The Files app and Finder are a perfectly acceptable replacement for Evernote

My main use for Evernote is to dump things I find when browsing on the internet. I am not always good about organizing what I dump in Evernote but do a search and find it later. I am however looking for alternatives to Evernote since I don’t think I want to continue to pay for it. I am looking at using Notes or Bear as a replacement dumping place.

I never liked Evernote, and I tried it a couple of times over the years. For the use you describe, I stole this idea from Federico Viticci, I think: I pinned an Apple Note to the top called Interesting Links and I dump those links into that one note. In most cases the link includes a header image from the site as well, which can be convenient in jogging my memory about it.

Another option is simply saving links to Pinterest; you can create private boards if you like.

Pinterest is an interesting possibility. I need to look into that.

I’ve been using Pinboard lately for the purpose of “these might be useful one day” links. If I have a specific project in mind I tag the links for that project, but if I’m just saving them for the heck of it, I leave them I untagged.

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Mitch, it’s funny, but I’ve become a huge Pinterest fan this year. I’ve been able to search within the site for all sorts of information and pics - from recipes to wall colors to Xmas card designs on Etsy to typographic examples - finding stuff more easily than by using Google. And I’ve been able to save interesting items to private boards and easily access them on the web or on the very nice iOS app.

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OK, now I’m playing with Pinterest. I previously stayed away from it because I thought it had girl cooties but it looks intriguing. I share a lot of retro-ads and links to social media and Pinterest looks like it could be a great place for that.

I don’t know whether to thank you for this. :slight_smile:

Ha. It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole with Pinterest. I did that the other day just by searching for Mac Productivity (thus making myself unproductive for an hour or so):

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Couple of workflow questions in order to solely rely on finder/icloud files and not evernote:

  • Evernote has the nice feature of automatically OCR’ing both PDF’s and photos and searching through those. It is seamless, which means I can take a picture, put it into a notebook, and be done. No more extra steps like activating scripts or something like that (e.g., not dependent on my computer being on 24/7 to make sure something gets filed in the right place).

  • Emailing items into Evernote is very convenient, can do it from the phone and add things to the subject line so it gets the right tags and put into the right notebook. That helps for things like flight details.

I’m attempting to use the finder and files app as an Evernote replacement too, but I found that on iOS the files app does not search within documents (eg PDF or DOC). Evernote on iOS would let me search inside of PDF and DOC files (if you had that level of subscription). The files app doesn’t seem to allow that on iOS.

Am I doing something wrong?

What I’ve done instead is use Google Drive. It appears as a volume/folder on my Mac, and I can search it via the drive iOS app. Google Drive does search within PDF/DOC files.

You’re not doing anything wrong. As of now Files on iOS does not index pdfs. That said the Notes app does! I find that I’m using a mix of the Files and Notes apps for all of this stuff. Notes probably has the better search but does not have labels and is, of course, a database. Of course, pdfs stored in Notes can be annotated just as they could be in Files. They can also be shared back out to Files or any other place a pdf can be shared.