PDF export – no pictures
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I just did my usual monthly PDF export of my journal, as I’ve been doing for years. I was surprised when it didn’t give me the usual notification first about how I can choose whether or not to download media that might not be on my computer yet. I use both my iPhone 14 and my Mac to journal. I always do this export on my Mac (which is currently running Day One 2024.11, newer than the last listing on the release notes page; I checked!) and I always tell that notification yes, download all media first.
I went ahead and did the export anyway. Result: It’s missing a lot of images!
I am not terribly concerned with this specific export and don’t have time to troubleshoot it, but wanted to share the glitch, hoping it’s just a little bug that you will fix soon and I can back up my May journal entries better later.
On a related topic, based on reading a couple other posts about exporting prior to this one, I’m wondering if maybe I do want to be doing JSON exports instead. Can you advise? I chose PDF exports because I don’t really need the pictures separately. It would be redundant because I save them all in my Files. My Mac has a 8Tb SSD . . . oh my gosh, I just checked the storage and see it’s like 90% full (my husband is filmmaker and shares the computer, so it’s his movies probably, not my journal entries, taking up most the space . . . could that be why the PDF backup didn’t bother to ask about downloading media?) Anyway, what I was getting at here is that I didn’t want to do JSON backups because I was worried about storage space. A PDF takes up much less space. But maybe you can tell me if the JSON files are zipped or otherwise maybe not as heavy as I fear?
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Thanks for writing in about the trouble you’re having getting images to show in your PDF exports. I’m curious, if you head to Settings> Sync> Storage, do you have “Optimize Device Storage” enabled? That setting means that not all your images are saved to your device, which can impact how exports work. If you don’t have the space to download the images to the device, that would create the trouble you’re seeing.
As for which kind of backup you should choose, that depends on your goals. A PDF is great for if you want something to look back at. They can’t be imported back into Day One though to restore your entries. It also won’t include Audio or Video. For that you will need a JSON export. This does mean that typically JSON exports are larger, as they contain more media and information.
If you let me know your goals for your back ups I can better advise. You should also know too that we are backing up everything through our Sync. You can log in to our web app to confirm exactly what we have saved: https://dayoneapp.com/guides/day-one-on-the-web/getting-started-on-the-web/
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