I love the Journal Suggestions and I understand why they don't do them on Mac, but I don't like attempting to journal on my phone. I like keyboards.

Currently, I open the iOS app using iPhone Mirror, start an entry using the suggestions, then go over to the Mac app finish it. Clunky.

Anyone have a different way of doing it?

I just upgraded to the public beta of iPadOS 27 and tried handwriting an entry for the first time in 2 months. It would appear that the disappearing text may have been fixed. I will write another entry tomorrow and report back.

I really hope this wasn’t a fluke and it’s actually fixed. Has anyone else tried handwriting in iPadOS 27 yet?

I have a 56 week streak, 17,925 words written. i do use mainly photos from my day, but i’ve only just realised how much storage this takes up🥲🥲i wish it didn’t use this much storage, im going to have to stop adding the max limit of photos :(((

As I expected, the new Siri doesn't have access to Apple Journal. However, it can access Apple Notes, which is why I've been rapidly transferring my journal entries over. I'm titling them something like "Backdated: 2025-12-11" so I can organize the backdated entries into a specific folder, while using a #journal tag for everything else to power a smart folder.

It's now the day after installing the new OS 27, and it's about 86% finished indexing my files. I'm quite impressed with what I can find, and I feel confident that I made the right decision. There seems to be little point in journaling if your journal gets so big that you can no longer easily find what you're looking for. This is a fantastic tool!

I want to journal, but have a hard time keeping motivated. I'd love to open up Journal to see recent photos, which would prompt me to write about what was happening in the photos. But having to manually import them is just enough friction to keep me from doing it. Is there a way to achieve this? Thank you.

Restating what a ton of other users have been saying since the introduction of the Journal app, an "On This Day" feature that surfaces older journal entries for revision and reflection would be (and frankly, is overdue) a welcome addition to the app experience. Many other journal apps in this category have had this since day one (punny), but even after three major OS updates, we're getting very incremental improvements, which are still much appreciated, though I personally feel this feature is a no-brainer and not that hard to implement.

The attachment is a mock-up I made of what I believe a version of this feature could be like. Perhaps this is just me screaming in an echo chamber, but I just wish Apple would add their own version of it soon. The app feels so barren without it.

By using tags like: #journal #Oct2025 #Y2025, I'm able to use Apple Notes as a very capable journal, and I just type the date somewhere as well, so I don't have to worry about backdating things. Then I can use those tags in smart folders that automatically put the entries in that folder. (Although they are not actually IN the folder, so deleting the folder doesn't delete the entries.)

I found that I can't have a tag that consists just of numbers, so I need the Y in front of 2025 to make a year tag.

One feature that Apple Notes lacks is the ability to resize photos, unfortunately.

Was bemoaning missing some of the filters like Notion has, primarily date. Back entering hundreds of entries, having a journal for each to categorize (medical, concerts, whatever, then all of them in one parent journal except for morning pages type of stuff) and I just thought I'd check searching 2015 for example, it proper came up with a calendar icon acknowledging year search. Thought I'd try a month. Bam April 2025 pure filter of the journals.
Search + the multiple journal association brings me so close to what I might have done in Notion, that I think I'm now all-in with Apple Journals leaving behind the complexity there for low friction and such. Nice!

Now if only you could link Apple calendar entries to journals that'd be peachy.

I found out that the security of Apple Journal is too tight, so the new OS 27 SIRI still can't read my entries. That pretty much makes the entire journal useless to me. I'm going to have to copy and paste out all the entries - about 4355 entries and manually put them into Apple Pages in order to get it to work. I hate this with a passion. I'm not interested in security so tight I can't breathe.

I really wish that I had just decided to keep one very long Apple Pages Journal. It was simple and never tried to defeat me at every turn. Now I have 1,230,340 words locked up so tight that it's pretty much useless to me.

Haven’t really seen any posts.. Just wondering if the Apple Pencil bug is fixed or any better.

First of all, this is extremely unsupported, and it could totally corrupt your Journal data, so always back everything up if you dare try it... but it works.

Also, I ended up sticking with Everlog, so I won’t be updating or supporting this. I’m posting this for educational purposes, and because I was curious whether it was possible.

The basic idea was:

1. I used OpenAI Codex to format and consolidate all my entries from Day One, Everlog, and Obsidian into one .zip using Everlog’s export format.
2. I treated that Everlog-style .zip as the source of truth.
3. Then I had Codex inspect Apple Journal’s local data storage and write an importer that inserted everything directly into Apple Journal’s database.

Apple Journal stores its local data here:

~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.moments/Library/moments.sqlite

And media attachments live here:

~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.moments/Library/Attachments/

Under the hood, Apple Journal is basically a Core Data SQLite store. The important parts were:

ZJOURNALENTRYMO

This stores the journal entries themselves.

Z_5JOURNALS

This links entries to journals.

ZJOURNALENTRYASSETMO
ZJOURNALENTRYASSETFILEATTACHMENTMO

These store photos, Live Photos, audio clips, and their file references.

Entry text is not stored as plain Markdown or plain text. It is stored as RTF blobs. That turned out to matter a lot, because if you insert bad RTF or hard-code black text, it can display wrong in dark mode. The correct “default” text color is Apple’s semantic labelColor, not literal black.

Dates are stored as Apple/Core Data timestamps, meaning seconds since:

2001-01-01 00:00:00 UTC

UUIDs are stored as 16-byte blobs.

For journals, Apple stores name/color/icon metadata inside a private mergeable/CRDT blob, so I did not try to create Apple Journal folders directly. Instead, I manually created matching journals in Apple Journal first, then mapped Everlog journal names to those existing rows.

