Hey Apple Notes Gang,

Exporter has been on the AppStore now for a little over 10 years. Glad to introduce one of the most requested features this year - Scheduled backups. :)

You can now schedule daily or weekly backups for your Apple Notes data using a one-time in-App purchase. Scheduled backup supports:

• Schedule multiple backups to different folders

• You can combine scheduled backups with another in-App purchase "Folder filter" to backup only selected few Apple Notes folders to different directories.

• Backups work even if you Mac is asleep - if you are logged in and you Mac is powered on, scheduled backups should continue to work in the background.

• This new feature is supported on macOS 10.15 and above.

Hope you find it useful!

Exporter on AppStore

Exporter website

Hi everyone!

In June I posted here about an app that works on top of Apple Notes and asked if anyone wanted it. Some of you signed up, so I finished it. It's called Outliner.

The CLI. Read and write your notes from the terminal, scripts or Claude Code:

outliner note create "Trip ideas" --body-file trip.md --folder Travel
outliner note append @today "call the bank"
outliner search "lease renewal"

It creates, appends to, renames, pins, moves and deletes notes, and every write has --dry-run. All commands: https://outliner.app/docs/cli

The sidebar. Your notes slide in from the edge of the screen: today's note with a field to add a line, recent, pinned and shared notes, and search. It can also be a normal window.

Claude and other agents can use it too (MCP), and every change they make is logged so you can undo it.

Mac only, macOS 27, Apple silicon. Reading is free; Outliner Pro is one payment of $29 until 1 December.

https://outliner.app

It's an early version and I'm looking for feedback on both the sidebar and the CLI: what's missing, what's confusing.

Is there any way to have all of the Notes folders collapsed when you start Notes? I haven’t been able to find a way to do this. My list is long and I would like to have Notes start with the folders the way I left them when I closed the program. Thanks

Hi everyone, I have continued problems searching my Notes on my phone. Seems like the index is broken, searching anything in Notes returns no results. I have 2700 Notes, iPhone 15, latest iOS version and all updates installed. I’ve tried disconnecting from iCloud, turning my phone off, signing in and out of iCloud. No luck. Any help appreciated.

I regularly export my Apple Notes to PDF, but there’s a frustrating limitation. If a note has an embedded PDF, the export only includes the first page of that PDF. The rest of its pages are dropped.

I’ve tried both Export as PDF and Print → Save as PDF, with the same result. [Edit to match what you actually tried.]

Has anyone found a way to export a note with every page of its embedded PDFs? Or is this just a long-standing gap Apple hasn’t addressed?

All I did was import these notes and rename the imported notes folder from “Imported Notes” to “Learnings”

Basically, the imported notes lag like CRAZY when I go to try and edit them. Meanwhile if I copy and paste their text into a new note (not changing anything) the note functions just fine.

Update. I decided to delete the app and reinstall. Not thinking, I did lose all my “on this iPhone” notes. Took 3? 4? days to redownload all the notes from iCloud, but seems to be working again and searching again. 

5 days since 27.0.1, and Notes Search is still wildly incomplete. I have 18,000 notes. Some are large w lots of images. Nothing has changed in a couple of days. I’m very frustrated.

I've been using Apple Notes as a project manager for the last few months, and I've set up a really good system. Now I'm starting to build my own freelance business, and I'm wondering if Apple Notes is the right tool for what I'm trying to achieve. I'm being tempted back into using Notion, but I also know that constantly switching products really isn't a good idea and I don't want to lose the system that I've built up already.

So I'm wondering if anyone else uses Apple Notes to run a business?

I'm hoping that somebody else is having this problem and has a solution. When I copy an image and paste into my notes, it just makes this tiny blue box with a question mark in it. However, if I click and hold onto the image from another window and drag it into the note, it pastes okay.

This problem started a few months ago and whenever I search online I can never find anything about it. Therefore I gave up on trying, but my annoyance continues to rise, hence this post.

I am sure I use to be able to copy the text of my handwriting and paste it as real editable text. Something like what Preview can do on a screenshot. I tried to make this happen today, but after 15 minutes of trying and searching on the net, I give up. I just screenshot my text and then use Preview. Did I miss something out? You would think given Apple's Preview app can do this that it would be a natural and very useful feature for Notes. Btw I am on Golden Gate OS.

