Once I made the decision to leave Evernote and transfer everything to Apple Notes, the real work began. I had to figure out how to export my notes out of Evernote and import them into Apple Notes. And of course Apple Notes notebook structure isn’t exactly the same as Evernote so I need to figure out how my notebooks were going to work. And tags… My tags from Evernote wouldn’t transfer directly so I needed to figure out how to get tags into Apple Notes and onto my cards within Apple Notes.

For more information about Apple Notes, check out this page on Apple Support.

It has taken me over a year and a half to get all my notes and my system working in Apple Notes. Now I haven’t been working on it every day all day for a year and a half – as you should know by now, I don’t do anything all day every day – but it has taken more time than I thought it would. I’ve had to modify my system within Apple Notes as I learned how it works etc.

The first thing I had to do was export everything out of Evernote. That was really quite easy because Evernote has a system for this. Here are the instructions from Evernote on how to do that. I exported my files into ENEX files. I kept those files as is in my iCloud just in case I wanted to go back to Evernote at some point.

Once I had the ENEX files, I desperately wanted to preserve all my tags. All my hard work! Just importing into Apple Notes from Evernote didn’t include the tags. So I found an article about importing my Evernote files into OneNote to preserve tags. But then I still needed to add the tags to the notes in Apple Notes. Well, that’s not a quick fix.

So I opted to import my notes into Apple Notes without the tags. My tagging system in Evernote had gotten a bit out of control. I was really creating an index like in the back of a book but it was clunky.

My Apple Notes notebook structure was different from my Evernote structure but not by much. As you can see in the photo above, I started using Apple’s Smart Folders in place of some of my larger tags. First I found this video showing how to structure Apple Notes. He has a similar basic structure to what I’d used in Evernote but it helped me navigate some of Apple Notes’ newer features.

As I mentioned before, I felt my tags in Evernote were overkill. So I took the opportunity with this migration to simplify things. As you can see in the photo above, my new tagging system was less index and more making sure I could find things that are stored in different folders. And I started creating a tag for each letter. Then I can click the tag for that letter and find all the cards and other notes connected to that letter.

The thing that didn’t really work from Evernote to Apple Notes was scanning my written cards directly into the app. To me, the true magic of Evernote was the ability to scan my cards as individual picture files directly into the app from my 3-in-1 printer. And then it also “reads” my handwriting and makes it searchable. Apple Notes has that ability if I use my photo to photograph each card. But that is clunky.

After a lot of work trying to figure out a workaround, I just decided to work with Apple Notes perimeters. I bought an iPhone holder arm so that I can “scan” my cards with my phone directly into Notes. One bonus is that Notes automatically names the note what it sees as the title of the card ~ usually the title I’ve given the card in writing. It doesn’t always get it right but it is definitely an upgrade from Evernote.

One thing that took me a minute to figure out was the difference between the iCloud folder and the Notes folder. The iCloud folder and the Notes folder are automatically created by Apple. The iCloud folder is everything in your Notes app except Recently Deleted. The Notes folder holds all the notes you’ve created but not moved to other folders you’ve created.

When I first started using Notes, I thought having all my notes in the Notes folders would help me organize them into folders. But when I moved all my notes from the iCloud folder to the Notes folder, the folder name/title was stripped from the note. So that was not a good system.

A few other issues… At first, the sync between iCloud and my Mac didn’t work as well as I would have liked. It would freeze and stall. I learned that by logging out of iCloud and back in, that seemed to fix it.

All in all, I’m happy with my new system! And I’m happy using Apple Notes.