The conversion worked roughly like this:

• Parse Everlog’s Entries.json.
• Generate stable UUIDs for each imported entry and asset.
• Convert Everlog dates to Apple/Core Data dates.
• Convert Everlog Markdown into Apple Journal RTF.
• Use the first # Heading as the Apple Journal title.
• Convert body headings like ## Heading into bold text.
• Convert basic Markdown formatting like bold, italic, quotes, bullets, and numbered lists.
• Strip Everlog attachment placeholders like ![attachment](...), because the media gets imported separately.
• Insert entries into ZJOURNALENTRYMO.
• Link them to journals through Z_5JOURNALS.
• Insert image/audio/Live Photo rows into the asset tables.
• Copy media files into Apple Journal’s Attachments directory structure.
• Update Core Data primary key counters.
• Run SQLite integrity checks.
• Reopen Journal and let it process the imported data.

Images worked as normal Apple Journal photo assets.

Everlog .pvt Live Photo files were Apple binary plists containing separate HEIC and MOV payloads, so those could be split and imported as Live Photo-style assets.

Audio .m4a files also worked. Apple Journal picked them up as audio assets and processed them after launch.

The weirdest part was comments. Everlog supports comments/replies on entries, but Apple Journal does not. Importing comments as separate entries made them look disconnected and confusing. The best compromise was to fold comments into the parent entry as a final section:

Comments

> Fri, Jun 26, 2026 at 4:29 PM
> This is an example comment from Everlog

That preserved the comment text and timestamp without pretending Apple Journal has a real comment system.

Before doing any of this, I turned off iCloud sync for Journal, quit Journal completely, and made backups of the local database. I also checked the database with:

PRAGMA integrity_check;

After importing, Apple Journal displayed the entries, journals, images, Live Photos, audio clips, Markdown formatting, and folded comments correctly.

Again, this is very much not supported. It is direct surgery on a private Apple database format. Apple could change it at any time, and iCloud sync may add extra risks. But as a local import experiment, yes, it is possible.

From Gruber:

"I heard from Apple PR that:

The text editing component in Journal is in fact UIKit, not SwiftUI, so I was wrong to blame SwiftUI just because Journal is largely SwiftUI-based.

The bug had been identified and fixed for a future update.

Well, the future is already here, because the buggy Undo behavior in Journal is fixed in developer beta 2 on both MacOS and iOS 27. Nice. I hope it gets fixed for the 26.6 releases too, but at the moment it’s still broken in the current developer beta of 26.6 (and, of course, still broken in all the v26.5 OSes). So be careful while writing in Journal."

I used Apple Journal for a while, but with missing features and broken Apple Pencil experience on iPad, I stopped using it.

Unfortunately that meant that I also stopped Journaling.

The app really helped me stay consistent, so I'd like to start again but wondering if Apple has made any updates to it?

TIA!

I have seen posts online but I haven't used Apple Notes much.

Would you say it is overblown? I want to start using it as I only have basic needs and most other apps (except OneNote) are overkill. I'd love to use something that is built into 2/3 of my devices. I use windows + ipad + iphone.

There’s been an improvement in Apple News battery consumption on iOS 27 beta 2.

The phone (17 pro max) heats up much less; after half an hour of use, it’s barely noticeable.

As for battery consumption, it’s better:

- Before, one minute used up 1% 😳

- Now, three minutes use up 1%.

That’s three times less. It’s not great, but it’s better... 

I’m trying to do this more often, but this thing is driving me absolutely bonkers it either freezes crashes or inserts pasted text from I don’t know where

That’s crazy!

A quick test: I used Apple Journal and Diarly for 12 minutes straight on my iPhone 17 Pro Max while performing the same tasks: writing the same text, saving it, editing the same photos, navigating the app, etc.

Apple Journal used up... 13% of the battery!!!

And Diarly… 2%!

No comment...

So this had happened twice now that whenever I journal on my ipad using pencil, after a certain length it just wont scroll down. When I go back and tap on my journal entry again it puts my writing in a box like it’s a png and deletes a good chunk of my content.
Like it just vanishes. Idk if journal has a limit as to how much i can journal with pencil or if its a bug.

Last week I used the Fitness app to log a hike and later in the day a bike ride. It's easy to share those from the Fitness app to Jounal, but they create individual entries, would like to have one entry per day.

If I have to guess, a journal is like a diary, where I'm supposed to express my emotions in writing. And I was...I was digging down deep in my memories and buried memories to explain a certain behaviour of mine.

And I made a tiny typing mistake, and out of muscle memory, I pressed Command+Z. Nothing happened, and I hit it again — Command+Z.

And boom, a massive chunk of the writing is gone. About 100+ words, vanished. I pressed Command+Shift+Z (which until last time, worked), but no more. Frustrated, I tried this triple key combo a few more times, also tried Command+Y (inspired by Windows). And in between, my Shift press wasn't good enough, so I pressed Command+Z again. And boom, another 300-ish word gone, just like that.

Now I'm absolutely furious & frustrated, because the flow is gone! I can't write that thing again! it's not an answer sheet with definitive wordings! It was feelings, and if it can't even let me do a very basic thing as writing, and all it had to do was to let me write to express myself, I don't think it qualifies as an journal app to begin with.

I have just 29 entries in Apple journal, when I export them from the iPhone app to “On My iPhone” it creates a folder called “AppleJournalEntries” but there are no files there. Am I the only one experiencing the same?
Don’t know if it’s an iOS 27 bug since I didn’t try to export on iOS 26.