As adding the ability to “View attachments without downloading” seems to be too difficult for the development team to implement, how about at least increasing the size of Secured Notes? Instead of 10,000 characters (which is in fact quite small), how about 1 MB or even larger?
Hi, I am a new to Bitwarden (want to switch because of the LastPass issues) and encountering such an old “bug” that has not been adressed since 4+ years makes me think wether I should look for a different service instead. Do the developers not want to address this issue for some reason, or is the development process just that slow?
(I subscribed to the pro version of Bitwarden)
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Fix this. This limitation is so lame in general. Even without this being related to lastpass importing it is just way to limiting.
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Considering migration from LastPass to Bitwarden. Web app, Chrome extension, and iOS apps look promising. Decent documentation on a migration path. Things are looking good.
Then I tried to import.
Fail.
My import fails because four secure notes exceed 10,000 characters. One is a note for my parents where, as power of attorney, I’ve kept all my notes on their accounts over the years. Sure, I can trim that down, but it’s annoying. The other three are GPG and PGP keys. Not a fun way to discover that Bitwarden doesn’t support key storage.
So, if I migrate to Bitwarden, not only do I have to choose what to remove from my longer secure notes, I have to find another tool to manage my keys? My excitement for Bitwarden has lessened.
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@burke Welcome to the forum!
If your keys are up to 3072 bytes in length, they could be stored in custom fields (one key per field).
In addition, if you have a premium subscription, you also have the ability to attach files to your vault items (up to 500 MB/file). This may be a way for you to store your PoA notes. If the notes primarily consist of login credentials to your parents’ accounts, you could also consider setting up a new Bitwarden vault to hold that information (depending on how consistent the format/structure of your note is, you may even be able to use search-and-replace to convert it into a CSV that can be imported into this new vault, sparing you the manual data entry); then set up an organization to share those vault contents with your own account.
If you are interested in pursuing some of the solutions proposed above, but have follow-up questions or need assistance, I would suggest starting a separate thread in the Ask the Community section of the forum.
I tried to paste something into the Notes field on MacOS desktop and it said I hit a character limit. Yet I can save that exact text as a .txt and attach to my entry.
So just eliminate the character limit for a better user experience. If I can attach a 30MB file, for example, I should be able to past a bunch of text into the Notes field. 
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I actually think storing notes as big as 10K characters (after encryption, I’m aware) is a bit of an anti-pattern; attachments should be used for that.
The core app and features should be lean, fast. Arbitrarily-sized note fields will inevitably mean some people will have file-sized notes in their vaults, resulting in slower sync, slower encrypt/decrypt, and sometime along the way, posts regarding the app’s performance.
Still, I’m curious: what do people store (in plain-text) in Notes fields that takes up more than 6.5K characters?
PS: if you’re serious about storing notes securely, take a look at Standard Notes – it’s not a good password manager (much like Bitwarden isn’t a good note manager), but it’s a very very good cryptographically secure notes manager.
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Looks interesting. Thanks!
As a typical usecase we use BitWarden also as a keyvault to deploy our software. And we used to be able to store pfx files as base64 in notes. We have deployment that uses these secrets automatically.
I can understand that, but it still seems like file attachments would be a better approach for such a use case (an encrypted base64 representation of a binary file will be significantly larger than the original file).
Hi @Jelle and welcome to the community,
For your use-case, regarding a keyvault replacement for management of things like API keys, certificates, and other types of machine secrets you may wish to look into the Bitwarden Secrets Manager as well.
I noticed, but did not yet have time to dive into this. I however did find the attachments in the secrets so now I just added the file to an item for a certificate, password goes in the item itself and the pfx is stored as an attachment. I’m happy for now…
Bitwarden team, please consider expanding this limit. It seems arbitrarily low.
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Single secure notes seem to be size limited to either a small number of characters or overall storage size (i.e., bytes/KB). The same limitations apply to both the desktop app and browser addons, and the phone app.
This might be fine for tiny bits of info (like names, address, phone, for one individual), but it makes it impossible to keep larger amounts of interrelated details within one note.
Use case… Prior to using BitWarden, I used a single text file to keep track of temporarily important data, like credentials for test websites I was developing and related info on content and script snippets to try and/or use. The total size of one such typical plain text file is currently 31KB, and it cannot be copy/pasted into a single secure note and saved.
I didn’t want to create an entire batch of logins that will not be valid after testing is done, nor did I want to edit and resize and split 31KB of text data into multiple secure notes that can’t be opened and accessed at the same time to locate related info on the same project or topic. I’ve ended up with 5 secure notes in total after severely reworking and reformatting the text.
The info is certainly sensitive and it could be damaging if it were to be read and used to compromise sites at the admin and root level, so obviously it needs to be secured.
It would be tremendously helpful if secure notes could handle substantially more content within a single note. I’m not suggesting megabytes, but something reasonable to accommodate several pages of text, like 64k, or even 32k could be workable.
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I don’t need my notes to be encrypted — just longer. I rarely store confidential information in my notes, so I fail to see why I should be forced to be limited to what can be encrypted. I merely use it to correlate relevant information to the entry most of the time.
I just evaluated password solutions for my company, and had to choose the significantly more expensive 1Password due to this issue. Too many notes already longer than this in our current system. The problem isn’t the philosophy, in itself. Attachments might have been fine for these notes back when they were created, but we had no reason to avoid long notes at the time. The problem is that Bitwarden is out of step with the rest of the industry on this point, undermining the ability of sizeable companies to migrate to it from elsewhere.
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Created an account just for voting for this feature.
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I just did the same
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+1 here – I’m guessing this isn’t such an easy thing to solve, given the length of time this has been outstanding, but at this point the competition can point at this thread and say something unfriendly, like: see, they can’t seem to solve a basic text field size issue that their users have been talking about for years…
Not sure if the community can do anything to help investigate/propose approaches or help in other ways… we do love all the Bitwarden goodness.