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Example for Photos.app https://medium.com/@mustafaakin/how-to-organize-your-messy-a...

You can also use this for things like exporting your notes and imessage history to plain text.

Didn't know that, had to look into it immediately! Looks like a lot of the stuff in the Notes sqlite file is encrypted, though. Will need to look into this some more, would be nice to make a nice little exporter.

Last I checked it was not encrypted (unless you explicitly asked it to encrypt a note). Just gzipped protobuf data. I wrote an extractor about six years ago, maybe it'll help:

https://github.com/dunhamsteve/notesutils

It seems to still work for text. It looks like it doesn't dump tables anymore, so that bit may have changed (it was pretty convoluted). I think the extraction of drawing information doesn't work anymore, but they provide a fallback PNG file.

I wanted it to be self-contained, so it has a little hand-rolled protobuf decoder and might be a little code-golfy.

That's fantastic, thanks for sharing this! I'll give it a spin on the weekend and see what I can get out of it.

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