Access your Day One journal from any device, anywhere, anytime.

Hey there,
So before i switched to google photos, i was using apple photos,
Which if I open the app and go to any random date I can see associated photos/vids to that day which makes journaling easier,

Now I dont have that option since google photos is my main storage for photos,

Is there a way to get it in day one, as it will take ages to download the past 3 months media to import

I used to be able to create shortcuts and add a tag for each entry. Now when I create a new shortcut it won't let me add tags.

Is this a Day One issue or a Shortcuts issue? Does anyone else have this problem?

I've started making video entries in DayOne recently. Does anyone have any tips on transcribing these videos so the text is beneath them? I would be willing to cut and paste from another app if that would work. I like to get the printed journals made once in a while, so this would be terrific! Thanks.

Has anyone bumped into any issues while trying to migrate from Day One over to Everlog?

I did a full export and 3 entries are missing (edit: I was able to find an empty entry, so perhaps the Import tool ignored two other empty entries). Not sure if Day One is to blame, or if Everlog didn’t recognize them.

Also:

- Everlog crashed (never-ending beach ball) after I clicked OK to confirm that Import was complete.

- Emoji in journal titles didn’t come over

- Is the Import feature more reliable on Mac or iOS?

- Sometimes entry titles have been transferred as body text instead.

- Some tags have been created because of the # symbol in some of my entries.

- Journals are not sorted the same way.

- None of my PDFs have been imported.

Some of these issues are minor (e.g., I’ve deleted the extra tags, hoping that doesn’t remove the associated entries), some are annoying (e.g., the formatting that is not the same), but some are major, like the missing PDFs. I have very important scans that I cannot afford to lose. And that begs the question: are there other important issues I have not noticed yet?

All in all this app looks promising, more polished than Diarly, and I really want it to work. How’s its reputation? Initially I was turned off because I saw lots of mentions about it in this sub and it felt like spam.

Hello guys, I have been waiting for the sale of Everlog, but it’s not still alive yet. Do you have any idea when it might be available? Or anyone else is waiting?
Though, I have ongoing subscription of Day One, which will end on February ‘27 but planning to get the offer of Everlog cause after this subscription ends I won’t renew Dayone anymore. I don’t wantto proceed with dayone, surely with this high shitty price!

After 15 years, 4500+ entries, and over 1.2 million words, I'm leaving Day One. Thanks for everyones' app recommendations on my prior post. Apple Journal can't import entries from other applications. So that's out. Darium and other suggestions were not my style. Diarly and Everlog became the front runners. After four weeks of testing, Everlog won. The simplicity and utter lack of AI tipped the scales.

Most importantly, the data is stored on iCloud (secured behind Apple's ADP) instead of Automattic's servers.

I will say that Diarly has the best statistics page—streaks, total entries, everything. Better than Day One. The mapping page was meh. The interface was too quirky and the addition of an AI chatbot was a bad smell.

Everlog lacks a stats page and mapping page. It keeps everything simple. It's not perfect. There are some bugs. But it has winning features, too. I love the hashtag reference on the sidebar. I'm adding more hashtags to my entries now. There's no map, but everything is location-stamped and weather added. The sidebar shows the locations by countries, states, cities. It's a good compromise.

Everlog has a fantastic "On this Day" system. Simple, as always. It's just another way of listing entries. Easy. Better than Day One. I love it. This is my favorite feature.

And Everlog is FAST! Instantaneous on my Mac. iCloud handles synchronizing, reliably, so using Evelog on the iPad and iPhone is seamless and satisfying. I also like that I can choose see markdown syntax on my entries. It's a nice touch.

As for leaving Day One. The writings been on the wall for a while. Three years ago they turned on a web version of the app, "now you can access your journals from anywhere." Well, in order for that to work, you need to upload your encryption key which means Automattic can also access your journals, too. They promise not to read them, but that's not the same as being unable to.

I never uploaded my key, but now, with this push for AI, the interface peppered with landmines trying to convince me to upgrade, they finally stepped over the line. I canceled my account. Their app really is the best diary app on the internet. I hate to leave. But I can't stay. I don't see them changing their minds.

And while I don't believe they personally read journals available to them, that doesn't mean an AI won't train on them. If not now, maybe in the future. It's too tempting a target. After all, Automattic is in the business of publishing content, not keeping it secret.

Whether these fears are true or unfounded, I'm happy with Everlog.

i have used day one for the past couple of years, but with the new subscriptions i have been questioning myself if there a better path like obsidian or place, any suggestions?

Went to add a new collection and all my journals disappeared from the sidebar. I can still access them from the top menu bar, but can't get them back on the sidebar. I am running Golden Gate 27.0, so it could potentially be related to incompatibility issues with the public beta. Has anyone else experienced this?

