Support for tags?

[mcolyer]

This library is great, thanks for creating it! Any chance you have plans to support tags?

[RhetTbull]

At this time it cannot support tags as Apple does not provide a programmatic way to access these. If I could figure out how to do so I would. I've not checked the Apple Notes in macos Tahoe yet...but it's doubtful they've added support. Apple really limits what you can do with Notes outside the app. It might be possible vis Shortcuts but I've not explored this yet.

[mcolyer]

I figured that might be the case. Any chance it's possible to read the underlying SQLite files?

For reference I'm using this here: https://github.com/mcolyer/mcp-apple-notes-py

[RhetTbull]

I figured that might be the case. Any chance it's possible to read the underlying SQLite files?

It's possible but not simple. Unlike some other Apple apps, where the data in the SQLite CoreData backend is fairly straightforward to read (see my osxphotos which reads Photos data from the SQLite database), Apple Notes stores data in gzipped protobuffs which take quite a bit more work to unpack. See Apple Notes Liberator, a Java app that exports data from Apple Notes using this technique.

It might be easier to use the Apple private framework to access Notes directly but I've not had time to explore this. They're undocumented and would take some work to reverse engineer.

[RhetTbull]

By the way, I love the idea of an Apple Notes MCP server! I'll take a look at your project.

[mcolyer]

If you put me in the right general direction I might be able to help reverse engineer - but am not totally sure where to look. I've found claude code to be quite helpful for things like this.

[mcolyer]

Have you seen https://github.com/threeplanetssoftware/apple_cloud_notes_parser

[RhetTbull]

So I took a look at https://github.com/threeplanetssoftware/apple_cloud_notes_parser and with the help of Claude code, now have a python implementation that can read tags. It's a pile of AI slop at the moment but I'll see if I can get it cleaned up and uploaded to GitHub. Happy to add you as collaborator to the repo once I get it up. This should allow macnotesapp to read tags (but not write them).

One caveat: this won't work for encrypted notes and I see no way around that.

[mcolyer]

Amazing! Would it be able to search across the notes with tags (that's my main use case)? Happy to check it out once it's up.

Totally makes sense that encrypted notes wouldn't work.

[RhetTbull]

Yes. You'll be able to easily search for a note containing a tag or list the tags contained within a note. My goal is to release this is a separate library then incorporate it into macnotesapp for seamless read-only tags access.

[RhetTbull]

I've uploaded apple-notes-parser which provides access to read tags off notes and search for notes containing a tag. I've not yet integrated this into macnotesapp but will do that as soon as I get a chance (or you're welcome to submit a PR). The apple-notes-parser can use the same ID that AppleScript uses to get a specific note so interaction between macnotesapp and apple-notes-parser should be fairly straightforward.

[mcolyer]

It works great - so much faster and now supports folders and tags! See https://github.com/mcolyer/mcp-apple-notes-py/releases/tag/v0.3.0.

[RhetTbull]

Great!