Like many other users of Evernote, I am trying to find a new home for my massive Evernote document collections (actually I have been looking for a new home for several years)
Just recently I discovered how easily I can export a notebook from Evernote to Apple Notes.
But to my sorrow, I discovered that all the documents get synced down to my iPhone… choking it to “death”. Many of my documents include several pictures and/or pdf’s
In Evernote, I could download only the documents I needed and no others.
Is there a way to do the same in Notes (like the way that photos are saved in the Photo app… only the ones I need get downloaded)
Any ideas from all of you?
May I humbly suggest that Apple Notes is not intended to be an “everything” bucket? It is for notes. There are better ways to save the PDFs, photos, etc. My approach is to use AN mostly for text, with only a relatively few notes having attachments. I store most documents in Finder or DEVONthink and link those to the relevant AN as needed.
That is just a suggestion, but I think it will making syncing must faster and more reliable for you, and avoid choking your phone.
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I suspect that Notes will offload some notes after a while, but I don’t think the user can initiate this.
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I’m thinking along those same lines. PDFs can go in iCloud Drive, for example, which OP would have to jump through a couple hoops to download important data. Same with photos.
Although I do disagree on design intent. I think Apple does intend for people to use Notes as an “everything bucket” - they’d just say OP needs a bigger iDevice. 
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A possible, if inelegant, solution would be to create a second account for Notes and not log in to that account on the phone. Then notes you want to keep off the phone go into that account.
You could use a second iCloud account, or it may be that your mail service will handle notes as well
You can have notes “On My Mac” which are local only, as well as “iCloud”, which will be shared with your iPhone. You must first enable the On My Mac location.
Then the locations show in the toolbar (the list on the left side of the Notes window). You can drag notes between the locations if in the wrong one.
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How big is the the evernote notebook?
If you have a mac, then maybe import to the local account and then transfer specific notes over to the icloud account?
Thank you for your reply.
I like your idea, which seems to be a very smart work around. Do all the heavy work at home on the mac 
Sorry to say, I don’t know how large the Evernote database is (but it’s laaaaarge, since 2008 and forward) and I’ve asked Evernote support, that doesn’t reply on that very question.