How to keep creation date when importing Evernote to Apple Notes

I moved everything to Apple Notes quite a while ago, and imported my Evernote stuff into Notes with no issues. Reading the other thread about the acquisition of EN made me realize I should double check I’ve got everything out of it and close the accounts, and I realized I had missed a couple of notebooks. Using the legacy version of Evernote, I exported the notes from Evernote as an .enex file, and then imported into Apple Notes. The content imports fine, but the creation date didn’t come with them, so they all show the current date as the import date.

Looking at the folders for the previous times I had imported Evernote content to Apple Notes, I see that the creation dates are all in there going back multiple years. It’s been a while since I imported those, so I can’t remember if I had to do something special or use some other tool, or if Apple Notes has perhaps just dropped the ability to keep the creation date on import or something. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

There’s unfortunately no way to do this, not unless both apps spoke the same underlying language (which in this case they don’t given it’s all plain text). It’s a shame because I care about creation dates too. It’s somehow easier to find something when you remember an approximate date of creation. I know this is a macOS software discussion but since I moonlight on an Android tablet, I ended up using Google Keep across all devices (including my iPhone). It’s more portable, equally free, has offered a better feature-set since forever and is able to embed photos, rich notes and more and then sync across all devices. On the mac I use a browser to access all my notes.

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I imported a list of books I had read from Evernote (version 10) to Apple Notes. I exported the Evernote notebook to an .enex file and imported that file into Apple Notes. All of the creation dates were preserved on import (approximately 400 books/Apple Notes). No special tweaking required!

Now, if anyone knows how to edit an Apple Notes creation date, I would appreciate hearing about that!

P.S. Importing an .enex file into DEVONthink also preserved the creation date.

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Thanks @mailbuoy, I was exporting from Evernote v7 and was having this issue. Exporting from Evernote v10 was the trick. Thanks!

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