How to export Apple Notes now that Markdown export exists

Filed under Guide

By Gerald · 8 August 2026

A cluttered storage room with bookshelves and packed boxes ready to be cleared out

For years, exporting Apple Notes meant paying for a third-party converter or exporting one note at a time as a PDF and losing the formatting. That changed with iOS 26 and macOS Tahoe, which shipped native Markdown export. If you searched this question before mid-2025, forget what you read. Most of it is describing a problem Apple already fixed.

The short answer: File, then Export as, then Markdown, on Mac, or the Share icon then Export as Markdown on iOS. It supports selecting multiple notes at once on Mac. It does not touch drawings, scanned document recognition, or a one-click export of your entire library folder-by-folder, and those gaps are the actual reason to keep reading.

The export button finally exists. The part nobody warns you about is verifying what it left out before you delete anything.

What changed when Apple added Markdown export

Apple Notes could always export a PDF, which flattens formatting into an image-like document you cannot easily reuse. Markdown export is different: it produces plain text files with real heading, list, and bold/italic syntax intact, which is what makes a note portable to another app instead of just printable.

This shipped as part of iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe, and Apple's own release notes and support documentation cover the feature (see Apple's support pages for the exact wording per OS version). It is the single most requested feature in every "why won't Apple Notes let me leave" complaint from the last several years, and it is now just there.

Using the built-in export and what it covers

A plain external drive with its connector cable resting on a desk — Keep a copy of your export somewhere other than the device you took it from.

On a Mac: open the note, choose File, then Export as, then Markdown, then save. For more than one note, select several in the notes list with Cmd-click, then choose the equivalent bulk export command, which saves each note as a separate .md file into one destination folder.

On iPhone or iPad: open the note, tap the Share icon in the top right, scroll down, and tap Export as Markdown. From there you choose Save to Files or send it to another app through the standard share sheet.

What comes out is a real Markdown file per note: headings, bold, italics, and lists convert correctly into their Markdown equivalents. That is the actual win here. A decade of Apple Notes complaints about lock-in mostly boiled down to "I cannot get formatted text out cleanly," and that specific complaint is now solved by the operating system itself, at no cost, with no third-party app.

What the native export still leaves behind

The export is text-first. It converts what Markdown can represent and is quieter about what it cannot.

Checklists in Apple Notes generally convert to Markdown task syntax. Less common formatting, tables and certain nested lists especially, is not something Apple documents in detail, so test that on your own notes before trusting it at scale. Verify a handful of representative notes rather than assuming every note type round-trips perfectly.

There is no single command that exports your whole library with its folder structure preserved as a matching set of subfolders. Bulk export saves a flat batch of files into one folder. If you have a hundred notes spread across fifteen folders, the export does not recreate those folders for you. You get one folder of files and have to sort them yourself, or export folder by folder, which is closer to a hundred small exports than one big one.

Notes locked with the app's own password protection also need attention before export. A locked note has to be unlocked in the app first. The export does not prompt you for the password or export locked content automatically, so anything you have hidden behind a lock needs a manual pass. If you have used Apple's note-locking feature for anything sensitive, go through those notes individually and confirm the export captured the real content, not an empty placeholder.

Attachments, scans, and drawings

This is the part every export guide should lead with and mostly doesn't. Markdown export handles text. It does not cleanly carry forward:

Handwritten drawings and Apple Pencil sketches
Scanned documents captured through the in-app scanner
Audio recordings attached to a note
Some embedded images, depending on how they were inserted

If a note is mostly a scanned receipt or a drawing, exporting it as Markdown gives you a text shell. The image reference is handled inconsistently, not a guaranteed copy of the original asset. For anything irreplaceable, scans of physical documents especially, export that note individually and confirm the attachment came along as an actual image file before you consider the job done.

Exporting a large library without going note by note

If you have hundreds or thousands of notes, the practical path is: export by folder using the multi-select bulk export on Mac, one folder at a time, rather than trying to select your entire account in one pass. This keeps each export batch a manageable size and makes it easier to spot a folder where something did not convert cleanly.

Rename the destination folders to match your Apple Notes folder names as you go. It is a manual step, but it is the only way to recreate the structure the built-in export does not preserve automatically.

Once you have Markdown files, moving them into another notes app is usually straightforward, because Markdown is the format most alternatives import natively. That's a genuine advantage of Markdown as a note format: the files themselves are useful outside Apple Notes, not locked to it.

Verifying the export before you delete anything

Do not delete anything from Apple Notes until you have opened the exported files and confirmed they are correct. This sounds obvious and gets skipped constantly, usually under time pressure, which is exactly when you lose a scanned document nobody thought to check.

A quick verification pass: open a sample of exported .md files in a text editor and confirm headings and lists look right. Check that any note you know contained an image still references or embeds that image. Count your exported files against your note count per folder, since a silent skip during a large batch export is more likely to show up as a missing file than an error message.

If a note was shared with someone else, check what the export actually captured. Sharing status and collaborator information are Apple Notes concepts, not Markdown ones, and the export reduces a shared note to its current content only. That is usually fine, but do not assume the export preserves who else had access or the note's edit history, because it does not.

Keep the raw export folder somewhere other than the device you exported from, an external drive or a second cloud location, until you are confident in whatever comes next. If you are moving the content into Flow or another app, the import guide covers what a clean import from Markdown files looks like, but that only works well if the export you are importing from was verified first.

Frequently asked questions

Can I export Apple Notes as Markdown? Yes. On Mac, open a note and choose File, then Export as, then Markdown. On iPhone or iPad, tap the Share icon in a note and choose Export as Markdown. This requires macOS Tahoe, or iOS 26 and iPadOS 26.

Can I export all Apple Notes at once? There is no single command that exports your entire account at once with folder structure intact. On Mac you can select multiple notes with Cmd-click and export them as a batch of Markdown files into one folder, which is the closest built-in option, done folder by folder for a large library.

Does exporting Apple Notes keep my folders? No, not automatically. Bulk export produces a flat set of Markdown files in one destination folder. If you want the export organized like your Apple Notes folders, export one folder at a time and label the output folders yourself.

Are attachments included in an Apple Notes export? Text and standard formatting convert reliably. Drawings, Apple Pencil sketches, audio recordings, and some scanned documents do not reliably carry over as usable files in a Markdown export. Verify any note containing an attachment individually before deleting the original.

Is there a way to export Apple Notes on Windows? Apple Notes does not run natively on Windows, so the built-in File, Export as, Markdown path requires a Mac, iPhone, or iPad. If your notes sync through iCloud, exporting from an iPhone or iPad and moving the resulting files to a Windows machine afterward is the practical route.

My verdict

Use the native Markdown export. It is free, built in, and finally solves the text and formatting problem that made Apple Notes feel like a trap. Just do not trust it blindly with anything scanned, drawn, or recorded, verify those individually before you delete the originals.