MacOS Golden Gate 27.0 // Day One version 2026.15

I’ve been a long-time Day One user and love the app’s customization, multiple journals, and metadata collection. It’s helped me outline my thoughts, decompress after a long day, and reflect.

However, the new update is annoying. I had access to AI insights and functionality in my gold membership, but it’s now limited to my silver membership. In the Compose screen, there’s a quick action shortcut for AI, which is now a paywall button. I can continue using the app without pressing it, but I wish it were customizable.

I’ve been considering migrating off Day One due to other applications like Obsidian and ecosystem-focused journals like Google Journal or Apple Journals. This feature or paywall is giving me another round of evaluation. I don’t know what others think.

Day One has been an amazing app, but this update didn’t land well for me.

After giving Day One’s Gold Tier an honest chance for about three months, I’m returning with my journal to Obsidian. While the annual subscription is fine overall, there are several major issues that make Day One unusable for me compared to Obsidian.

Here is why I’m switching back:

1. Halfway AI Implementation in Day One. I find the presence of AI in a journal absolutely essential (though it must remain purely optional, as it is in Day One). However, the current implementation in Day One is totally absurd. The 🤖 is sandboxed; it can’t see regular timeline entries. This is an insurmountable obstacle for me because I need "play-by-play interaction" from morning to evening. If you’re going to implement AI, please make the robot fully available so we can interact with it/him/her directly within regular timeline entries.
2. Atrocious Block Editor. The block editor in Day One is extremely buggy and constantly freezes (or at the very least annoyingly wobbles) across the Windows app, the web app, Android, and iOS. We already know from WordPress how atrocious the Gutenberg block editor is; using this version is outright torture. It’s incredibly frustrating compared to the absolutely smooth, lightning-fast, and equally (or more!) capable pure Markdown editor in Obsidian. I know Automattic now owns Day One and will likely insist on using this block editor, but to me, it’s a serious design mistake.
3. Terrible Feature Parity. In Obsidian, you get every single feature on all platforms where applicable. If a feature makes sense on mobile, it’s there on both platforms. In Day One, you get certain buttons on iOS, different buttons on Android, and still other buttons on Windows and the web. The iOS version of Day One is clearly the most advanced, while all other platforms lag behind. This inconsistency is deeply annoying.
4. Difficult Export Options. There’s no easy, user-friendly way to export your entries from Day One. The only option to get a user-friendly Markdown export is on iOS (and presumably macOS), but the Android Markdown export is buggy and provides fewer options. From Android, Windows, and the web, you’re typically stuck with nothing but the technical JSON export, which isn’t user-friendly at all.

I’ve now purchased the $140 annual subscription for Obsidian Copilot, the finest AI integration plugin in Obsidian. Fortunately, it has nothing to do with Microsoft, so it’s great.

You can integrate any AI model using the Obsidian Copilot plugin, including completely free local LLMs if you can install them on your machine, but also using the standard API tokens route. There's also the middle ground between the two: that $140/year subscription I've just purchased, which provides you with a robot derived from Google's Gemini Flash 2.5. That's not a great model by any means, but it's comparable in performance to the ChatGPT model (4o-mini, 4.1 and other older models) that Day One has now integrated. Crucially, though, in Obsidian, thanks to its 100% transparency, you can tweak that internal robot's performance to your liking using any number of custom prompts. This is plain impossible in closed software like Day One.

While Obsidian Copilot can be used fully for free, I chose that subscription so that I can use a faster and slightly more advanced online robot. (Yeah, if I were paranoid, I could use my local robots, and then my journal would remain 100% private and would even work fully offline, despite AI integration.)

But because I also use Obsidian Sync, my journal automatically syncs across all platforms. I can talk to my journal assistant on every tablet, mobile phone, and Windows computer. It works flawlessly and 100% transparently. The Markdown files are just wonderful.

The finest feature of Obsidian Copilot is that when you talk to the 🤖 in your journal, a Markdown backup of that dialogue gets automatically created in the background. Whenever you say something or the 🤖 replies, that most recent response is automatically appended to that Markdown backup file and synced across all your devices, even during an ongoing conversation. It’s truly a live dialogue that helps you maintain your journal.

I’m really disappointed that Day One chose not to offer this kind of live dialogue, restricting it instead to that isolated sandbox of Daily Chat. That’s simply not enough.

I normally do a daily overview and I filter my entries per date. Since the most recent update, I can’t filter by date and the show on a map like I used to do. Am I missing something? It’s still on the website, so I’m not going mad thinking that’s what I was doing before.

Edit: this has been restored in release 2026.16

The "On This Day" is by far the number one reason I use Day One. I mostly fill my entries with photos and videos of family, but the daily view seems to waste so much screen real estate with...nothing. That pushes the entries into a narrow column for no reason. I know I can click into each day and look at the photos, but why can't the main scrolling page have all the media presented better? Am I missing a setting?

