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. 

macOS Tahoe incudes 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. 

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. What the Journal app doesn't do is help you create documents. For that you should stick to something like Pages. The Journal App is merely for recording this kind of information easily and being able to view it yourself later on. It is not something you would really use to produce a publication or create online content. As long as you use Journal for what it is meant for it's actually a pretty neat little app. 

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 can 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. Then I can start writing something right here. 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 can edit text in it and it is similar to Notes in how you work with text. So you can select some text here. You can use the standard keyboard shortcuts. You can see under Format, Font, you have all the standard things like Bold, Italics, Underline. 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 is not a document creation app. It's just a journalling app. So if you're really want to customize everything down till 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 in the Photos icon and then you can choose Photos. Then you can select some images to include. So let's include a few random ones here. Like that, and add them. You can see it's going to do a little layout thing here. So I chose three images and it puts one on the left and two here on the right, like that. You have little x buttons in the corner to remove one. 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 were creating a document say in Pages. You're just adding some photos to an entry and it is just showing them to you. 

Another thing you can 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 can also just Search here and add one, like that. 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 can 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 to add 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 can also go to record audio. If you just want to record audio and 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. 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, 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. There you've got the transcripts. So you could just leave it at that and just have the audio there recorded. But you can also click here and you can add the transcript to the entry. So you can see it put it right where I had my text cursor. At that point you can 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. It is actually Add Drawing. It allows you to create a drawing, if I scroll down here you can see it created this little canvas at the bottom. 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. You can also add some basic shapes. You can add textboxes 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 are 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, or two-finger click and go to Edit. There's also these three dots here at the bottom and you can choose Edit. You can go back in and Edit. 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, you want yesterday's date. So we can easily change this. So you can play catchup on your journal if you need to and the dates will be right. 

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Now so far this app seems like it is a fun way to record information about your day. But here's the feature that makes it super powerful. You can have multiple journals. If you go to File, New Journal you can create another journal. You can give it a name. I'll call this one Work Journal. You can give it an icon. Paint this little book here and give is a color like that, or that or that. Then Done. You can see I've got this second Journal here. I can go to this journal and add entries to this journal. Why does it make it more powerful? Well, because there is so many different things you can do with journalling that aren't about recording how your day way. For instance you can have a work journal where you record the progress of various projects. Or a different journal for each project. You can use it to record notes for meetings. You can use it for health related matters like if you doctor tells you to keep track of something on a daily basis or use the same things 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 can have a journal for that. If you play Dungeons & Dragons you can have a journal talking about your different game sessions. Any information that is 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 record an 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 from my work journal. Or it is? 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. 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 Journalling 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 setup 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 can 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 could search on the text. You can search on what's in the photos or in the audio or certain places. Even your drawings. Another things you can Search for is Bookmarked entries. So, for instance, I can do 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 just want to see just my Bookmark items. Now I can go into Search here and I can search for Bookmarked Only. So you can use this as your Favorites List or just as a temporary way to mark some of the items to see them together. 

You also have some special sections here. Insight will give you some basic things like your current Streak, the number of entries per year, other information here about your journalling. You've got places which shows you a Map and shows you your journal entries on a map. The map is taken from the locations of your photos or the locations you've added to each entry. 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 will require your login password or touch ID to open up the Journal. 

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 and you can Copy & Paste if you want. But you can 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. You can click on it and view it there. So it is a nice backup of your Journal but it is probably not very useful. Especially since you can't pick and choose which entries to include. Still if you're doing some serious journalling I would try to remember to backup once a week using this technique. But the other thing you can do is Print. Printing works with say selected entries. I'll select this one, Command Click to select this one. But it is 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 the PDF button here or better yet click the little arrow next to it and say Open It Up in Preview. This will create a PDF that isn't saved yet. Now maybe this is a way to share with somebody or to create a kind of simple document from my Journal Entries. 

Now there is 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 is just meant for journalling. Not scrapbooking or document creation. It does what it is 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.