Bring your Day One journal into River

A journal without its dates has stopped being a journal, so Day One entries keep theirs. Each one files into River's day for the date it was written. Open that date and the writing is there, behind today's page rather than in a separate archive. River keeps one note for each day. The first entry for a date becomes that day. A second entry that day, or an entry for a date you have already written here, arrives as an ordinary note. It is not thrown away.

getting your notes out

In Day One, export as JSON and include the photos and recordings. That produces a zip. Drop it in as it arrives — not a plain-text export.

Up to 500MB in one go.

what arrives

Your entry text, with the Markdown Day One already stored. The date you wrote it and the date you last changed it. Your tags. Starred and pinned entries arrive pinned. Voice recordings come across. Pictures stay in the note within your plan's image allowance; on Free, pictures beyond 100MB come back in the leftovers file.

what the export leaves out

River holds images and audio, so video and PDFs stay as files. Day One exports sometimes name a photo they do not include. Nothing can come across when the file is not there, and you will see which ones. This is a copy, taken once. Day One carries on unchanged, and nothing you write in either one from now on reaches the other.

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.

sign in to bring your writing across