I wrote the support line about this, but wanted to share it here so others can vote on it if they agree.
When importing notes, it would be great if the imported notes respected the creation date of the original imported note (not the date I imported it). For Markdown, when I export notes from another program (like Apple Notes), it maintains the note creation date as the file created date. It also preserves a separate “modified date” too. Ideally, SN would use the file created/modified date as the Card created/modified date upon import. Otherwise, all my imported notes show as today which is quite annoying for the timeline views. Also, notes that I created 2 years ago are intermixed with notes I created a day ago which interrupts my workflow.
The ‘Created’ date of a card has been designed to be the exact timestamp you added it to Supernotes whether that was via an import, integration or directly through the app. Modifying this date is something we want to avoid and that’s why we introduced the ‘Targeted’ date, with the new Daily view to override the created date of a card. So you could assign cards to different days.
Would you be happy if we set the ‘Targeted’ date of the card to be original creation date of the imported note? This way you will still be able to see on which date you imported a bunch of notes (via. the Created date) and have them show up on their original creation days in the Daily view (via. the Targeted date) so it won’t clutter up your views?
Oh, that’s good to know! I’ll try it with a part of my Ulysses notes pretty soon. I’ve been playing with Supernotes on my IPad since yesterday and haven’t attempted bringing in notes on my Mac yet.
It looks like the app on Windows takes the modification date, not the creation date. It’s not that important (at least for me), but the behavior is different from what you described above.
However, going back to the main idea of this thread, it doesn’t really work for me, and there are two reasons why:
I have to set a targeted date for each new note manually in case I want to keep my imported notes from other platforms and my new ones created on Supernotes. This is a bit annoying because one of the main advantages of the app is that we can take notes and organize them easily without applying too many attributes as we usually do in other apps.
The targeted date doesn’t contain time, so my notes with the same targeted date are sorted randomly among themselves. I’ve tried applying sort by targeted date to the specific list and sort by created date in the settings (just in case if it reverts to default sort order if targeted date is the same), but that doesn’t seem to work.
I can create multiple notes within one hour and I want them to be sorted by creation date (preserving the order in which they were created), however I want to keep notes from other platforms as well.
Can you give me any advice on how I can actually achieve this?
The behaviour I described above was that creation date will always be the imported date, we will not backdate creation dates as it’s a log when a card was created on Supernotes. This is why we created targeted dates, so you could override the creation date – the targeted date during import should be set to the creation date of the original imported file. If this isn’t the case please let us know which app / os you are using and we will investigate this further.
Having targeted dates respect time is an interesting point and definitely something we could look into. Initially we wanted targeted dates to be simple, but I moving forward it makes sense to optionally add time as well. I’d be tempted to make this into a separate FR, “Add time to targeted dates”.
We’re also adding manual sorting in 2.9.9, which should help you preserve the order of your notes as well.
I’m just about to embark on a very large import of my markdown notes from NotePlan to Supernotes, and want to make sure I do this right.
To me, it seems strange that you’re not respecting the original file that is being imported’s “creation date”, and re-assigning it to the date of import as the “creation date” in Supernotes.
I understand you not wanting to refactor how “creation-dates” work within Supernotes, but maybe adding another metadata of “creation date of imported file” or something along those lines that would also show the note on those day notes would be useful here.
I think a cleaner and more understandable strategy though would be to simply route it like this
Original Imported File Metadata
Supernotes Metadata
Notes/Thoughts
created date
created date
keeping these the same gives the most intuitive import. It’s not intuitive for new users to see “Targeted Date” as the original file creation date, because the word Targeted has a “manual adjustment” connotation to it
modified date
last edited date
This obviously already works and makes sense
targeted date
no file data here, because “Targeted Date” is a proprietary Supernotes metadata. I think it should be left blank in Supernotes to not overwrite the “created date” of the original file, also allow future use of the targeted date
date you imported the note
imported date
new metadata field in Supernotes to specifically capture the date in time you imported something (currently you’re using the date of import as the “Created Date” in Supernotes, which date of import is arguably the least useful date to keep track of
instead, currently Supernotes is importing and sorta strangely mapping the metadata like this:
Original Imported File Metadata
Supernotes Metadata
Notes/Thoughts
created date
→ _____
!!! The original Created Date is currently not being captured !!! This is a big problem IMO, Created Date of the original note should map to the “created date” in Supernotes
modified date
→ targeted date
! this is really strange that modified doesn’t map to “last edited”. Instead, looks like the last modified date of the original file is mapped to “Targeted Date”, not the original file’s Created Date being mapped to “Targeted Date” as you mentioned in a previous comment above. (I still think targeted date should be left blank in Supernotes however to allow using it later and not losing the original created date of the imported note if targeted date is changed)
→ Created Date
currently the created date is being overwritten by todays date (date of import). This is confusing, and most importantly, the real original file creation date is not being captured at all
date you imported the note
→ Last Edited
if anything had to be left blank, I would leave the date and time of importing to not be captured in Supernotes. Ideally a new “imported date” metadata could be added to Supernotes instead though
here’s a screenshot of my original 20250508.md file:
