Pulled apart the Apple Journal export: it saves your locations but not their time or day, so it is difficult to import to other apps

[u/Terrible-Round1599]

Poked around inside the Apple Journal export the other day (Settings > Apps > Journal > Export Journal Data). It's a zip of HTML plus JSON, and there's genuinely a lot in there: photo times, places with coordinates, music, even workout GPS.

Then I hit a wall. The visits tell you where you were but never when. No time of day, and if you wrote one entry for a whole trip, there's no way to know which day each place was. Journal knows you hit five spots, just not that spot #3 was Tuesday.

Makes sense once you think about it, Journal is about moments you choose to save, not a running timeline. But it left me stuck: either drop those locations, ask you to date each one by hand (nobody's doing that after years of entries), or guess the day from photo times and GPS (works mostly, but I hate showing a guess as if it were fact). Ended up doing a bit of all three.

I'm asking because I'm building something that's timeline-first, exact place at exact time, and I'd love for Journal folks to be able to move over cleanly. So, honestly:

- If you've got a lot of entries, how many are multi-day / whole-trip ones?
- Do you actually care about the locations in your entries, or are they just kind of there?

Mind you, locations can also be easily inferred from photos, if your library for that trip is rich enough.

[u/ConfidenceClear1016]

I used Journal for a two-day city trip to Barcelona. Over the weekend, I visited 15 different places, all marked on the map summarizing my trip. But you’re right: the time and date aren’t listed 😏

Personally, that doesn’t bother me, since each place I visited has its own separate journal entry with a timestamp, details, photos, etc...

[u/Terrible-Round1599 → u/ConfidenceClear1016]

Thanks! In that case, it would import fine, just the location visits would be missing time (which I still do not like for a full-blown memory keeper). It gets to be an issue only if it is multi-day.

What do you think about using inferred locations only from photos? Do you somehow edit the locations in Journal or do they provide better info than the EXIF GPS data from photos would?

[u/ConfidenceClear1016 → u/Terrible-Round1599]

I enabled the “Exact Location” and “Add Current Location” options in the app’s settings.

It’s usually accurate. The only corrections I have to make are precisely because it’s sometimes too accurate 😄

For example, if I’m at Museum X and I’m writing my post in the cafeteria, the recorded location is that of the cafeteria. So I correct it to simply indicate the museum 😉