migrating s-notes, samsung notes, voice recorder memos

[MilesF 0]

I'm using a Samsung Note 8, and I'm getting a bit fed up with the various Samsung note taking apps - particularly the lack of support for desktop access, exporting in standard formats, and backup.

Which leads me to wonder how easy it would be to migrate all of my various content into EverNote, and then whether the EverNote Android app is as powerful when it comes to handling handwriting & voice, as the Samsung apps.

Advice please!

Miles Fidelman

[gazumped 11,652]

Hi.  I don't normally use handwriting or voice,  so no great recommendations from me,  but I do have a Note 4 which can be set up to save Notes to an Evernote-accessible notebook.  The integration is far from complete - once edited in Evernote the notes become part of that space and can't (AFAIK) be made available in the Samsung app.  As to migration - if your notes can be exported as HTML,  images or text files they can be clipped or otherwise dropped into Evernote.  Best way to find out if it is feasible would be to try it out on some test notes and see what happens...

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

Hi, @MilesF, and welcome to the forums. This topic comes up from time to time. A couple of years ago I did some experimenting, and can share my results with you. Grab a beverage -- I tend to go into details. 

A couple of preliminaries: as I gather you are aware, there are two Samsung note taking apps (at least that I'm aware of), the older and better S Notes (no longer supplied with new devices, but available on Google Play), and the newer Samsung Notes. Getting notes out of them and into Evernote is slightly different for each device. And there is no way to do it en masse: you have to export/share each note separately. Also, in what follows note the difference between syncing and sharing. A synced note (possible only in S Note) will be updated in Evernote if you make changes to it in S Note. (The reverse cannot be done: you can't edit a note synced from S Note in Evernote, because it's in a proprietary format.) A shared note, OTOH, has only the state of the note at the time it was shared. Any further editing, whether in S Note or Samsung Notes or in Evernote, will not be synced automatically.

Samsung Notes: The best way to get handwritten notes (including lockscreen notes) from Samsung Notes to Evernote is to share them from within Samsung Notes by using the Share function to share as images. The handwritten text will be indexed (it can take a minute and a re-sync to work) so it can be searched from the note list--but not from within the note, as usual with images. It's also possible to share the notes from within Samsung Notes to Evernote as PDF. In either case, you can't get handwriting from a Samsung Note into Evernote as text. However, if you create a typed text note, not handwritten, in Samsung Notes you can share it as a text file to Evernote, and it appears in the default notebook as a text note.

S Notes: S Notes can be synced directly with Evernote. What exactly syncs from S Note to Evernote is a bit complicated, though. What is actually synced is an attached S Note .spd file and an image of the S Note. On the Android device, a separate main-menu top-level category "S Notes" is created; if you tap on a note there, it opens in S Note, not in Evernote. However, an automatically synced note is also created as a note in the default notebook, available in the Windows app and on the Web as well as the Android device, with the body of the note (even a purely text note) as an image (the attached .spd file is also there). Text in the image (including handwriting) does become searchable (it can take a minute), with limitations: it can only be found by searching the notebook or all notes, not within the note.

However, in S Note, as in Samsung Notes, you can tap Share, choose a format (S Note .spd file, JPG, PNG, PDF, or text only), and then Add to Evernote. This will add a note to the default notebook (in addition to the automatically synced note), in which both text and handwriting are indexed and searchable (in JPG and PDF formats, anyway, and within the limitations Evernote has for those formats). If you choose the text-only option, of course, all the text is searchable, but naturally any handwriting won't come through at all.

So that's what I know, as @gazumped says, try it and see. WRT handwriting and voice, Evernote can do both, though many find handwriting a note in Evernote to be laggy. Handwritten notes will be indexed for searching, as noted above. AFAIK, voice notes will not.