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I have tons of notes on my iPhone. When iCloud came out, I created an account.

Now I have the Notes App in Mountain Lion, but only notes added after the iCloud account creation date are showing there.

In my Notes iOS app I can see three 'Accounts': All Notes, On My iPhone (old unsynched notes) and iCloud (new synched notes).

Is there an easy (or complicated but automated) way to get all notes from my iPhone on iCloud? I would like to avoid copy-pasting all of them into new notes, as I have tons of them.

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5 Answers 5

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You need a 10.6/10.7 system handy as this doesn't work in 10.8. The method I've previously used is as follows:

  • Plug your iPhone into your Mac and go into iTunes -> Your Device -> Info tab and choose to Sync notes.

  • This should grab the notes out of the On my iPhone section and dump them into Mail.app.

  • Your notes should appear under the Notes section in Mail.app, but ideally filed under an On My Mac header.

  • Simply select all the notes from under On My Mac and drag them into the iCloud section. That should upload them all to iCloud and save you some time copying and pasting or fiddling with other software!

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  • You, sir, are genius. It took a while to come around testing this, but I just did and it worked like a charm. Had all my notes on iCloud in not time! Note that I had to use Mac OS X 10.7, as iTunes Note synching was completely removed on Mac OS X 10.8.
    – Ricardo Sanchez-Saez
    Oct 22, 2012 at 23:03
  • I can confirm that this worked for me on OS X 10.7 Lion with iTunes 11 - on a device running iOS 7.0.4.
    – chimerical
    Dec 16, 2013 at 15:40
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This is actually amazingly simple in Mountain Lion.

  • Open the Notes app.

  • You should have a list of notes folders on the left side.

  • Select the "On My iPhone" folder or whichever folder you want to move notes from.

  • Then select all the notes using Command+A.

  • Drag them to the Notes folder in iCloud.

I literally just did this about 5 or so minutes ago.

Hope this helps. :-)

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  • I have a "On My iPhone" folder on the iPhone itself. However, the "On My iPhone" folder doesn't appear on my Notes app in Mountain Lion. Even after having the iPone manually synched using iTunes (and having ticked sync my iCloud mail address). What did you do to have the "On my iPhone" folder appear on Mountain Lion?
    – Ricardo Sanchez-Saez
    Dec 2, 2012 at 19:08
  • I don't have an "On My iPhone" folder in the Notes app on 10.8 either. Are you syncing them over iCloud, Gmail, or what?
    – anjunatl
    Dec 16, 2012 at 1:36
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You can use a Mac app like PhoneView to access the notes on your iPhone. You will still have to copy and paste, but that can be a much faster process on the Mac—you have all sorts of options to speed things up, from keyboard shortcuts to AppleScript.

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I'm not sure if this is quite possible but try exporting your iPhone notes to your computer via this iPhone notes app. Then use the iCloud control panel on your computer to import the notes to iCloud.

I am not sure if you could import Notes via the iCloud control panel on your computer but it is worth giving it a try.

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To do this on 10.9 open up Notes.app then select View -> Show Folders List

You should then be able to simple drag and drop notes from one folder to a different folder and also across folders on different accounts.

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