Keep It 2.5 is now available. In this version, Keep It has been updated to work with the latest versions of macOS, iOS and iPadOS, checklists in notes can be indented, and it’s now possible to choose custom highlight colors for notes, rich text files and PDFs. On Mac, there is now a Safari extension for adding a web link with a single click. On iPad and iPhone, integration with the Files app and document browsers has been updated to allow Keep It’s folders to be used as persisted locations in other apps.

Notes & Text Files

Checklist items in notes can now be indented, which also covers sharing notes to Keep It from the Notes app on Mac, and pasting copied checklists from notes into Markdown files.

Keep It has always offered a choice of colors for highlighting text, and you can now choose your own. This color will be stored in iCloud, and available across Keep It on Mac, iPad and iPhone. On macOS Sequoia, iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 Keep It will convert highlights to their nearest rich text equivalents. 

PDFs

As with notes, it’s always been possible to choose from a range of highlight colors for PDFs, and it’s now possible to choose a custom color that will be stored in iCloud and available across Keep It on Mac, iPad and iPhone. 

Locked PDFs can now be unlocked with user and owner passwords to allow restricted operations such as printing and copying text.

Integration

On Mac, Keep It now includes a Safari extension that allows you to save the current page to Keep It with a single click. 

On iPad and iPhone, Keep It’s Files app and document browser integration has been rewritten to use the latest version of Apple’s technology, which makes it possible to select any Keep It folder as a persisted location in other apps.

And More…

When searching, Keep It will now scroll to the first occurrence of a found word in notes and other editable text documents, PDFs, web pages and mail messages. The default Markdown editor style now uses the current accent color on Mac. Keep It’s app icon has been updated, with Dark Mode and tinted versions for iOS 18 and iPadOS 18.

For a full list of changes, see the release notes:

• Keep It 2.5 for Mac Release Notes
• Keep It 2.5 for iPad and iPhone Release Notes

Keep It 2.4 is now available for Mac, iPad and iPhone. This version improves the display of notes and editable text items on Mac and iPad, importing and attaching photos and videos, inserting links into Markdown files, removing empty lists, and adds the ability to export bookmarks.

Photos and Videos

On Macs running macOS 13 or later, and on iPad and iPhone, it’s now possible to attach multiple photos and videos from your Photos library to notes and rich text files. On macOS 13 and later, add standalone photos or videos from your Photos library.

Constrain Width in Full Screen on iPad

On iPad, the width of notes, rich text and Markdown files (both editor and preview) can be constrained when the library split view or a separate editing window are made full screen. This option is on by default, but can be disabled for each file type if the old behaviour is preferred. Plain text files can also constrain their width in full screen, but this is off by default.

Markdown Links and Images

When inserting links to items in Markdown files, there is now an option to link to the item’s file (as a relative path) instead of inserting a Keep It-specific item link. It’s now also possible to choose a Keep It item when inserting a link to an image — in that case, the link will always be a relative path to the image file.

Lists

Confirmation will no longer be requested before moving empty folders to Deleted Items, or when removing empty bundles, labels or saved searches, but confirmation will always be shown for shared folders. The icon for the Recents list is now green.

And More…

The last-used settings will now be remembered when saving web links. On Mac, the format bars for notes, rich text and Markdown documents is now centred in editing windows. On Mac and iPad, see Quick Look preview for multiple selected items in the list. Set display margins for plain text files. Export a bookmarks HTML file of your web links, preserving the folder structure and any tags.

See the release notes for a full list of changes:

• Keep It 2.4 for Mac Release Notes
• Keep It 2.4 for iPad and iPhone Release Notes

Keep It 2.3 is now available. This version is updated for iOS and iPadOS 17 and macOS 14 Sonoma, makes improvements when adding web page text, allows you to search for prominent features in images, adds Live Text, Visual Look Up and the ability to copy the subject from images on macOS 14 Sonoma, improves working with attachments and links in notes on iPad and iPhone, and previewing Markdown documents.

Adding Web Page Text

Web page text can now be automatically cleaned up when pasted, dropped, or added via the Services menu on Mac. Fonts, colors, and line breaks can all be adjusted, with settings for each. The Clean-Up Formatting feature also uses these settings, so any text that has previously been pasted and would benefit from this can also be cleaned up.

On Mac, where various browsers may copy text differently, there is an additional setting to reduce the font size; text copied from Safari and Microsoft Edge will benefit from leaving this enabled, while text from Chrome and Firefox will not. Keep It checks the default browser when it starts up and sets the default settings accordingly, but these can be overridden.

Images

In Keep It for Mac, standalone images now support Live Text on macOS Ventura and later, and Visual Look Up and the ability to copy a subject on macOS Sonoma. Also, on all versions of macOS, a toolbar is now shown above images in the main window for zooming and rotating.

Keep It can now find images by their prominent features when searching for content. A wide variety of subjects can be identified, including landscape features, buildings, animals, plants, machines, foods, and more. This feature applies to standalone images and attachments on notes, rich text documents, and mail messages in Keep It on all versions of macOS and iOS.

On iPad and iPhone, Keep It uses a new photos picker that allows access to more kinds of photos.

Notes

On iPad and iPhone, it’s now possible to tap and hold on the Aa button above the keyboard to choose from saved note styles without needing to show the format view, and there are improvements when working with bulleted and numbered lists so that behaviour more closely matches how things work on Mac. On iOS and iPadOS 17 specifically, there are improvements for working with attachments and links in both notes and rich text documents.

On Mac, the compact version of the font button in the format bar no longer shows the font face name (for traits such as bold or italic) to prevent the other buttons in the format bar moving when a trait is chosen.

