Moving from another journal app: how to bring your entries with photos, places and weather

Imagine eight years of entries in your old journal app, three journals and a few thousand photos. The thought of "moving" then runs not into where, but into what gets lost on the way. This piece is about exactly that: what journal apps give you on export, what Lanternly accepts, where the gap between them is, and how to see the result before deleting anything.

The short answer: text, dates, tags, favourites, places, weather and photos move over intact. Audio, video and PDF attachments do not, and that is covered honestly below.

Step 1. Find out what your old journal gives you

Any decent journal app has an export, usually in three forms. PDF or text for reading: pretty, but dates and photos cannot be parsed out of them. Markdown: text with dates in file names, photos separate. And a JSON archive: one file with all the entries and their metadata, plus folders with media. For moving you need the last one: only there do creation date, tags, coordinates and weather sit in separate fields rather than dissolved in the text.

Lanternly reads a JSON archive in the format that has become the unofficial standard among journal apps for iPhone and Mac: one .json per journal and, next to it, photos, videos, audios and pdfs folders. If your journal can export like that, the move takes an evening. If it only gives you text, entries have to be moved by copying, and that is a different story.

Step 2. Export the archive

In the old app, find settings, the section about export or "Import/Export", and choose JSON. Before exporting, check two things: every journal you want to move is selected, and the range is "all entries". If asked whether to include media, say yes: otherwise photos will not make it into the archive.

The result is a zip. Save it to Files, to iCloud Drive or to a folder on your Mac. The old journal stays where it is: an export is a copy.

Step 3. Unpack

On iPhone, open Files, find the archive and tap it: a folder with the same name appears next to it. On Mac, double-click. Inside the folder is the .json and a photos folder. Nothing needs renaming.

If there were several journals, the folder holds several .json files, one per journal. Lanternly imports one file at a time, so three journals means three imports. That is deliberate: you see the result for each one and can stop.

Step 4. Import

In Lanternly: Settings, "Export and import", "Import from other journal apps". Pick the .json or the whole unpacked folder, it makes no difference: the app finds the file and the photos folder next to it.

The import runs on the device; nothing goes to the internet. When it is done you see the number of entries and photos moved. All entries land in a separate journal called "Import", which does not use up your free custom journal, and they take their own dates rather than the day of the import.

What moves intact

Text. Backslash-escaped markup is unescaped, so "*" becomes "*" again. Attachment placeholders are removed from the text.

Creation and modification dates, both. An entry from 3 March 2019 lands in the calendar on 3 March 2019.

Tags. As they were.

Favourites: a star in the old journal becomes a star in Lanternly.

Place: coordinates and name; Lanternly takes the most precise one available in the entry, from place name down to country.

Weather: description and temperature in Celsius.

Photos: from the photos folder, each attached to its entry, with the entry's date.

What does not move

Audio, video and PDF. They are in the archive, in the audios, videos and pdfs folders, but Lanternly does not read them yet. If such entries matter to you, keep the archive nearby: it is not going anywhere, and you can come back to it.

Formatting. Bold, italic and headings become plain text with markup characters. For a journal that is rarely a problem, but it is worth knowing.

Steps, activity and other health data that some journals attach to entries. Lanternly keeps its own steps; it does not import someone else's.

Several journals in one import. One file at a time, see step 3.

How to check in three minutes

Do not read everything. Open three entries.

The very first by date. If it is there with the right date, date parsing works across the whole archive.

One with a photo. The photo should open in the entry's gallery, not be an empty square.

One with a place or weather. The metadata line under the date should show what the old journal had.

If all three are fine, the rest is fine with the same probability. The old archive stays with you, so you can compare at any time.

Why to make a book after the move

Eight years of entries in a phone is one thing; on a shelf it is another. After the import, all the old entries are part of your journal, and they can be made into a book: a year, the whole journal, or a single journal, with a cover and photos, as a PDF for print or an EPUB for an e-reader. That comes with Lanternly+, and it is, frankly, the one reason to bother moving at all if your old journal suited you.

What to compare when choosing a replacement I covered in the piece on an alternative to the journal you are used to. This piece is about mechanics: once the decision is made, the move takes an evening, not a week.