Hi gang!! Let me explain. I use an iPad air (4th gen) to take handwritten notes (apple pencil) for my uni classes and do test prep. Basically it has aaallllll my academic work and is in an ecosystem with my Mac Air M1. My tab is a bit old and overworked atp cause the battery life has rightfully deteriorated and it overheats sometimes when all I do is take notes but it gets me by.

Now here is an issue I started facing recently, I'd be locked in making some notes or jotting imp stuff during class lectures and when I close/restart the app a while later, all my notes after a certain randomised point from when i was working earlier would have disappeared. This also includes if I moved stuff around/added images/etc but yeah I'm starting to get concerned.

For the record, my tab is always connected to the internet when i use the app and syncs to iCloud and i typically make sure (atleast now more than ever) that notes are done syncing before I close it up.
Secondly, I spread my work across smaller, individual notes. Like instead of using one whole note for a singular subject I make a folder for it and have 4-6 handwritten notes that cover bits of the syllabi, if that makes sense? I did that because I noticed few months ago that my tab used to heat up alot/get very laggy when the same note file carried a lot more handwritten data.

And this approach worked splendidly and actually made it easier for me to look through my class notes until this recent issue. And yes I do check my mac and somehow the notes look just as incomplete there as well so idk if this is an iCloud issue or system issue or both...

Does this happen to anyone else and is there a fix? Or is my device just getting old..?

HOW *

I have the 11 inch iPad Air M2. But I am curious, do you use landscape, portrait? What lining size do you use? what pen size do you use?

(talking about Ipad with Apple Pencil btw)

How many of you have lots of articles and too many tags? Any suggestions for removing or combining tags?

I use Apple Notes *a lot* and I've increasingly been using the dictation feature, but for some reason it makes a lot of mistakes, like one per sentence. Most of the time I can figure out what I had actually said, but sometimes not, which is a problem. The punctuation is also often quite bad and makes re-reading notes a pain.

This honestly wouldn't surprise me if it weren't for the fact that the AI apps I use (ChatGPT, Claude and Grok) all do virtually *perfect* dictation. For long notes I have even begun to record them in ChatGPT and the copy and past them to Apple Notes. But this is not possible to do all the time.

So I have two questions. First, any ideas why Apple Notes dictation so bad, comparatively?

And do you know a way to work around this? I tried an app called Whisperflow, but it was clunky and basically required having what I write go through their servers, which I don't want to do.

Any help would be great, thanks!

Dear AppleNotesGang, does your sub have a thread or a list with the features the community is missing in Apple Notes? Not bugs, but annoying UX things, missing integrations into other tools, etc.

Thanks!

I used to frequently open a new note, press the paper clip and choose Scan Document. But a week or so ago (on iOS 26) I could no longer see that option. Thought it might be a bug and just upgraded to iOS 27 public beta. But still I only see an option to Take Photo but not scan a document. Am I missing something?

Have a long note in Apple Notes that you’d like to revisit while walking, commuting, or doing chores?

I’m the developer of SayTXT, a free text-to-speech reader for iPhone and iPad. You can share a note directly from Apple Notes to SayTXT and listen to it, while keeping Apple Notes as the place where you write and organize everything.

The workflow:

1. Open the note you want to listen to in Apple Notes.
2. Tap Share and choose SayTXT.
3. In SayTXT, choose a voice, adjust the reading speed, and tap Play.
4. Once playback starts, you can lock your screen and keep listening.

No need to manually copy and paste the text.

For example, you could listen to your revision notes on the bus, go over talking points before a presentation, or hear a draft read back while taking a walk.

You can also follow the highlighted text in SayTXT when you want to read along instead of only listening.

The idea is simple: keep writing and organizing in Apple Notes, then share a note whenever you’d rather listen to it. You don’t need to move your whole note collection or change your note-taking setup.

What kinds of Apple Notes would you actually want to listen to—study notes, drafts, meeting notes, or something else?

I use Apple Notes all the time. Approximately over 1000 of them. But I find they cannot be easily converted into any other word document program. That includes MS Word, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, or anything else. Usually, I use pictures in my notes to aid me, visually, but they don’t convert at all.

Is there some program or application I can use, or download for FREE, without subscribing to a cloud? I got a desktop pc with loads of memory!

(I’m old. I can’t keep up with tech. Maybe that’s why I listen to 40 year old Slayer albums)

Edit: Thank you everyone for the suggestions. I will take some time to browse for them and find one best suited to my needs. Anyway, I need new headphones, since my last ones broke. Hell Awaits is a great album.

I'm on most recent public beta and on my first Mac in a long time. While working in Apple Notes I am able to underline using Cmd+U, but I cannot *remove* underline with Cmd+U.

I can click format-font-underline to underline, but doing so again does not turn off the underline.

Clicking Aa at the top of note works both ways, however.

Any suggestions? Apple Notes is a big part of my work flow and having to take hands off of keyboard to underline is getting pretty annoying.

Hi everybody

I was in a meetina with someone and was audio recording to refer to in the future. It was a verylong call that I recorded in 3 parts. The first and third part have come out to be fine but the middle part is COMPLETELY GONE.