The photos picker will appear half-height when attaching photos to notes and rich text documents on iPhone, and will no longer appear as a popover on iPad. On macOS 13 Ventura and later, you can also use the same photo picker to attach photos and videos to notes and rich text documents.

On Mac, there are improvements when sharing notes to Mail, and when sharing notes to Reminders, Keep It will now exclude any attachments, to ensure the reminder created links back to the corresponding item in Keep It.

And More…

You can now use Quick Open on iPhone and on iPad without a hardware keyboard — tap the action button above the Lists view and choose Quick Open from the menu shown. Also on iPad and iPhone, when you open a link in one Keep It item to show another, a button will be shown to go back to the original item, and you can now see recents when inserting links to items. The default Markdown preview style now matches note styles. Pull to reload web links and Markdown previews on iPad and iPhone. Import folders without using drag and drop on iPad and iPhone. Keep It has also been updated to support changes to Stage Manager on iPadOS 17.

See the release notes for a full list of changes:

• Keep It 2.3 for Mac Release Notes
• Keep It 2.3 for iPad and iPhone Release Notes

Whenever there is talk of Evernote layoffs, or price rises, or when that Electron rewrite happened for version 10 and Evernote lost things people relied on such as automation, I get an influx of people showing up interested in Keep It.

If you want to import your data from Evernote into Keep It, you’ll need to export an ENEX file first. Find full instructions on the Keep It support page.

As noted there, Keep It will import notes with single attachments as standalone files, web clippings as HTML files, and everything else as a Keep It note, preserving metadata such as tags, and creation and modification dates. 

And yes, Keep It will automatically perform text recognition (OCR) on images and PDFs, whether standalone files or attachments, so that you will still be able to find those.

Make Smart Choices

Whether or not you choose to move to Keep It, I’d urge anyone considering moving from Evernote to another app to make sure that the new app allows you to get your notes out again in a useable format. 

Apps cannot import data from another app if that data that cannot be exported.

For example, Apple’s Notes app can only export individual notes as PDFs or as text via the share sheet, and while you can get further with AppleScript (which Keep It’s Apple Notes importer uses), you can still lose things like clickable links and hashtags.

Exporting from Keep It

Keep It stores everything you put in it as files in standard formats that you can access in the Finder, and can export everything as files and folders, preserving folder hierarchies and tags, by selecting All Items in the sidebar and choosing File > Export All Files from the menu. Or on iOS, tap and hold on All Items and choose Export All Files to export a folder of the files and folders, or a zip file.

When exported, Keep It’s own notes format are converted to rich text files that you can open in TextEdit and many other Mac apps, and view in the iOS Files app. You can also manually convert Keep It notes to rich text files just by renaming them to have a .rtfd extension. Exported notes will lose note-specific features, such as horizontal dividers and interactive checklists, but you’ll see text equivalents instead.

Encrypted files in Keep It are zip files that, provided you know the password (which is stored in your Keychain), can be decrypted in the Finder by opening them with the Archive Utility app, in the Files app on iOS, or with apps such as The Unarchiver, which is free. Keep It always offers to decrypt your encrypted files when you export them from the app.

Keep It 2.2 is now available. This version adds the ability to merge multiple items into a single note, and to convert various files to notes. Folders, bundles and saved searches can now be duplicated, there are improvements to the Share extension, and more.

Notes

Multiple items can now be merged into a single note. Notes, rich text, HTML, web links, Markdown, mail messages and plain text files will all be shown inline, and other files will included as attachments, with each item separated by a horizontal divider. When merging items, it’s possible to choose the order, the name of the merged note, and whether or not to move the originals to Deleted Items.

Similarly, any individual item can now be converted to a note or an attachment on a note. Previously PDFs and images could be converted to inline attachments on notes, and web archives and web links that can be shown in Reader mode could be converted to notes. Now rich text, plain text, mail messages, and Markdown files can also be converted to notes, and all other files as attachments — with PDFs, images and movies shown inline, and everything else as an icon.

Lists & Items

It’s now possible to duplicate folders, bundles and saved searches on both Mac and iOS, and to duplicate multiple selected items on iOS (which was already possible on Mac).

On iPad and iPhone individual folders or bundles can be exported without using drag and drop, and a new action menu above the items list makes it more convenient to find items, change how the items list is sorted, and choose other options. On iPhone the tag filter can now be resized.

On Mac, Quick File or the menus can now be used to to move an item to a folder where another item with the same name exists — you will be offered to keep both or replace, as when dragging items to folders in the sidebar, matching the behaviour on iOS.

When searching on Mac and iPad, the preview area now shows “No Items Found” to make it clearer that a search is in progress — the number of results is still shown in the title bar on Mac and the status view on iOS, but this makes it clearer that a search is in progress. 

Imports

In the Share extension and Import view on Mac, there is now a search field for filtering destination lists or items, as on iOS, and you can create folders or bundles when adding things via the Share extension or the in-app Import View too.

On Mac it’s now possible to drag files, links and text to Keep It’s title bar to add those things to the current list. It’s also possible for Keep It on Mac to automatically convert Markdown and Word files to Keep It notes when they are imported (or en masse later) to help when moving from other applications that only export those formats. Markdown files will be styled using your current note styles, as when converting individual Markdown files.

And More…

Use the share sheet to start collaboration on macOS Ventura. Movies can be played in Picture in Picture mode on both Mac and iOS. On Mac the number of items can be shown above the list in Compact Mode, and you can click and hold on the history buttons to navigate directly to a particular item. There are also improvements when viewing images and PDFs on Mac, editing Markdown files on iOS, and saving existing web links on both Mac and iOS.

See the release notes for a full list of changes:

• Keep It 2.2 for Mac Release Notes
• Keep It 2.2 for iPad and iPhone Release Notes