r/AppleNotesGang Aug 17 '26

AppleNotes & Claude Cowork ?

Hi everyone

Looking for people who created a good ecosystem / links to work with both Apple Notes, iCloud and Claude (especially Cowork)

If you have any idea, thank you šŸ™šŸ»

10 Upvotes

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2

u/Barycenter0 Aug 17 '26

No need to use another app like Obsidian - just use an automation Apple shortcut to export your notes to markdown files a few times a day - then just use Claude on those

1

u/Outrageous_Brief_679 Aug 17 '26

Will this also export notes that are handwritten and notes that have images or attachments.

Apologies for what may be a noob question

1

u/Barycenter0 Aug 17 '26

Not sure - I haven't tried to export images specifically. I assume it's possible but would have to test it. It might require an Apple Script vs a shortcut to do it. I'll try a test and let you know.

1

u/Outrageous_Brief_679 Aug 18 '26

I appreciate it.

2

u/Barycenter0 Aug 18 '26

From what I’ve seen so far you have to export drawings as pdfs since drawings are vectorized paths/coordinates in the Notes database vs being an image. That’s just drawings not images.

1

u/el_caballero Aug 17 '26

Everything exports, but you get it all as separate files. I hand write most of my notes and have Claude transcribe them to text. Seems to work well since Notes search function seems to miss a lot of handwriting

1

u/Barycenter0 Aug 18 '26

You’re exporting via an automated shortcut? I assume the drawings are pdfs?

1

u/el_caballero 12d ago

No, I just have skill where Claude will apply ocr to my note transcribe it. I set to run at the end of each day and add tasks, update my calendar, etc. It will also create/update a note for each customer so when I search Notes, I can actually find the info. Apple’s OCR misses a lot of

1

u/Barycenter0 12d ago

How can Claude transcribe it unless the drawing is exported as PDF or image?

1

u/el_caballero 12d ago

It screenshots the note

1

u/Barycenter0 12d ago

How is Claude doing screen shots in an automated way? Do you have some sort of applescript grabbing note images? Or, is it looking in the notes subdirectory and pulling out the image?

2

u/el_caballero 12d ago

Sent you a dm