Bringing Your Old Journal Home
Journaling · 2026-10-22 · 5 min read
Years of entries shouldn’t be stuck in the app you started with. How HushNotes imports Day One, a journal saved as web pages, or a folder of text, on your iPhone and for free.
The most valuable part of a journal is the years already in it. Switching apps shouldn’t mean starting again from an empty page.
Many people who keep a journal have done it for a long time, often in one app. Over the years, that app becomes the only place a lot of their life is written down: the move, the new job, the year someone got ill, the small good days that would otherwise be forgotten. When the app raises its price, changes direction or simply stops feeling right, the entries are what make leaving hard.
So when we built HushNotes, import was not an extra. It is free, it runs entirely on your iPhone, and it reads three kinds of export. This post explains what each one is, how to make it, and, just as importantly, what does and doesn’t come across.
What HushNotes can read
- Day One: its JSON export. Dates, tags and photos come along.
- Journal saved as web pages: some journal apps export a ZIP of web pages, one page per entry. HushNotes reads the ZIP or the unzipped folder. Dates and photos come along.
- A text folder: a folder of .md or .txt files, for example from a notes app or a folder you kept yourself. A date at the start of a file name, like 2021-05-01, becomes the entry’s date.
In HushNotes, open More, then Bring entries in, and pick the kind you have. Each one shows the steps on screen before it asks for the file.
From Day One
In Day One, open Settings, then Import/Export. Choose Export, then JSON, and pick all the journals you want. Day One makes a ZIP. Save it to the Files app, come back to HushNotes and choose that file. If you pick a PDF or a plain-text export by mistake, HushNotes tells you it isn’t a JSON export rather than guessing.
From a journal saved as web pages
If your journal app offers an export as web pages, open its settings, choose Export, and save the ZIP it makes to Files. Then pick that ZIP in HushNotes. If you already unzipped it, pick the folder that holds its Entries folder instead. HushNotes reads the date at the top of each page, the prompt if there was one, and the paragraphs you wrote.
From a folder of text
Put your .md or .txt files in one folder in Files and choose that folder. Each file becomes one entry. If a file name starts with a date, that date is kept, so a file called 2019-03-14 Lisbon.md lands on 14 March 2019 rather than on the day you imported it.
What happens while it imports
Everything happens on your iPhone. HushNotes has no network code, so the file you pick is read where it is and nothing is uploaded. Your old app isn’t contacted or told. You can leave the progress screen and the import keeps going.
- Every entry keeps its original date, so your history stays in order.
- If you import the same file twice, entries that are already in your journal are not added again.
- Imported entries usually have no feeling chosen. They show as an outlined block rather than a coloured one, so “no feeling recorded” never looks like a grey day.
What doesn’t come across
We would rather tell you now than have you find out later. Import brings your words, dates and photos. It doesn’t bring everything an app can attach to an entry.
- From Day One, video, audio and PDF attachments are left out; photos come across.
- From a journal saved as web pages, map, workout and song cards are left out of the entry text.
- From a text folder, there are no photos to bring, and an entry’s date comes only from the file name.
Your original export is never changed or deleted by HushNotes, so it stays a complete copy for as long as you keep it.
Once your journal is home
This is where years of entries start to pay off. With HushNotes Pro, you can ask your journal a question, such as “when did I last feel like this?”, and get back sentences you wrote, each with its date. Search finds entries by what they mean, not only by the exact words, which helps when you can’t remember how you phrased something in 2018. On this day brings back an entry from the same date in an earlier year.
And the door works both ways. Export is free too: Markdown, PDF or JSON, whenever you want. A journal you can’t take with you isn’t fully yours, so we made leaving as easy as arriving.