How To Use the Journal App on Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using the Journal app on your Mac. So macOS Tahoe includes a new app called Journal. Now, if you use an iPhone as well, then you may recognize this app because the Journal app was introduced last year on the iPhone. But now in 2025, we have that same app for the Mac. And in fact, using iCloud, it syncs across devices. So you can add entries, edit entries, and view your journal on either device. So what the Journal app does is relatively simple. It allows you to create entries. The entries can have text, images, and other things, and each entry has a date. So you can create a diary or a series of daily reports for work, things like that. But what the Journal app doesn't do is help you create documents. For that, you should stick to pages. The Journal app is merely for recording this kind of information easily and being able to view it yourself later on. It's not something you would really use to produce a publication or create online content. As long as you use Journal for what it's meant for, it's actually a pretty neat little app. So I'm going to launch the Journal app here on my Mac, and I've already got some entries here. But let's just start off by creating a completely new one, like this is a blank journal. There's a plus button here, or you could use File and New Entry, and you can create a new entry. Now each entry can have a title, and then you can just start writing. If you'd rather not have a title each time, then you can always go into Journal Settings, and there is a setting here for not having a title. I'll use a title here, and then I could start writing something right here, and you could just add multiple paragraphs of text like that. You can see it puts a nice space between each paragraph. It's a pretty nice writing environment. You could edit text in it. It's similar to notes in how you work with text. So you can select some text here. You could use the standard keyboard shortcuts you can see under Format, Font. You've got all the standard things like Bold, Italic, Underlined. You can create bullet lists. You can change the color of text. You can also click here and get controls to change the formatting for whatever you have selected. So you don't really have too much control over things. You can't change the fonts and things like that. Again, it's not a document creation app. It's just a journaling app. So if you really want to customize everything down to like what font you use, then something like Pages is more suited to that. Now you can also add media to any entry. So you can click here on the Photos icon, and then you can choose Photos, and then you can select some images to include. So let's just include a few random ones here like that and add them. And you can see it's going to do a little layout thing here. So I chose three images and put one on the left and two here on the right like that. You have little X buttons in the corner to remove one, and you can continue to add more if you like as well. So again, you don't really have as much control over this as you would if you're creating a document, say, in Pages. You're just adding some photos to an entry and it's just showing them to you. Another thing you could add is locations. If you click on the little Location button here, then you get a list of locations from the photos you took, or you can click Near Me and get a list of places near your current location. But you could also just search here and add one like that, and you'll see the location appear here. Now beyond typing, you can do other things to record information in the journal. For instance, you can click on the camera icon here and you could take a photo with your Mac's camera. You can record a video as well, so you can kind of keep a video diary. Or if you just want a photo of like what clothes you're wearing or how you did your makeup today, you could add a photo to it very easily like this. In addition, you could also go to Record Audio if you just want to record audio, not a video. So you can make an audio entry as well. Now you may be thinking, well if I can record audio, can I get a transcription? And yes, you can. So if you record audio here of something that you say or talk about or just mention things that went on in your day, then you can click Done and you get the little audio entry here. It mixes in with the other media. You can double click on it to go into it and notice there's the little button here to show you the transcript. And there you've got the transcript. So you could just leave it that and just have the audio there recorded. But you could also click here and you could add the transcript to the entry. So you could see it put it right where I had my text cursor. At that point, you could delete this if you want or leave it there. But of course, you can also use the regular dictation functions on your Mac. Now another thing that you can do that's really interesting on the Mac is you can click this button right here, which looks like the markup tools, but it's actually Add Drawing. And it allows you to create a drawing. If I scroll down here, you can see created this little canvas at the bottom. And I can use these tools here, like for instance, this tool to say, I'll use a pen at this thickness, and I can draw like that. And you can also add some basic shapes. You can add text boxes and do a lot of the things you normally do in markup to create sketches and things that you want to illustrate something in the journal. So there's a lot of different things you can have in an entry. But you can also just keep it simple and just have text. I think that's what most entries will probably end up being. When you're done, you can click the checkbox here, and you're back in just viewing mode for this. But you can click Edit to edit it again. Click the little back arrow here, and you'll see all your entries. So here's this entry. And you can see some older entries that I made. Note that to edit it again, you can control click, right click and go to edit. There's also these three dots here at the bottom, and you can choose edit. And you can go back in and edit. And another thing you can change here is the date at the top, click here. So this