Bring your Apple Notes into River
There is no button that exports the lot. Apple did not build one.
This is the hardest one on the list, and it is worth knowing that before you spend an evening on it. Apple Notes will not export a whole library in one action. That is Apple's decision, not River's. What works: export the notes as readable files, then drop those in. They arrive as ordinary notes, and the folder they came from becomes a tag.
River cannot read NoteStore.sqlite, the file where Apple Notes keeps everything. That store is Apple's and unpublished, and River cannot open the database. Export the notes as Markdown or HTML, then drop those in.
getting your notes out
On a recent Mac, open a note and use File → Export as → Markdown. That is one note at a time. Or drop a zip of Markdown or HTML from an exporter you already trust. There is no useful way to do this in bulk from an iPhone. Once you are signed in, drop those files into River.
A zip up to 100MB, or loose files up to 10MB.
what arrives
Whatever you export as readable files — Markdown or HTML, zipped or loose. The text, the titles, and the folder name as a tag. Images sitting beside the files, within your plan's image allowance.
what the export leaves out
Locked notes. River cannot open them. Open the lock in Notes, then export those ones again.
nothing goes missing quietly
Anything that cannot come across as a file is handed back to you. When the import finishes you get a leftovers file — a zip holding the actual files, with a short note against each one saying why it stayed behind.
Empty notes, and notes River already holds — say the same item is coming through again — are counted rather than packed. A matching title is not the same note. Extra writing for a day you already have arrives as an ordinary note, not as leftovers.
Download the leftovers file before you carry on. It's held for fifteen minutes after the import, and then it's gone. It lives in the page for that window — a refresh lets it go early — and it is never written into your browser's storage.
Pictures stay in the note on every plan, up to its image allowance. Free has 100MB of retained encrypted image storage; pictures beyond that come back in the same leftovers file, with the writing still in River. Paid has no ceiling on the total. Voice recordings come across on every plan. Audio in a format River does not support, or recordings larger than it can keep, come back in the leftovers file.
The same fifteen minutes is your window to undo. One tap, then a confirm, and the whole import goes to deleted. After that, the notes are yours, and can be deleted one at a time or in multiples like anything else.
start here
Write today, even if nothing has come across yet. The archive can come when you're ready.
Your own place to write, with your writing saved to your account.