Importing your notes

Bringing a vault in from Obsidian or Google Keep, dragging in single files, or simply copying Markdown into the folder.

The simplest import

Copy .md files into /data/users/<you>/notes/. Papyra notices them and they appear. No import step, no processing — they were already in the right format.

This is the right move for an Obsidian vault you have direct filesystem access to, and it preserves everything, because nothing is being converted.

Obsidian

Settings → Data & Storage → Import → Obsidian. Upload your vault and Papyra brings the notes across, keeping frontmatter and [[wiki links]], which mean the same thing in both apps.

Import runs as a background job with live progress, so a large vault does not tie up the page.

Google Keep

Export from Google Takeout, selecting Keep. Then Settings → Data & Storage → Import → Google Keep with the archive.

Papyra maps what has an equivalent: title, body, colours, pinned state, labels become categories, and checklists become Markdown checklists. Keep’s reminders have no equivalent and are not imported.

Drag a file in

Drop a text file onto the note grid and it is imported as a note, immediately. Good for one-offs.

After a large import

Two things are worth doing once the dust settles, both in Settings → Data & Storage:

Rebuild the search index if search does not immediately find imported notes.
Rebuild embeddings if you want semantic search to cover them. Embeddings are computed as notes are written, so notes that arrived before a model was configured were never embedded. This one takes a while on a big vault and runs in the background.

What to check afterwards

Skim a handful of imported notes for:

Attachments. Images referenced by relative paths need those files present in media/; a copied-in vault should bring them along, an archive import may not.
Frontmatter you rely on. Keys Papyra does not own are preserved untouched, but it is worth confirming with one note that yours came through.
Links. [[wiki links]] resolve by note id, which is the filename. A note renamed during import will have links pointing at the old name.

Going the other way

Everything imported stays a plain file, so leaving is the same operation in reverse: copy the folder, or use Settings → Backup → Export for a zip. See Backups.