dayone-to-obsidian

Convert a Day One JSON export into individual entries for Obsidian.

Heavily based off of the work from QuantumGardener and edoardob90 with a few improvements.

Added features

Check the --help option to get a description of the new features.

Changes by edoardob90:

Process audio, video, and pdf attachments as well
Toggle on/off YAML frontmatter (if you don't want it or use it)
Add option --convert-links to replace internal DayOne links (e.g., dayone://view?entryId=<UUID>) with Obsidian links
Status tags can be added with the --status-tags (or -s). Each tag passed as argument will be added as #status/tag
Add the option --merge-entries to merge entries (with a custom separator) with the same date instead of creating multiple files

Changes by me:

Adjust for slight changes in the Day One JSON export
Fix quoting in YAML frontmatter
Write location as number instead of strings (this enables using the Map View plugin in Obsidian)
Either a YAML frontmatter or the metadate in the text is written, not both when enabling the YAML frontmatter
Combine the time and date into a single field
Fix links across journals (links are now relative instead of just the filename)

Installation

Clone the repository
Run poetry install
Run poetry run python import.py path/to/folder

You can also run without Poetry: you can simply create a virtual environment and run pip install -r requirements.txt since the script requires only a couple of packages not in Python standard library.

Day One version

This script works with journals exported as JSON from DayOne, version 2024.03 (Android) as of February, 18th 2024.

Setup

⚠️ WARNING
This script deletes folders if run a second time
You are responsible for ensuring against data loss
This script renames files (namely, media files)

Export your journal from Day One in JSON format
Expand that zip file
Run the script as shown above
Check results in Obsidian by opening the folder as a vault
If happy, move each journal name, photos, and pdfs folders to another vault.

Suggestion: to move the outputted Markdown files, it's convenient to use rsync. For example,

rsync -R -av --inplace --update export_folder/ vault_folder/

and rsync will re-create the exact folder structure.

Features

Config file

If you want to import the same journal periodically, you ideally want to run the import.py script with the same options. For this purpose, the script supports reading a YAML configuration file with the -c/--config option.

The YAML config file recognizes keywords with the same names as command-line options. Additionally, you can add a metadata key which contains any extra metadata field you might want to add to each entry.

Command-line options have precedence on the corresponding key-value in the config file, i.e., you can use a command-line option to override whatever value is set in the config file.

The only keys which are not discarded when the equivalent command-line option is passed are ignore_tags and status_tags. In this case, the values passed when invoking the script are merged with those found in the config file (if any).

An example of a valid config.yaml is:

vault_directory: ~/path/to/my/journal/folder/
yaml: true
merge_entries: true
convert_links: false
ignore_tags:
  - First tag to ignore
  - Another tag to ignore
status_tags:
  - Draft
  - From email
metadata:
  up: 'A new metadata field named "up" will be added'
  note: |
    This note field can be a
    multiline text.
    It can also contain

    empty lines, if that's what you want.

  # Additional tags will be added to EVERY entry.
  # Make sure this is what you want.
  tags:
    - Additional tag 1
    - Additional tag 2

A few notes about the YAML format:

YAML doesn't require strings to be quoted. However, you might want to quote them to preserve their content as-is.
If you leave a key with no value, Python will assign a default None to that key.

Metadata formatting

The metadata formatting choices were dictated by purely personal criteria. In other words, the files are formatted the way I want them in my Obsidian vault.

An example of a metadata block:

dates:: <entry date (YYYY-MM-DD)>
time:: <entry time (HH:MM, localized)>
places:: <entry address>
location:: <GPS coordinates (if present)>
weather:: <weather conditions>
tags:: #journal/journalName #prefix/tag1, #prefix/tag2 #status/statusTag1 #place/country/region/town
url:: [DayOne](dayone://view?entryId=<uuid>)

That said, the formatting can be adapted to one's purposes very easily. If you are comfortable in editing the source code and have some experience with Python, take a look at the definition of the Entry class at the beginning of utils.py and adjust the __str__ method to change the formatting.

Todo

Features I'm considering:

Specify the vault destination folder to skip files that are already present
Add possibility to read in options from a config file (ideally a config.yaml)
Add the possibility to customize metadata formatting (not sure to which template it should adhere)
Implement a copy with rsync
Auto-unzip of the exported journal

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