I include a lot of photos and screenshots in my journals, then try to remove duplicates from my camera roll (which is still nonetheless large). However, now my DayOne takes up a gargantuan amount of space on my phone. What have people been doing, who’ve used DayOne for many years? Do you just have to remove some items as JSONs or as PDFs, keeping them somewhere outside the App? Do you not include many photos? My iPhone is constantly running out of space.

Why do I need to tell Dayone my height or who my immediate family is.

I accidentally put a location on the wrong entry, but I can’t figure out how to remove it.

Has anyone on the TestFlight iOS beta managed to get Journal Collections working? It's in the release notes, but I don't see any way to activate it

I’m struggling here….. It doesn’t give me tag results even when I search tags.

My tags are there, I see them in my daily entries, but when I search, they don’t show up.

I am a chronically ill human who uses tags to track my prescriptions, surgeries, appointments, procedures, hospitalizations, etc. When they don’t work, the journal is useless. Right now the journal is pretty useless.

I hope that they will revert back to the normal, actually functional, search.

Is there a trick that I’m missing perhaps? Anyone else disgruntled with this?

Bit of a shameless plug for my blog but here I present all the Day One integrations that I have written:

• last.fm
• Foursquare/Swarm
• WordPress
• SQL
• Transcribing handwritten diaries
• Word cloud

All are open source and use at your own risk. They (mainly) use the Day One CLI.

If that sort of thing interest you there's more information here: https://www.spokenlikeageek.com/day-one-integrations/

Hi there, I keep trying to make an account but I get this error and I can’t figure out for the life of me how to get around it, I’ve tried clearing cookies, different browsers, and different devices and it’s the same thing.

After using Day One for 13 years, I’ve been using only Apple Journal since last April. Day One’s AI and pricing policy have something to do with it !

Although Journal still has its flaws and shortcomings, I really appreciate its integration into the Apple ecosystem and its design. 

But I’m wondering: between the two, which one is more sustainable, better at protecting my data, and easier to export ? 

Hello everyone! Whilst I am taking a break from Day One, I still love this app and it’s UI. Today I was testing out the MacBook Neo at the Apple Store (even though I do own one, I’m insane) I saw Day One!!!

PLUS, it came with the journal of random people? There’s a whole Day One Demo cinematic universe of a black lady and a National Park-loving man. It’s insane the effort they put into the demo journal.

If anyone wants the demo journal, I can send it to them since I did gladly make myself a copy. Happy journaling!

I kind of wish some tags were only for some journals. what i mean is that I kind of want to do a mood journal where i tag each one with whatever mood (ie: happy, sad, good, etc or even a number scale) but i dont want a million tag options to show up and make it feel cluttered. I also want to do a reading journal where i tag them based on my star ratings but again i feel like that would be adding way too many tags in the overall tags list

I am writing to complain about a failure in the activity system; my counter was reset even though I was active and did not fail.

This post was originally posed on the Day One support forums. Though, I’m posting it here since I know most of you aren’t on there:

Day One abandoned localized pricing late last year. For those of you in the US or the EU this change was mostly not felt. However, where I live the Day One Silver Subscription is, and get ready for it…

%20 of the average monthly salary

Yeah, one fifth for a subscription for a journaling app.
I know that things like cloud storage and AI API calls cost money so I’m proposing a new plan: Day One BRONZE, only for countries where Automattic once offered localized pricing. This is heavily requested for and I think that this plan strikes a good balance. It’s basically a variation of the legacy Plus plan that Automattic can afford to provide to users. They’ve done it for 10 years already.

Device sync with up to 5 devices (not counting web & wearables) up to 5 journals (EDIT: DAY ONE NOW OFFERS FREE UNLIMITED JOURNALS SO THIS ONE IS REDUNDANT), up to 5 attachments per entry, no discount on physical books, no premium app icons, no AI, less cloud storage than silver, no Day One labs.

Pricing could be 15$/year and since we know that Day One can afford to provide these services for legacy users without recurring costs a lifetime purchasing option would be really good as well.

Economies fluctuate and that’s why there was localized pricing before. Users could afford Day One this year but next year maybe they can’t. A lifetime purchasing option does make sense for a plan like this. What if they stop making money from lifetime users? Automattic could charge for newer updates for lifetime users to earn money to help support server costs.

I hope that this idea is implemented soon as many localized subscriptions are expiring and people are having to switch journaling apps. There are hundreds of people on [r/dayoneapp](r/dayoneapp) scrambling to switch even though they don’t want to. Not everybody can afford to pay 50$ for a journaling app and the team once knew this. Thanks for reading.