How to Export Apple Notes as PDF (and Get Notes Out)

Apple Notes is easy to put things into and stubborn about letting them back out. One note at a time, PDF export is built in and works well. In bulk, there is no native exporter — so here's the single-note route, what survives the trip, and the honest workarounds for getting a whole library out.

Export one note as PDF

1. Open Notes and select the note.
2. Choose File → Export as PDF…
3. Pick a name and location, and click Save.

The entire note becomes a single PDF — long notes just get more pages. This is the right format when the note has to leave the Apple ecosystem looking like itself: meeting minutes for a client, a recipe for a relative, documentation for a file share.

An alternative with more control is the print dialog: press Cmd + P, then choose Save as PDF from the PDF dropdown. Same output, but you get paper size and orientation options first — useful when a wide table is getting clipped in portrait.

What survives, what doesn't

• Text and formatting — headings, bold and italics, lists, and links come through cleanly.
• Checklists — render with their checked and unchecked circles, frozen in their current state.
• Images and scanned documents — embed inline at the position they hold in the note.
• Tables — render as drawn, though very wide tables can clip at the page edge; the print-dialog route in landscape fixes that.
• Audio and video attachments — do not survive; a PDF can't hold them. Export those separately: right-click the attachment in the note and save it to a folder first.
• Locked notes — unlock before exporting; the export produces the note, not the lock.

The bulk problem — and real workarounds

There is no Export All in Notes on macOS 13, 14, or 15, and selecting multiple notes doesn't enable the PDF command. If you're archiving or leaving, these are the realistic paths, in increasing order of effort:

• Export the notes that matter, one by one. For most people, ten minutes covers the notes actually worth keeping outside Notes.
• Copy and paste into another app. Select a note's content with Cmd + A, paste into Pages, Word, or a Markdown editor. Formatting and images mostly survive the clipboard; it's tedious but faithful.
• AppleScript. Notes is scriptable — each note exposes its body as HTML, so a short script in Script Editor can loop the whole account and write one HTML file per note. That's the only built-in road to a complete text export; attachments still need saving separately.
• Third-party exporters exist that automate exactly this, producing Markdown or HTML archives — worth it above a few hundred notes.

Before you burn the bridge

If the goal is a backup rather than an exit, you may not need to export at all: notes in iCloud live on every device signed into your account, and a Mac's Time Machine backups include the local Notes database. Exports shine when you need notes readable elsewhere — and for that, run the export while you still have the Mac, since the Notes database format isn't something other apps read directly.

One more escape hatch worth knowing: notes can be dragged between accounts inside the app. If notes live in a Google or other IMAP account and you want them under your control before exporting, drag them from that account's folder in the sidebar into an iCloud or On My Mac folder — the note moves whole, attachments included. It's also the fix when Export as PDF seems to misbehave on a synced note: move it local, then export.