Home
Exporting your stuff from Evernote
April 22nd, 2009
I really like Evernote. I suggest it to a lot of people, especially anyone who owns an iPhone. Evernote makes it so easy to take a picture, write a note, or record some audio on your iPhone and retreive it later on your Mac, PC, or even online. This has so many potential uses from comparison shopping to simple reminders. However, as I was using Evernote the other day I realized one fatal flaw in the system. Evernote only exports “notes” as Evernote-compatible files. Why is this a bad thing? Let me share my experience…
Right now Shaun is in song-writing mode preparing for a new album and a new round of completely free songs. While at a church in Iowa the other day Shaun was messing around on the church’s piano and wrote this beautiful melody. A few hours later before the concert, it was completely gone from his head. In his own word, “I’m not too old to write music, just too old to remember it.” Hoping it would return to him I told him I would record it with my handy-dandy iPhone and then send it to him later. Sure enough, the following morning Shaun woke up and the melody had returned. I immediately opened up Evernote for iPhone, started a new audio note, and within a few seconds the melody was captured and sync’d up Evernote online. So far so good, but that was only the first step.
When we returned home I opened up Evernote on my Mac to snag the audio file and e-mail it over to Shaun. I started in standard Mac fashion by trying to simply drag the recording out of Evernote onto my desktop… nothing. Strike one. So, I selected the audio note and chose “Export…” from the File menu. The only format I could export to is a proprietary XML format that only Evernote can read. Strike two. I scoured the Evernote forums, knowledgebase, and Google and didn’t find an alternate export option. Then I read that Evernote stores a copy of all media files used as standard files on my computer (not in some secret secure database). If I could find the media file on my system I could send it to Shaun.
So, I popped open Finder and went to my home folder (the one named for your user name). From there I went to:
Library -> Application Support -> Evernote -> data
Inside that data folder were sub-folders for each “notebook” I have in Evernote. Of course, they are not named after those notebooks but instead use numbers so I had to look through each one to find the folder that corresponded to the right notebook. Each of these numbered folders contains a file called Evernote.sql (the database info. for that notebook) and yet another sub-folder called content. These content folders are where Evernote stores everything it needs to keep up with the notes inside that notebook.
Each content folder contains sub-folders for each item within that notebook. These folder names each start with the letter “p” which is followed by a number. Thankfully, these folders are in order. Since the audio file I was searching for was the last item I had created, it was in the last folder. Each of these “p” folders contains the thumbnails Evernote creates for your note along with the HTML it uses to display your note and all media attached to your note. The media files are named with long strings of numbers and letters, but at least they are there and they retain their proper filename extention (my audio file was a WAV file and images are often JPG files).
The full location of my file ended up being something like (“Home” will be your short user name):
Home -> Library -> Application Support -> Evernote -> data -> 40147 -> content -> p141 -> 2286a189e0225a887e3495cd50f6d912.wav
Once I found the audio file I simply copied (not moved but copied… hold down ALT while you drag) the file from this location to my Desktop. Then I renamed it something human-readable and attached it in an email to Shaun.
While I did find a solution to my problem, I find it hard to believe that I am the only person who has ever wanted to export media I have caputred with Evernote for use in some application other than Evernote. This seems to be something that would be easy for the Everntoe developers to incorporate since the original media files exist in the file system. So I suppose the big question is: Why is this not already a feature in Evernote? Are they afraid to give us control over our own content? Do they think we will stop using the service? Is locking users into their system really the answer?
5 Comments Subscribe to comments for this post. (RSS)
josh
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:59 am
ben,
i read the whole thing. i have no clue what i read. but i read it. because we are friends. because we have meaningful conversations about how to say a word that plural. because we both like cigars. that is why. good day to you.
benstewart
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:16 pm
You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. :)
gregtaylor
June 2nd, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Hello – I just came across this post and your blog during my own attempt to google a solution for “evernote email looks like [expletive]”
Despite being such a great piece of software for copying pretty much any web formatted text & its layout, it is not designed to allow for any such flexibility in pasting those details out. In the emails, it wraps everything in a large green Evernote template. And have you tried making one of your notebooks public? The result is a webpage too horrid to use for any sort of “collaboration”.
I’m just as confused as you are regarding why the developers layed out the application this way, and even more confused why no else seems to notice.
Well, nothing else left to do but grab a copy of this page and file it in my UnresolvedIssues folder! =)
Cheers
benstewart
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:32 am
Evernote is definitely much better at gathering information than it is at using or sharing that information. I have heard that they are working on better collaborative tools and I am definitely looking forward to that day.
For now, it has its place alongside other tools. Maybe one day it will replace some of those other tools.
My iPhone home screen apps | Ben Stewart
June 26th, 2009 at 10:02 am
[...] Evernote is a web application that allows a user to import stuff that gets synced to other places. I posted one example of how I used it here. Basically imaging copying stuff from your browser on your Mac (like a recipe) and being able to [...]