Entry name after import from Day One

Support
1

Hi community,

I just successfully imported all my 1.600+ entries from Day One into Bear.

My problem: I would like to organize them by putting the creation date in the header. Is there any way to automate this? Or can I achieve this by adjusting the export? I obviously don’t want to that by hand for every single entry…

Thanks in advance!

2

About the only thing I could think of is using Shortcuts to iterate the noted and change the headers.

3

Yes, but I dont think it is even possible to retrieve the creation date of a Bear note via shortcuts.

4

When you imported them did it set all of the notes creation date to the date they were imported?

For some reason I thought I read in the forum that Bear has an import for DayOne and would use the DayOne creation date.

Hopefully one of the devs will chime in. Certainly that should be available for the importer.

The Bear note creation date is available to read in Shortcuts.

5

The creation date remains correct after the import. I can also sort the entries by creation date. But for usability reason, I need the creation date in the headline.

Could you please give me a hint how to read the creation date in siri shortcuts? My knowledge about shortcuts is pretty basic…

6

I was starting on a sample Shortcut and just had a thought. I’m going to bet that you have attachments in many of the journal entries. If so, there is not a way to do this with Shortcuts. The only way to do this with Shortcuts would be to loop through the notes and with each loop get the entire note and basically re-write the note (thus not changing the Created On date). This idea will not work if there are attachments in the note.

So I guess it looks like will need help from the devs to re-import and setting the title as you would like during import.

Maybe submit a support request.

7

Will do, thanks a lot!

8

I solved this by using the Mac utility app Hazel. It’s a multiple step process, but it worked well for me:

  1. Import Day One entries into Bear using the JSON format. Use first line as title and escape involuntary tags.
  2. Export these imported journal entries from Bear as Markdown files to a temporary folder. Delete them in Bear and empty the Bear trash.
  3. Run a Hazel rule on the files in the temporary folder you created to rename the markdown files to the file’s creation date. I used YYYY-MM-DD_ddd hhmm because I had multiple entries per day in Day One.
  4. Use Bear’s Import from Markdown to import the newly renamed journal entry files. Use file name as title and keep original creation and modification dates. Do not escape involuntary tags.
  5. Delete the folder tag, which is an artifact from Bear’s import process.

I’m not sure how this can be done for such a large set of journal entries without a utility like Hazel. I posted a while back about making it an option to title the Bear note as creation date in the Day One import process. Maybe this post will help make that a reality. It would be so much easier!

If you decide to got this way, let me know if you need help with the Hazel rule.

Bob

9

Hi Breen, this is a great tip, thank you. I tried it with the trial version of Hazel and it worked like a charm. Now one problem remains: I still don’t have the attached photos in Bear. But I guess that’s a hill I have to die on…

10

Photos in Day One should come across fine to Bear in this process. Make sure you have the export attachments box checked in step 2 when you export the journal entries to a markdown folder.

11

Didn’t work for whatever reason. But you already helped a lot, thanks!