How to import your Diarium diary into Innerholm
Diarium keeps your diary on the machine in front of you, which is the right instinct and the wrong answer the moment you want to write from somewhere else. Its JSON export is clean and complete, and Innerholm reads it directly. Here is the whole path, photos included, and an honest note about what stays behind.
Export your diary from Diarium under File › Export, choosing JSON. In Innerholm, open the sidebar, click ↑ Import at the bottom, choose Diarium, and upload the file. Your entries, their dates, your tags, your mood ratings, the weather Diarium recorded, your favourites and your photos all come across. The whole thing takes about ten minutes.
Step by step
Export from Diarium
Open Diarium and go to File › Export. Choose JSON, not PDF or DOCX: those two are made for reading, and only JSON carries your dates, tags and moods as data. Diarium writes a file called DiaryEntries.json.
Open the import wizard in Innerholm
Sign in to Innerholm. At the bottom of the sidebar, click ↑ Import, then choose Diarium from the list of apps.
Upload the file
Drag DiaryEntries.json into the upload area, or click to browse for it. If you asked Diarium to include photos it may hand you a ZIP with that file inside instead: upload that and Innerholm will find it. The diary file itself is read up to 50 MB, which is a very long diary; a ZIP holding it alongside your photos can be up to 200 MB.
Look at the preview first
Before anything is written, Innerholm shows the first ten entries with their dates, titles, tags and word counts, and tells you how many the file holds altogether. Diarium's format has changed over the years, so this is where an old export proves itself, not afterwards.
Import
Confirm, and your entries arrive on their original dates, unfiled: Diarium keeps one diary rather than separate journals, so there is no journal name to file them by. You will find them under All Journals, and you can move any of them into a journal afterwards. Tags you did not have yet are created, and tags you already had are reused rather than duplicated.
What comes across from Diarium
Diarium records a lot beside the writing, and most of it has somewhere to go here.
| Diarium | Innerholm | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Entry text | Entry body | Your writing, as written |
| Date and time | Entry date | Your timeline keeps its order exactly |
| Tags | Tags | Created if new, reused if you already have them |
| Mood | Feeling | Read on whichever scale your version of Diarium used |
| Weather | Weather | The condition and temperature Diarium recorded |
| Favourite | Starred | Appears in your starred filter |
| Photos | Photos | From the ZIP, or from inside the JSON; under each entry |
| Location | Not stored | Innerholm records a place only when you ask it to, at the moment of writing |
Where your photos land, and what stays behind
Photos come across, in whichever of its two shapes your export uses: as files in a ZIP, or written into the JSON itself. Diarium keeps its photo list beside the entry rather than marking a place in the text, so there is nothing to say where in the writing each one sat. They land under the entry instead, in the order Diarium listed them, and you can move any of them where you want afterwards.
Four kinds of file are brought in: JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP, up to 10 MB each. Anything else stays in the file you exported, so keep it. Innerholm remembers each entry by its Diarium identifier, so running this import a second time skips everything already here rather than duplicating it, which also means it cannot go back and pick up what it left. If you exported without photos, the fix is to export again with them and upload the ZIP.
Two smaller things, for completeness. Diarium's location data is read and then deliberately dropped: Innerholm records a place only when you ask it to, on the page you are writing, and back-filling years of coordinates from an archive is not that. And a mood is drawn on the page in a journal that keeps a feeling mark; in one that does not, the rating is still held with its entry and appears if you turn the feeling mark on later.
If your export is an old one
Diarium has been around long enough to have changed its own file format more than once. Older versions numbered entries rather than giving each one an identifier, named several fields differently, and rated mood out of ten where newer ones rate out of five, with nothing in the file saying which.
The importer handles all three. It reads every field by each of the names it has gone by, gives a numbered entry a stable identifier of its own so a second import stays safe, and works out the mood scale by reading the whole file before converting any of it, so a rating never means one thing in one year and something else in the next.
If a single entry still cannot be read, it is counted and named on the way out rather than passed over in silence, and the rest of the diary comes across as normal.
Frequently asked questions
Can I import Diarium into Innerholm?
Yes. Innerholm reads Diarium's JSON export directly, with no third-party converter in between. Export from Diarium under Settings then Export, choose JSON, and upload the file in Innerholm's import wizard. Your entries, their dates, your tags, your mood ratings, the weather Diarium recorded, and your favourites all come across.
How do I export my diary from Diarium?
Open Diarium, go to Settings, and choose Export. Pick JSON rather than PDF or DOCX, which are made for reading rather than for moving your data. Diarium writes a file called DiaryEntries.json. If you ask it to include photos it may hand you a ZIP with that file inside; Innerholm accepts either.
Does Diarium's mood rating come across?
Yes. Diarium has used a one to ten scale in older versions and a one to five scale in newer ones, and the export does not say which. Innerholm reads the whole file, works out which scale it is on, and converts the whole diary the same way, so a rating never means one thing in January and another in June. The feeling is drawn on the page in a journal that keeps a feeling mark; in one that does not, it is held with the entry and appears if you turn the mark on later.
Do my photos come across from Diarium?
Yes, and either way Diarium wrote them: as files in the ZIP, or tucked inside the JSON itself. Diarium keeps its photo list beside the entry rather than marking a spot in the text, so each entry's pictures land under its writing, in the order Diarium listed them. JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP files are brought in, up to 10 MB each. If you exported without photos, export again with them and upload the ZIP.
I have used Diarium for years. Will the old entries still read correctly?
They should. Diarium has renamed fields and changed how it numbers entries across versions, so Innerholm reads each field by every name it has gone by rather than assuming one. Older entries numbered rather than given an identifier are given a stable one derived from that number, which is what makes a second import safe. If any single entry cannot be read it is counted and named as skipped, and the rest of the diary still comes across.
Do I have to leave Diarium to try this?
No. Exporting from Diarium changes nothing in Diarium, and importing into Innerholm changes nothing either. You can bring a copy across, live in both for a while, and decide later. Innerholm exports your whole journal back out as Markdown or a Day One ZIP, free, whenever you want it.
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