Import process to import 3.5k notes from Apple Notes and 15 years of Things App

Questions & Help
1

I have a very large collection of notes in Apple Notes, and ~15 years or more in Things. I’ve searched, but not found much except this experiment with Things: Things 3 Plugin - proof of concept and feedback - #7 by Orus

I’m very interested in Logseq (just discovered it).

Anyone have any ideas or links to existing attempts to import from Notes?

I’m keen to capture the created date (if it exists in notes) and use to inject to the note into a journal entry for the created date, and use the first line of the note as a page name / link.

The rest of the note import I guess would require some manual work. Although, using an auto linker to link the notes on import would be good, but I doubt my page titles match up with anything much in the rest of the notes.

Things is a seperate matter, and I’m not yet sold on Logseq as a things replacement, but I can see it has potential. Maybe I’ll mess around with some query and plugin writing to mimic my things workflow. I basically use this style, which is awesome: https://productivewithapurpose.com

seo: ThingsApp Things3 Things3App

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FYI Just came across this nice little app: ‎Exporter on the Mac App Store

It will export apple notes into markdown, and include the creation date as a header entry. Eg.:

----
title: Italy Trip August
creation-date: June 25, 2022
modification-date: July 28, 2022
----

# Content etc...
- something
- something else

Blah blah...

And seems to do a pretty good job of markdown formatting.

Ok, so now I have the markdown, next is to see about generating the journal entries based on that creation-date meta…

3

Ok quick look at the Logseq journal format - will have to read the creation date, rename the file to the Logseq journal date format s.g. 2022_06_25.md, then check if one already exists, merge it, injecting the title: meta as the first block, then will probably just append a child block which contains the entire markdown file (as opposed to trying to smartly segment it into blocks as well).

Hmm I wonder - maybe creating a block and child block per markdown heading #, ## might be worthwhile…

The nice thing about Logseq I can experiment with the import process in different graphs until I get what I like, then merge it into my (mostly empty so far) main graph.

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4

Ok last quick note - attachment mapping is a going to be a PITA. Not sure if I’ll give that a go, skip notes with attachments, or just leave the attachments out. Guess I’ll leave this post here for a bit first and see if anyone else has any easier suggestions :slight_smile:

5

Quick google search reveals there is a python library for things Things API · GitHub

For python programmer with basic skills should be easy to convert things to markdown files.

For example I just wrote a program (Python and pipedream.com) to read my google takeout YouTube watch history and convert that into Logseq pages. Took me a few days as I’m a hobbyist.

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Oh that sounds cool! I’d be interested in running that. Are you going to make it public? That would be cool to sync the watch history into the journal on a recurring basis.

I’m more interested in Notes atm. (I probably should have made this two seperate posts).

I have the notes exported as standard markdown using the exporter program mentioned above, so problem is converting the markdown into something that’ll work ok with Logseq. I found GitHub - andreoliwa/logseq-doctor: Logseq Doctor: heal your flat old Markdown files before importing them which seems what I need, but it crashed on start. Haven’t looked into the error yet.

I think I’ll import them all as pages instead of journal entires, then generate journal entries that embed the page if it’s small, otherwise links to it. So I can recover the journal aspects of the notes.

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I’ve written a script to do this now, as well as importing transcripts from Voice Memos using Whisper. I’ll post them both soon as gists.

Not sure about Things - might pause on that for a while, until I do a simulation of the Things workflow in Logseq.

8

@psynikal , do you have those Gists or code snippets available to share? I am trying to do a similar project, and they would be very helpful! Thanks :smiley:

9

that’s something i also want to do. it would be great if you can share your workflow

i would also like to summarize them with a local LLM as i sometimes talk for 1 to 3 hours

i also used Things at one point and would like to know as well how to export it

10

+1 on sample code request; I’m starting to dig into how to import from various sources and inspiration would be cool, even if I end up doing it in a different way! Thanks!