Bring your Evernote notebooks into River

Evernote notebooks tend to be old, large, and full of things that are not writing. Export one and drop the ENEX in. The notes arrive as ordinary notes with their dates and tags intact. If a notebook turns out to be one entry a day, River offers to file it into days instead — you choose on the way in. River keeps one note for each day; extra notes for a taken date arrive as ordinary notes.

getting your notes out

Export from the Evernote desktop app — web and phone cannot make an ENEX. Right-click a notebook and export it as ENEX. Do it a notebook at a time; River reads the notebook name from the file name and adds it as a tag. If the file is larger than 500MB, split it in Evernote first.

An ENEX file up to 500MB in one go.

what arrives

Note text, created and updated dates, your tags, and the notebook name as a tag. Images and audio embedded in the note come across as images and voice recordings, within your plan's image allowance.

what the export leaves out

Encrypted blocks. River cannot open them. Decrypt those blocks in Evernote and export again if you want the words. The block is marked in place, so you can see where it was. PDFs and other attachments that are not an image or a recording stay as files. Attachments the export names but does not contain — that happens with older files — cannot come across, and you will see which ones. This is a copy, taken once. Evernote carries on unchanged.

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.

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