is very useful because often we record journal entries for say yesterday, we want to put what happened yesterday in an entry, but we don't want today's date on them, we want yesterday's date. So we can easily change this. So you can play catch up on your journal if you need to, and the dates will be right. If you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash Patreon. So far, this app seems like it's a fun way to record information about your day. But here's the feature that makes it super powerful. You can have multiple journals, go to file, new journal, you can create another journal, you can give it a name. I'll call this one work journal. And you can give it an icon, paint this little book here and give it a color like that or that or that. And then done. And you can see I've got the second journal here, I can go to this journal and add entries to this journal. Why does it make more powerful? Well, because there's so many different things you can do with journaling that aren't about recording how your day was. For instance, you could have a work journal or record the progress of various projects or different journal for each project. You can use it to record notes for meetings, you could use it for health related matters. Like if your doctor tells you to keep track of something on a daily basis, or use the same thing to track exercising, or your diet. If you're a caretaker for someone, you can record information about their health and needs. You can have a journal for each of your hobbies. If you're into birding, you could have a journal for that. If you play Dungeons and Dragons, you could have a journal talking about your different game sessions. Any information that's kind of date-based, you can put into a journal. And you can have multiple entries per day, you're not restricted to one per day. So if you did something in the morning, you've recorded entry for that, and you can record a separate entry for the afternoon on the same day. Another thing about multiple journals that opens up some interesting possibilities is you can create an entry and this is for my work journal. Or is it because I can finish this entry and when I go back to the list of entries right here, I can click here and choose journals. And guess what? You can have this entry in more than one journal. So if something should be in your personal journal and your work journal, you can have it in both like that. Now there are other aspects to the journaling app as well. One of those is notifications. You can get to it here with journal notifications, or just go to journal settings and then click on notifications. Now you can set up a schedule and have a certain time on certain days where you get a notification asking you to add to your journal. There's also this streak notification here which allows you to set it up so you get a kind of deadline at the end of the day if you haven't added something yet. There are also some other things you can do. For instance, you can search and you can search on the text, you can search on what's in the photos, or in the audio, or certain places, even your drawings. Another thing you could search for is bookmarked entries. So for instance, I can go to this entry and say this is one I want to use in something I'm writing later on. I can bookmark it and decide I want to see just my bookmarked items. Now I can go into search here and I could search for bookmark only. So you can use this as your favorite list or just as a temporary way to mark some of the items to see them together. You also have some special sections here. Insights will give you some basic things like your current streak, number of entries per year, other information here about your journaling. And you've got places which shows you a map and shows you journal entries on a map. The map is taken from the locations of your photos or the locations you've added to each entry. And you can move around on the map and see the entries that fit the location. Also, if you go into journal settings, you have the ability to lock your journal. Now, of course, your entire Mac should be locked behind your password anyway. But if you want to just have an extra layer of protection for your journal, you can do that and then it'll require your login password or touch ID to open up the journal. Now you have three ways to export things from the journal app. One is, of course, you can go into an entry here, you can select text, you can copy and paste if you want. But you could also use the file and then export option. But it doesn't work as well as you think. It works more as a backup. I can see it creates a little mini website. I can open up in Safari right here and it just has each day there and you can click on it and view it there. So it's a nice backup of your journal, but it's probably not very useful, especially since you can't pick and choose which entries to include. Still, if you're doing some serious journaling, I would try to remember to backup once a week using this technique. But the other thing you can do is print and printing works with, say, selected entries. I'll select this one, command click to select this one, but it's just those two entries and I can go to print. And of course, I'm not going to print. What I'm going to do is I'm going to click PDF button here or better yet, click the little arrow next to it and say open it up in preview. And this will create a PDF that isn't saved yet. And now maybe this is a way to share with somebody or to create a kind of simple document from my journal entries. Now, there's more to the journal app on the iPhone. For instance, you can easily record music you were listening to during that day and also how you're feeling that day. There's a little slider you can choose from that doesn't seem to be anywhere on the Mac version yet. Maybe those will be added to the Mac in the future and maybe other features as well. So this is a nice little app for recording things about your day for personal or business use. It's not too complex. It's just meant for journaling, not scrapbooking or document creation. And it does what it's supposed to do pretty well, but not much beyond that. It's not for everybody, but I'm sure many people will enjoy using it. Thanks for watching.