Bring your Simplenote notes into River
Settings, Export, drop the JSON in. That is the whole thing.
There is not much that can go wrong here. Export from Simplenote and drop the JSON in. Notes arrive as ordinary notes, with tags and dates intact.
getting your notes out
In Simplenote, open Settings → Export and download the export. Drop notes.json, or the zip that contains it, in as it arrives.
A JSON file up to 10MB, or a zip up to 100MB.
what arrives
The note text — first line as the title — plus tags and the created and last-edited dates.
what the export leaves out
Trashed notes, by default. This is a copy, taken once. Simplenote 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.
Your own place to write, with your writing saved to your account.