Moving notes from Google Keep to Joplin January 1, 2021 on jfx's site

Introduction

As part of my new years resolution to be more privacy conscious, I’ve tried to migrate as many of my Google services to open-source alternatives as possible. After some investigation Joplin seemed to be a suitable alternative to Google Keep, my primary notes manager.

Although Google Keep is more for “sticky” notes and Joplin is more like Evernote where it is supposed to hold virtual notebooks, it’s a pretty good alternative. I like the in-built synchronisation and end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support, and it’s nice having multiple notebooks for categorising my notes.

Guide

Beware

• The migration script generates an Evernote formatted backup of your Keep files which Joplin can import, and requires Python 3+
• If a note is unnamed then it’ll be tilted after the date it was first created
• If you have lots of unnamed notes this might take some time to clean up

Steps

To export your notes from Google Keep Google offer a service called “Google Takeout” which allows you to export your data many of their services.

1. Head to Google Takeout:
   1. Click Deselect all
   2. Find Keep and tick it
   3. Under the next step, select Send download link via email, Export Once for frequency, with the highest file size
2. You should shortly receive an email with a link to download your data. Google will make you verify your account with your password before your zip/tgz can be downloaded.
3. Once you have downloaded and extracted your files download a copy of my modified version of the keep-to-enex script from here:
   • https://gist.github.com/itsjfx/689ae620222240911a3efae33e313b1b
   • The original version is available here https://gitlab.com/charlescanato/google-keep-to-evernote-converter
     • but it didn’t work for me so I added a modification that allowed it to work
4. Put that script in the folder before the Keep/ folder, which should be in Takeout/.
5. Run with python keep-to-enex.py -o output.enex -f "./Keep" where output.enex will be the name of the file generated and “output” will be the name of the notebook created from your backup.
6. Open Joplin and go File -> Import -> ENEX - Evernote Export File (as Markdown) and select your ENEX backup file you just generated.
7. A notebook with the same name as your backup will be created and all your notes (and images) will be imported.

Thank you for reading

Thank you so much for reading my post. If you have any feedback or queries, please reach out to me. My details are on the home page.