How To Merge Multiple Notebooks

Hi there, appreciate all your help first of all Laurent!

When exporting from Evernote, I had some issues with the ENEX files so exported them in multiple batches. When I imported to Joplin, I was faced with folders that don’t make sense. I tried researching both on Github and here how to merge them within the UI/UX but couldn’t see anything.

Is this possible? If not, do you have recommendations on how I can merge things on the backend?

Appreciate your continued help and great product!

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we usally export notes ; folder by folder

Hi @foxmask, thanks for the quick reply! Can you help me understand what you mean by that or how it applies here? I only had one Evernote folder (but it wouldn’t export in just one file) so I had to break down those files into multiple.

I just need help combining Joplin folders or merging ENEX notes prior to re-importing. Any thoughts there?

Thanks for the help!

Hi @foxmask just wanted to followup with my question or see what additional information I can help provide to you! Let me know what you think!

@farverio, when you import ENEX files into Joplin, a new notebook is going to be created for each enex file. So if you don’t need multiple notebooks, you could simply select all the notes (in the Joplin desktop app) and put them all into the notebook of your choice.

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Hi @laurent, thanks for the reply! Just was able to move them. Was a bit confused at first how to select all, but managed to figure out. Might be helpful to add shading when you are hovered over a folder when selecting notes to signify they are about to move, but this is likely a low priority.

Thanks again for the great product and look forward to continuing to help improve it :slight_smile:

Hi,

if the Evernote Notebook is too large than Evernote is creating automaticaly seperate ENEX files.
So far so good.

What happens with the "Schlagwörter" if I move later on my notes to only 1 notebook in Joplin and I would delete the empty notebook? Are the "Schlagwörter" stored inside the notes? So I move them too?

Best regards,

dingolino

How do you select all notebooks? There is no menu item and no way to do this with mouse/trackpad.

You can't select all notebooks, but you can display all notes (as Laurent said) in all notebooks by clicking the header "All notebooks".
Then select them all, drag and drop them in a new notebook, delete the old notebooks. Done.

I don't know what version you are using but I am using Joplin 2.10.19 for Mac. There is no "All notebooks" header. There is only an 'All notes' one and, again, there is no visible means of selecting all notes. Did you try it?

Sorry, my mistake. Header is "All notes", not "All notebooks".

  1. Click on "All notes". This will display all the notes of all notebooks
  2. Click on a note, then Command+A to select all. Don't use the menu Edit > Select All.
  3. Drag and drop into the new notebook

OK, but what you and laurent neglected to mention, something which is all-important, is that for this to work, you need to have both the 'sidebar' and 'note list' panes open. You show that in your attached image but it would have been clearer to state it explicitly. Once I realized that, I could select the top note in the 'note list' pane and then cmd-A selected all the notes. I got a side pane that had many options:
Screenshot 2023-07-02 at 10.08.47 AM.w=200.px
but I did not know what each one would do, so I tried to drag and drop them all to a new notebook. Fortunately I made a backup of all the notebooks first just in case. It's a good thing I did because instead of copying all the notes, despite the fact that I held down the 'option' key, which usually forces 'copy' rather than 'move', I could see that in fact the notes were being moved, and the original separate notebooks were all empty while this was happening. It took a long time to finish. This is scary when you have over 500 notes being moved, not copied, not knowing if it will complete without error. There is a risk that anything could interrupt the transfer or that some notes were not copied. I consider this a design flaw. I still don't know if there were errors. It would be impossible to check. A much better option would have been to copy all notes first so you can live with the new folder a while to see if everything went OK.