The easiest way to export all your notes from Ulysses and import them into Obsidian seems to be via it’s “External folder” feature. This lets you hold onto any folder structures you may have as well.

If you follow the same instructions as you would for Bear:

• In Ulysses, click the File > Add external folder.

Then you can start dragging and dropping in your Ulysses folders into this external folder. The one problem is that external folders don’t support images or notes. So it’s more like a process of elimination where you attempt to move multiple folders, get an error, and then try and move a smaller selection of items.

As a side note, if you don’t remember what a note is, if you have any sheets with a paperclip icon 📎, that means it has a note. If you open the dashboard icon in the top right of your Ulysses app, and then click on the little speech mark icon 💬 you will see any notes you have for this sheet. To be honest, I never used this feature except one time when I was testing it out, so I got a bit confused trying to figure out what it was.

I tried to drag in one folder at a time, but nearly all of them had either an image in one of its sheets which hindered things.

How to find all your notes that have an image

So I figured, the next best thing to do would be to find all of my sheets that have images, and put them in a separate spot to process them later.

If you go to view all your sheets under “All”, you can select all of them in one go with command + A. Then open the dashboard via the icon in the top right, and the last tab in your dashboard is a media section which shows all of your images.

Unfortunately they are all just named Image so you will have to click through them one by one. Since selecting all the sheets at once causes Ulysses to treat your editor as one big mega-sheet, it’s also not that easy to separate out the sheets when you come across the image.

I also realised that Ulysses will only show about 20 of your images in the dashboard. So doing this for all my sheets in one go was kind of a non-starter. I decided to do it folder-by-folder instead.

Processing your sheets with images

You can right-click notes in Ulysses to export them - you’ll have to manually do this one-by-one for each of your sheets that have images. Now the annoying thing is it seems like they export each one as index.md, so you can’t just just quickly click through all of them export them to the same folder. I went with:

• Click export
• In the file browser, choose to make a new folder
• Save the index.md file (and the image) into that folder

Importing your external folder into Obsidian

Now that the hard part is out of the way, you just need to copy-paste the folder into Obsidian.

From inside of Obsidian, you can right-click a file or folder in your file explorer, and choose the “reveal in Finder” to open your Obsidian vault in Mac’s file explorer.

From there, you will be able to copy-and-paste your Ulysses content across.

Attempting to bulk export

You can bulk-export all of your Ulysses sheets. However the downside of this is Ulysses will merge all of your sheets into one mega-sheet for export.

I guess from here, you could attempt to split out the sheets by writing a script to go “if a new H1 appears, split the contents into a new sheet”. This would get around the image problem as well.

However, the big downside is that you would lose your folder structures, if you had any. I think this option is viable as well, but it depends how important folder structure is to you, or how many images you have (since this makes the external folder option much harder).