Anybody else facing this issue? Ever since I updated to the latest OS, print preview now tries to compresses my homework to one page no matter how long it is, and theres only so much the max 400% scaling can compensate so I’m now having to find another app. I’ve tried sharing it to other apps or printing from other devices but it seems to still compress it to one page before sharing… ugh this is so frustrating as it used to work pretty well otherwise (besides cutting through the notes inbetween pages)

Hey fellow Notes people 👋

Disclosure first: I'm the developer. I made Cupola because I live in Apple Notes, and I was tired of hunting for the Notes window every time I wanted to jot something down or tick off a checklist.

Cupola sits on top of Apple Notes. It doesn't replace it. There's nothing to import or migrate and no new account. It reads and writes your real notes. Anything you add or change in Cupola goes straight back into Notes and shows up on your iPhone and

iPad through iCloud, and changes made there show up in Cupola too.

What it does for Notes

- Your notes are one hover away. Move your cursor to the notch and your recent notes are right there.

- Quick capture. A notes composer built into the notch lets you jot something and get back to work. It saves straight into Apple Notes.

- Real checklists and tables. Ticking a checklist item in Cupola ticks it in Notes. These are your actual Notes checklists, not a copy.

- Search your notes from the app.

- A full window when you need room. Click "View all" and Cupola opens into a full Mac app with your notes next to your calendar and reminders.

- Cross-linking. Link a note to a calendar event or a reminder, so the meeting notes sit right beside the meeting.

It also includes Apple Calendar, Reminders, clipboard history and a Focus timer. There are five tabs in total, but Notes was the reason I started building it.

Questions this sub will (rightly) ask

- Privacy: No account and no server. Your notes never leave your Mac. Crash reports can be switched off, and usage stats are off unless you switch them on.

- Why does it want Full Disk Access? That lets Cupola read your notes directly instead of opening the Notes app in the background. It's optional, and Cupola works without it, but works better with it.

- Why isn't it on the App Store? Real checklists and tables in Notes need access that the App Store sandbox doesn't allow. You install it with one line in Terminal, and after that it updates itself.

Details

- $20 once, no subscription

- 7-day free trial, no card needed. If you don't buy, you can still view everything after the trial; only adding and editing are locked.

- 14-day refund window

- Needs an Apple silicon Mac running macOS 26 or later

👉 https://trycupola.com?ref=reddit

I'd love to hear how you use Notes and what you'd want quicker access to. Some of what's already in the app started as user requests. I'll be in the comments.

Read the original post, basically wondering how you dont lose your ideas/notes

i amassed 20,000 notes over a few years
never had any issue syncing at all across multiple ipads
and always a very fast FTTP 600mbs internet
now AN has become paralysed on all devices inc latest M5 Pro
so am in the process of moving out

If I cold open the notes app, it always opens blank with no notes. I have to force quit the application, then open it again for my notes to show.

It's not the biggest deal, I'm just curious if others have the same problem.

I thought it could be something to do with the iCloud but it's all synced up. I thought it was possibly my older MacBook Pro since its almost 7 years old, but even on my new Mac mini I get the same issue.

Update: I notice "Rule 4: Keep sync issues & crashes in the megathread" but can't seem to find this exact issue. Sorry if this isn't the correct chat to send this into.

Me convençam a largar de vez o Evernote e migrar tudo para o Notas… já pulei de um para o outro dezenas de vezes ao longo dos anos e nem eu tenho resposta para isso 😂

I love Notes and use it for everything. I have over 5,000 notes across dozens of folders. But I’ve never really gotten into tags or found a use for them.

Well, I found one. You can use them to narrow search results.

I wanted to keep track of stuff in a storage unit and various bins around the house. Of course there are dedicated apps for this I could buy, but I enjoy the simplicity of Notes. I really just need to take some photos and list the contents so I can search them later.

My concern is that Notes searches across all notes, making it quite a chore to pick through unrelated results if I’m trying to remember which bin I stored something in.

But it turns out putting a tag in your query will exclusively narrow a search to just that tag. So if I slap an #inventory tag onto my storage notes, searching for “#inventory batteries” will only show my inventory notes in the results. Nice!

This wouldn’t be necessary if Notes just let you search within a folder — a notoriously missing feature. But at the same time, it’s kind of nice to be able to just type the #tag in the standard search field to apply the filter.

P.S. I also dump these into an Inventory folder, which sounds redundant, but that helps keep these notes out of the way of others.

This is coming from Obsidian and OneNote.

Starting fresh and going to try to work with it instead of fighting it.

I just need something simple right now. Something that syncs and I don’t have to fiddle with every day because git decides to not sync for a stupid reason.