Moving from Apple Journal

Apple's Journal app keeps your entries locked to your iPhone. Ember imports them — text, photos, audio, and even the places you were — so your history moves with you and settles into a life you can actually browse.

1. Exporting from Apple Journal

Apple Journal exports all of your entries into a single package.

On your iPhone: open Settings → Apps → Journal → Export Journal. This produces an AppleJournalEntries.zip file you can save to Files or AirDrop to your Mac.
On your Mac (if you journal there): use the Journal app's export option — this produces an AppleJournalEntries folder rather than a zip.
Move the exported file or folder somewhere easy to find, like your Desktop.

2. Importing into Ember

Now bring those entries into Ember.

Open Ember and go to File → Import.
Select the exported folder or the .zip file.
Ember processes your entries locally. Nothing is uploaded — your journal never leaves your Mac.

How your data translates

Ember and Apple Journal are shaped differently, but we bring across everything that matters.

Text: Every entry's writing comes across, with its title where you gave one.
Dates: Each entry keeps its original date.
Photos, drawings & audio: Media attached to an entry is imported and placed inline. Voice recordings come across as playable audio.
Locations: If an entry was tagged with a place, Ember captures the place name and its coordinates onto the entry.
Map snapshots: Apple includes a rendered map picture for located entries. Ember keeps the location but skips the map image — it's a screenshot, not one of your photos.

A note on multiple journals

Apple recently added support for keeping several separate journals. Unfortunately, Apple's export doesn't record which journal an entry came from — the exported file is just a flat list of entries. So everything arrives in Ember as one set, and we can't automatically sort entries back into their original journals.

This is a limitation of Apple's export, not Ember. (By contrast, Day One's export does include the journal name, so a Day One import tags each entry with its journal.)

Safe and sound

The import is strictly additive — it never deletes or overwrites anything already in Ember. Everything is processed on your device.

Next Step: Apple Journal doesn't have "people" the way Ember does, so right after importing, Ember opens the Find & Tag People tool. It scans your freshly imported entries, surfaces every name you've written, and lets you tag them with a click — instantly turning your journal into your Graph.

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