What's next: getting your old notes off your phone — safely

I'm writing this one before the features ship, on purpose.

Saying out loud what I'm working on keeps me honest. It also means that if something here sounds useful — or sounds wrong — you can tell me while it's still easy to change. Nothing below is released yet. It's all running on my own phone and Mac right now, and I'm testing it with my own notes.

The problem: your phone fills up

GeoJSONic keeps everything on your phone. That's the point — no account, no server, no cloud copy you didn't ask for. But photos and videos add up. My own journal is a couple hundred notes and about 3 GB of media, and my single biggest note — a weekend trip with 48 photos and videos — takes up 648 MB by itself.

At some point you want the old stuff somewhere else. The usual answer is "put it in the cloud." I don't want to give that answer.

Archive to Mac

The next GeoJSONic can send older notes straight to your Mac over your own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth — the same phone-to-phone connection nearby sharing already uses, no internet required.

It works like this:

Your Mac shows a code.
You point your iPhone's camera at it.
GeoJSONic shows exactly what it's about to send — say, every note older than six months — and you tap Send.
Your Mac checks every single file that arrived: every photo, every video, every recording, every route.
Only then does your phone offer to delete those notes to free up space. And only the ones the Mac confirmed.

That last step is the one I care about most. Deleting from your phone happens after the copy is verified, and only if you tap the button. If anything didn't arrive intact, the phone says so and keeps everything.

The first time I ran it for real, it moved two old notes off my phone, verified them, and cleaned them up. Small, but it worked the way it should.

Look before you move anything

Moving things is easier when you can see them first. So there's a second option: your Mac can ask your phone for a summary — each note's title, date, place, tags, how many photos and videos it has, and how much space it takes up. Not the note text, and not the photos themselves. Just enough to decide.

From there you can see which notes are eating your storage, sort them by age, and even look at them all on a globe on your Mac. Then you pick what to back up — "everything from that trip," "anything with video older than three months" — and your phone asks you to confirm before sending.

PortaDrive becomes the home for your archive

PortaDrive already opens a PDF like a USB drive so you can browse the files inside it in Finder. Every GeoJSONic backup is one of those PDFs — a readable document with your notes, as open GeoJSON, and your original photos and videos tucked inside.

The next PortaDrive grows a library: a folder on your Mac that holds every archive you've sent over, checks that none of them have been damaged, and lets you find any note again. Open any archive in PortaDrive and your photos are right there in Finder. No proprietary format — if GeoJSONic and PortaDrive disappeared tomorrow, your files would still be ordinary PDFs, photos, and GeoJSON.

You can just ask

Here's the part I'm most excited about. The first version of the Mac side is a command-line tool. That sounds nerdy — but it means an AI assistant like Claude can run it for you.

So instead of learning where the buttons are, you can type something like "move everything older than six months off my phone," scan the code that appears, and let it handle the rest. Or ask "what's using the most space on my phone?" and get an answer. You stay in control — nothing leaves your phone until you tap Send, and nothing is deleted until you tap Delete — but you don't have to do the busywork.

Smaller things coming to GeoJSONic

Merge notes. Select a few notes and merge them into one. The note you pick keeps its title and place; the others become entries in its journal, each keeping its own time, text, and pin on the map. All the photos, videos, and routes come along.
Richer places. Tap a store or restaurant on the map and you'll see its phone number (tap to call), website, and hours — "open now" at a glance.
Reviews & photos. One tap opens Apple's place card for ratings, reviews, and photos, right on top of the map.
Share a place with anyone. Share sends a simple link. If your friend has GeoJSONic, it opens right on that spot. If they don't, it opens a page with a map and directions in Apple Maps or Google Maps — here's what that looks like. No app required, no account, and the place lives entirely in the link.

What isn't changing

No account. No server holding your journal. No cloud copy. Your notes stay on your devices, in formats you can open without me. Everything above is built around that, not in spite of it.

I'll write again when these ship. In the meantime, if you want to tell me what you'd do with them — or what worries you — I read everything: jason@geojsonic.com.