How is Rename Attachment supposed to work?

[normanlamont 1]

I scan documents from Scansnap into an Import Folder. The Scansnap automatically names them.  Some documents I would like to rename for ease of finding the PDFs in future outside of Evernote. I thought if I right-clicked in the resulting Evernote note and did 'Rename Attachment' it would rename the original Scansnap PDF. But it doesn't seem to do anything. It has no effect on the original PDF. 

Have I misunderstood what it's supposed to do, or does it just not work?

(Windows 10, Evernote 6.3.3)

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,006]

I haven't used Rename Attachment before, but in a quick test it seems to do what I would suppose it to do, renaming the attachment within the Evernote system, i.e., in your local Evernote database, on the Evernote servers, and thus wherever you might access the note with the attachment (e.g., Web browser, Android device, etc.). It wouldn't rename it anywhere else, e.g., in the folder from which it was imported into Evernote. To accomplish that, you could do Rename Attachment, then Save As... and save it to the original folder using the new name. Of course, that would give you two copies of it there, under different names.

[normanlamont 1]

Thanks Dave. I think I may have misunderstood the function. The documents I'm talking about don't appear as an attachment to an Evernote note, they are the note. They are PDFs which appear in Evernote because they're in an import folder. What I wanted was to use Rename Attachment and it would rename the PDF on my hard drive. I understand now that's not what it's supposed to do. 

[CalS 5,309]

48 minutes ago, normanlamont said:

Thanks Dave. I think I may have misunderstood the function. The documents I'm talking about don't appear as an attachment to an Evernote note, they are the note. They are PDFs which appear in Evernote because they're in an import folder. What I wanted was to use Rename Attachment and it would rename the PDF on my hard drive. I understand now that's not what it's supposed to do. 

If you want you can delete the PDF on your hard drive once it is in EN by selecting Delete under source in the Import Folders dialogue box.  The PDF should be safely stored in EN at that point.

[DTLow 5,745]

57 minutes ago, normanlamont said:

The documents I'm talking about don't appear as an attachment to an Evernote note, they are the note. They are PDFs which appear in Evernote because they're in an import folder. What I wanted was to use Rename Attachment and it would rename the PDF on my hard drive.

Just to be clear, you are talking about two different items
- the pdf file
- the file attachment in the note   <<< this is being renamed

I don't even keep the pdf files after importing into Evernote
 

[Dave-in-Decatur 4,006]

5 hours ago, normanlamont said:

Thanks Dave. I think I may have misunderstood the function. The documents I'm talking about don't appear as an attachment to an Evernote note, they are the note. They are PDFs which appear in Evernote because they're in an import folder. What I wanted was to use Rename Attachment and it would rename the PDF on my hard drive. I understand now that's not what it's supposed to do. 

Glad it's clearer. For the record, even when a note consists of nothing but a PDF, the PDF is still an attachment. There's no other way for it to get into Evernote.

If you want to rename the note for filing on the hard drive (and I can totally understand wanting to do that), there are a couple of ways, depending on your setting in the Evernote dialog Tools > Import Folders, under Source. If you have it set to Delete, then the way I suggested before would actually work OK, as long as, after renaming the PDF in EN, you save it to somewhere other than the import folder. OTOH, if you have that setting as Keep, then after EN imports the PDF you could use Explorer to move the file to a different folder and give it a different name (and probably give it that name in EN using Rename Attachment, for the sake of consistency).