Evernote and Interoperability

Evernote does not appear to make any effort to allow you to port your data to or from other systems. Its online help articles are unhelpful-to-wrong. This article, for example, explains that you can import from other notes apps exports - but the only format that the app seems to support is the custom ENEX format, or files ending in ".enex".

Similarly, Evernote does not export into a format that is usable by other apps. PCMag investigated this at length and reported on the difficulties of porting to OneNote, Joplin, Zoho, Bear, and Notion. Several of these have features specifically for importing from Evernote.

Evernote to Bear

Moving notes to Bear from Evernote works in HTML format, though poorly - it loses images. Better is to use Bear's feature in the File menu to "Import From" > "Evernote", and import ENEX files, which preserves images in the notes. As the PCMag article accurately reported, Bear loses all the folder structure of Evernote's notes, because Bear does not use folders. A pretty workable approach may be to tag all your notes in Evernote before exporting:

• In the Evernote app, select all the notes in an folder
• From the right-mouse button menu (Context menu?) choose "Edit tags"
• Apply a tag to all of the items
• Export them all as one ENEX file
• Import into Bear using "Import From" > "Evernote"

As a result, the notes will preserve images and tags.

The source code (markdown) for this article can be found on GitHub.