’t get it. She can use Evernote no problem.

FWIW I still use Skitch to take screenshots and share via the cloud. I use Evernote itself to save banking transactions with the webclipper, so my bookkeeper can see every detail.

I tried that but Monterey won’t let me run the program, How can I get around this ?

Screen Shot 2022-01-01 at 9.17.51 am

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In my case, the loss of local notebooks was the final straw. EN was a great program for an iPad user. I had access to all my non sensitive data on the go and to everything when on my Mac. But without local notebooks for the data I don’t want online, it no longer worked for me. I closed my account with 8 months left on my subscription.

The have already made a lot of improvements so that is entirely possible. But Google drive, EagleFiler, and Notion has replaced everything I used to do in EN.

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Go to System Preferences on your Mac. Look for and click on “Security & Privacy.” Make sure you’re on the General Tab of that preferences item. You’ll see a note that it prevented the app from opening and a button that allows you to open it anyway.

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My annual subscription renews in July. Leaning toward ending it then, but I’d also be unplugging a lot of my wife’s web clipper usage for homeschooling, etc., and that’s always been the distinctive hard-to-replace (at the same level) feature. Hoping I can figure out a good way forward.

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IMO, Notion’s web clipper is almost identical to Evernote’s.

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Did the same. Exported all of my Evernote(s) and imported them into a Notes folder called Evernote. Spent 20-30 minutes moving my post important Evernote(s) into new Notes folders and now I just use search if I think there’s something I need from back in my Evernote days.

A shame, really. I used to pay for the full version, told friends about it, etc. It probably should have been purchased by Google or Microsoft a long time ago but all the big tech companies have their own notes apps now.

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Questions about this:

Does notes OCR pdf files? That’s been very valuable to me in Evernote.
Can notes handle large file size attachments?
Can some notes folders be marked for offline viewing but others be left in the cloud? I won’t want every attachment download on every device.

I’d love to not pay Evernote, and I think these are the few items that have me “locked in.”

I’m using Evernote v10 and as of today I see I can export my notes as PDFs, as HTML, or as .enex (the Evernote format.)

– Do people consider PDFs an acceptable form of export?

OCR: yes, I believe so. I’ve been running a couple of quick tests to make a final decision on where next to store my reference items (which is essentially what Evernote did for me). I thought I was going with Dropbox, but Notes seems to be easier to work with — including turning up search results from text within PDFs via a Siri/Spotlight search on i*OS.

Can’t yet answer your other two questions. Like you, I’m particularly interested in whether selective syncing might be possible (or at least how syncing is managed between devices with different levels of available storage)…

– Do people consider PDFs an acceptable form of export?

It’s all a matter of personal taste.
Webpages I captured and want to keep go to DevonThink as PDFs. Notes I wrote are heading to Obsidian.

Evernote 10’s limitation is that export can’t be automated to it’s one file at a time. The legacy app people point to is good for enmasse/automated imports.

No, I want editable notes and PDFs are not usually editable. So for me that would not be an acceptable export format. YMMV

Keep in mind I only used Evernote for about a week years go and the cloud nature turned me totally off it almost immediately.

If you don’t need to edit the content again directly, then yes.

I prefer PDFs for archiving web content as I can highlight and annotate it using Skim (my PDF reader of choice.)

Yes. Not marked as such but it allows to have multiple accounts (iCloud, Google, Exchange, etc.) where notes can be synced and one of those accounts is the local “On my Mac” account. You can just drag and drop notes to this account to keep them local on the device.

I discovered this once when I had issues with Notes taking a lot of space in iCloud for no reason and the only help after multiple calls to support was to erase notes in iCloud and start over to get rid of hidden phantom data. I was frustrated that Notes didn’t allow to export in any format from which it can import it again and didn’t want to lose all my notes. moved all to a local folder, let it sync and checked iCloud storage recover in a few hours, then put them all back. Wonderful experience!

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I once did that myself, which solved my Notes/iCloud issues 2-3 years ago.
As far as I understand it, the Local storage does not sync anymore and therefore changes you make to one note won’t be updated to other devices and if you would loose that device with local storage notes I assume you would need to hope for your device backup to restore those?!

It never did. That’s the point of local storage, no? Hence, the inherent security/privacy that it never leaves my disk and the inherent need for manual backups since I need to ensure redundancy.

Thanks for the info. This doesn’t solve the problem I’m after though.

I want to be able to access the note from any device, so it does need to sync to the cloud. I just don’t want it automatically downloading to all my client devices so that it isn’t taking up room on those devices if I don’t need it. I’d be very surprised if Notes had a way of solving this problem that was granular enough. That’s not really the Apple way.

Oh I get what you meant by offline now. I think the only way Apple allows to do that is in iCloud Drive if you had a folder with docs/PDFs/Text file as opposed to in Notes database. You can optimise the iCloud Docs and Desktop folder which allows you to download some folder always and others on demand.

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