Easy way to import Evernote's *.enex
files to Notion.so
Notion's native Evernote importer doesn't do it for me, so I decided to write my own. Thanks to Cobertos and md2notion for inspiration and Jamie Alexandre for notion-py.
You can either use Evernote native export or try out my other tool, evernote-backup, to export *.enex
files from Evernote.
- Embedded files and images are uploaded to Notion
- nested images will appear after paragraph
- Text formatting (bold, italic, etc) and colors
- Tables are converted to the new format (no colspans though)
- Web Clips
- as plain text or PDFs, see below
- Everything else basically
- Paragraph alignment
- Subscript and superscript formatting
- Custom fonts and font sizes
- Tasks
- Encrypted blocks
- just decrypt them before export
If you are not familiar with command line programs, take a look at these step-by-step guides:
Download the latest binary release for your OS.
With Homebrew (Recommended for macOS)
$ brew install enex2notion
With PIPX (Recommended for Linux & Windows)
$ pipx install enex2notion
With Docker
This command maps current directory $PWD
to the /input
directory in the container. You can replace $PWD
with a directory that contains your *.enex
files. When running commands like enex2notion /input
refer to your local mapped directory as /input
.
$ docker run --rm -t -v "$PWD":/input vzhd1701/enex2notion:latest
$ pip install --user enex2notion
Python 3.8 or later required.
This project uses poetry for dependency management and packaging. You will have to install it first. See poetry official documentation for instructions.
$ git clone https://github.com/vzhd1701/enex2notion.git
$ cd enex2notion/
$ poetry install
$ poetry run enex2notion
$ enex2notion --help
usage: enex2notion [-h] [--token TOKEN] [OPTION ...] FILE/DIR [FILE/DIR ...]
Uploads ENEX files to Notion
positional arguments:
FILE/DIR ENEX files or directories to upload
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--token TOKEN Notion token, stored in token_v2 cookie for notion.so [NEEDED FOR UPLOAD]
--root-page NAME root page name for the imported notebooks, it will be created if it does not exist (default: "Evernote ENEX Import")
--mode {DB,PAGE} upload each ENEX as database (DB) or page with children (PAGE) (default: DB)
--mode-webclips {TXT,PDF} convert web clips to text (TXT) or pdf (PDF) before upload (default: TXT)
--retry N retry N times on note upload error before giving up, 0 for infinite retries (default: 5)
--skip-failed skip notes that failed to upload (after exhausting --retry attempts), by default the program will crash on upload error
--keep-failed keep partial pages at Notion with '[UNFINISHED UPLOAD]' in title if they fail to upload completely, by default the program will try to delete them on upload fail
--add-pdf-preview include preview image with PDF webclips for gallery view thumbnail (works only with --mode-webclips=PDF)
--add-meta include metadata (created, tags, etc) in notes, makes sense only with PAGE mode
--tag TAG add custom tag to uploaded notes
--condense-lines condense text lines together into paragraphs to avoid making block per line
--condense-lines-sparse like --condense-lines but leaves gaps between paragraphs
--done-file FILE file for uploaded notes hashes to resume interrupted upload
--log FILE file to store program log
--verbose output debug information
--version show program's version number and exit
You can pass single *.enex
files or directories. The program will recursively scan directories for *.enex
files.
The upload requires you to have a token_v2
cookie for the Notion website. For information on how to get it, see this article.
The program can run without --token
provided though. It will not make any network requests without it. Executing a dry run with --verbose
is an excellent way to check if your *.enex
files are parsed correctly before uploading.
The upload will take some time since each note is uploaded block-by-block, so you'll probably need some way of resuming it. --done-file
is precisely for that. All uploaded note hashes will be stored there, so the next time you start, the upload will continue from where you left off.
All uploaded notebooks will appear under the automatically created Evernote ENEX Import
page. You can change that name with the --root-page
option. The program will mark unfinished notes with [UNFINISHED UPLOAD]
text in the title. After successful upload, the mark will be removed.
The --mode
option allows you to choose how to upload your notebooks: as databases or pages. DB
mode is the default since Notion itself uses this mode when importing from Evernote. PAGE
mode makes the tree feel like the original Evernote notebooks hierarchy.
Since PAGE
mode does not benefit from having separate space for metadata, you can still preserve the note's original meta with the --add-meta
option. It will attach a callout block with all meta info as a first block in each note like this.
Due to Notion's limitations Evernote web clips cannot be uploaded as-is. enex2notion
provides two modes with the --mode-webclips
option:
-
TXT
, converting them to text, stripping all HTML formatting [Default]- similar to Evernote's "Simplify & Make Editable"
-
PDF
, converting them to PDF, keeping HTML formatting as close as possible- web clips are converted using wkhtmltopdf, see this page on how to install it
Since Notion's gallery view does not provide thumbnails for embedded PDFs, you have the --add-pdf-preview
option to extract the first page of generated PDF as a preview for the web clip page.
Notion prohibits uploading files with certain extensions. The list consists of extensions for executable binaries, supposedly to prevent spreading malware. enex2notion
will automatically add a bin
extension to those files to circumvent this limitation. List of banned extensions: apk
, app
, com
, ear
, elf
, exe
, ipa
, jar
, js
, xap
, xbe
, xex
, xpi
.
The --condense-lines
option is helpful if you want to save up some space and make notes look more compact. Example.
The --condense-lines-sparse
does the same thing as --condense-lines
, but leaves gaps between paragraphs. Example.
The --tag
option allows you to add a custom tag to all uploaded notes. It will add this tag to existing tags if the note already has any.
$ enex2notion --verbose my_notebooks/
$ enex2notion --token <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE> "notebook.enex"
$ enex2notion --token <YOUR_TOKEN_HERE> --done-file done.txt "notebook.enex"
If you found a bug or have a feature request, please open a new issue.
If you have a question about the program or have difficulty using it, you are welcome to the discussions page. You can also mail me directly, I'm always happy to help.