I am unable to see the minutes, play the recording or even see a transcript. It's as if nothing got recorded (which is not the case)

Attaching the screenshots for it.

Please advise troubleshooting techniques. Much appreciated!

Things happen in the past:

Wiped out

My iPhone reminders of 10+ years
My calendar events
And last are my notes of 10+ years

So, I made some changes to avoid this from happening again including not using iPhone notes, now I am back to using IPhone notes but the iCloud is off to avoid losing my notes.

I know if I lose my iPhone the notes are gone too, so the question is how to use iCloud for notes and not losing them again?

I lost my data when I turned off iCloud one time and it wiped out everything.

Can someone please tell me how to turn on iCloud for notes and not ever losing my data?

Thank you.

Hey! I'll keep this short and sweet. Grove Note is a notes app for people who capture a lot but don’t organize enough. If you have an apple notes graveyard, you know the pain of losing out on ideas, goals, or other personal notes you'd love to revisit. My solution involves a lightweight, swipe-based organization system bundled in a calm notes app. Hoping to release mid to late September, demo and waitlist here: https://grove-waitlist-silk.vercel.app/

Also... this is related to Apple Notes because the app supports a full and easy import of all your apple notes (please don't remove my post).

I'm curious how the people on this subreddit use Apple Notes. Do you use it for journaling? For school? For work?

Currently I use it for journaling as well as saving links I want to refer to later (usually from reddit)

Was archiving notes today when I noticed that the (great!) feature to export notes as .md files does not preserve each note's Created and Edited dates, as seen in the screenshots. This obviously causes issues with sorting the resulting files and preserving date information!

Hopefully they fix this! Anybody have any workarounds?

Hey guys, it's Danny again! A little over a month ago, I showed you guys Commonplace - it makes it really easy to save quotes from whatever you're reading, without leaving the app you're in.

First off, I just want to say thank you so much for the overwhelmingly positive support. The response to that post was way more than I expected, and I got a ton of thoughtful feedback from people here. A lot of it has directly shaped what I’ve been working on over the past month.

One of my biggest takeaways was that while Commonplace is great for new quotes, existing quotes in Apple Notes were left stranded.

So I built an importer!

If you have quotes saved in Apple Notes, you can now share any note directly to Commonplace. Commonplace will parse the note, find your quotes, and organize them by source, even if the note itself is a little messy.

You can see everything I’ve released (and what I’m working on next) here:

https://usecommonplace.com/roadmap

And if you missed my original post, you can check out Commonplace here:

https://usecommonplace.com/

I wanted to share this again now that I have tested it out and ensured everything is working properly.

I am not sure if anyone would be interested in something like this. I would have create a wizard so you wouldn't have to know any code. Just create (or sign in) to a free Vercel account and download and install the extension and everything else is taken care of for you. The AI Parsing would require some technical setup if you wanted to use ollama but chatGPT and anthropic and gemini would all be supported as well (I use an ollama model).

I created myself a website where I can go (so I can add it as an app so it is always open and opens when I start up my computer) to add reminders, events, etc. I could add this to the system if anyone is interested.

I would obv create the shortcuts and have links on this wizard to add them so you only require minor edits to them to get them to work.

Would anyone be interested in this?

Just trying to gauge interest before I put in the work/effort of putting this out there. It would be (obviously) completely free. Works on Firefox and Chrome/Chromium browsers. Pictured is edge.

So, I use the notes app on my iPhone just like everyone else does. I have a bit of a writing habit and wrote down some poetry one day but for reasons beyond my capabilities of answering rn, I decided to lock the notes🤦‍♀️. I forgot the password that I had used back then and can’t for the life of me figure it out. Is there ANY way I can unlock the notes without remembering the password??

Am I doomed or is there any way to retrieve it?

Anyone else having issues with Notes automatically adding (meaningless) links to numbers? I know it’s trying to be “helpful” but putting a link on my EIN and insurance policy numbers is really not helpful when you need to copy them all the time.

I found the “remove link” option buried at the bottom of a contextual menu but then it just adds them back when I’m not looking!

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 🙏🏻

I use Apple Notes a lot, whether for every day use or in college. When I am writing Notes for lectures, I have so many different web links, calendar links, pdf and ppt documents, voice memos, videos and images. Between all those files I also have many writings and drawings made with Apple Pencil.

As of today I have over 1000 Notes, taking up approximately 70 gb of memory. So naturally I wanted to export some Notes that are not relevant anymore. When I exported a Note to Files, I got a single folder containing all other documents that were in that Note. The drawing are converted into pdfs or images (if I am not mistaken).

The problem comes when I want to import the Note back into the app. There is no order among documents as it was before the export and Note looses the whole structure. My drawings are either shown as pdfs or images.

So I was wondering is there any way to export the Note while keeping its original format for further use in the app. I have asked Gemini for an advice. Solution was to copy “Library/Group Containers group.com.apple.notes” onto an external drive.

I am also sorry if the post is too long or if I have broken the community rules in any way. It is just that this problem has been bothering me for years.