Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
67 lines (45 loc) · 3.86 KB

README.md

File metadata and controls

67 lines (45 loc) · 3.86 KB

samsung-notes

I love the notetaking capabilities of the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. I've been using it for awhile now and I've been wanting to extract the notes to a more portable format. Unfortunately, Samsung is doing a great job to make things marginally integrateable with the rest of any ecosystem outside their own. This is a working project to extract notes from the Samsung Notes app and convert them to markdown for inclusion elsewhere (obsidian, etc.).

Because of the security model on the phone, you can't see the directory structure of the Notes app (where the notes are stored) by trying to look at the filesystem. Since I don't have a rooted phone, I was stuck until I came across the Windows 10/11 version of the Samsung Notes app, and some work by others to make the app work on non-Samsung devices (you can install an app that connects to your Samsung account on your Windows machine, but the Notes app is "locked" to Samsung-only tablets). Once Notes was running on Windows and had synced to my Samsung Account (only way I've found to get these notes off my phone in a sane way), I could see the directory structure of the Notes app. That is left for another discussion.

So, the general process is:

  1. Follow these instructions to get Notes installed and synced up on your Windows machine
  2. Launch Notes
  3. Select the notes you want to export
  4. Select "Save as File"
  5. Select the destination location and click ok
  6. When Notes is done exporting, close the app
  7. Open a terminal to this project's folder
  8. Run ./notes2md.sh <data_root> to process the extracted PDFs to Markdown bundles

At this point, there are one or more .ZIP files in the <data_root>/out directory that each contain:

  • PNG files of the note screens and the original PDF
  • A markdown file that links the images and pdf together

Usage

There are two ways to use this project:

Using notes2md.sh

  1. Install Poppler

  2. Create your data_root, which should have 3 subdirectories:

     data_root\
        +in\
        +out\
        +work\
  1. Launch Samsung Notes (NOTE: The hack to get Notes working on non-Samsung platforms like Windows works perfectly for this.)
  2. Select the notes you wish to extract
  3. From the hamburger menu, select 'Save as file'. This doesn't pack all notes into a single file, it creates one file per note.
  4. When prompted, select ${data_root}/in as the destination folder.
  5. Let it run. Only indication you get is a badly designed, barely visible rotating animation in the center of the app. Otherwise, monitor ${data_root}/in for the files.
  6. Exit Notes and get to a terminal (I'm using WSL, so I know linux works right now), opening to this project directory
  7. Run the script ./notes2md.sh

When done, the ${data_root}/in folder will be empty, and the ${data_root}/out folder will have a collection of ZIP files, one file per note. Each zip file will have a markdown file at its root, which references the PDF and PNG files in the assets/ folder.

At this point, you can do what you want with the files, but that's beyond the scope of this converter.

Caveat(s)

  • The generated PDF (for that matter, any of the output formats) doesn't push any metadata from the note out.
  • The timestamp in the filename is the time the PDF was generated, not when the note was originally created.
  • Metadata is buried inside the SQLite DB Notes uses, which I haven't dug into (yet).

Using the nodejs app

This is still WIP

Acknowledgements

This project was created using bun init in bun v1.1.24. Bun is a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime.