Bring your Google Keep notes into River
Takeout sometimes names a photo it did not pack. You get told which ones.
Keep fills up with scraps you have not scrolled to the bottom of in years. You can bring the whole lot over in one go. They arrive as ordinary notes, keeping the dates you wrote and last edited them. They are not filed into days — Keep notes cluster and scatter, and filing them would put words on days you did not write them.
getting your notes out
Google Takeout is the only way out. Go to takeout.google.com, deselect everything, tick Keep, and ask for a zip. Google emails a link when it is ready — that can take minutes or several hours. Once you are signed in, drop that zip into River exactly as it arrives. There is no need to unpack it.
Up to 500MB in one go.
what arrives
Your note text and titles, with the dates attached. Labels become tags. Colours become tags too, so the yellow ones stay findable. Pinned notes arrive with a pinned tag. Checklists arrive as tick-boxes you can still tick. 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. Notes you had archived come across.
what the export leaves out
River holds images and audio. Anything else Keep attached — a PDF, a spreadsheet — has no home here, so it stays a file. Takeout also, sometimes, lists a photo in its data and then leaves the file out of the zip. There is nothing to bring across when that happens, and you will see which ones. Reminders stay in Keep. Notes you had binned do not.
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.