How to go back to Legacy Version

[NightStalker 407]

This new version of Evernote, released only days after iOS14 came out (I ran betas of iOS14 before the main release) seems to be a disaster.

Once again, they seem to be unable to get it right before a major release (this has been the case for years - I've been a Premium subscriber almost from the beginning of Evernote).  Either their beta testers just don't pick up these bugs, or the coders don't fix them.  And once again, they change stuff for the sake of changing it - like the Clipper, which now doesn't seem to work at all.  See separate thread on Saving to Evernote from iOS.  Mine simply doesn't work.  No clipped note.  Zero.  And this is a disaster for me as I source information from both the web browser (Safari) and Flipboard constantly.  I can't do that with this new version on iOS14.

I don't know if the problem is Evernote, or iOS14, or most likely both together.  But iOS14 has been in the works for months, with lots of beta testers, so I can't imagine that the Evernote coding team didn't have access to iOS14.

So - how can I downgrade my iOS Evernote back to the previous version, which worked just fine?

[CalS 5,281]

39 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

But some people who take a legacy search to start with have a broken legacy database or search index. I am pretty sure the majority of people in this (long) thread don’t know by heart whether their legacy data is clean, or how to fix it if not. Then it is garbage in, garbage out.

One thing I have found is that ScanSnap OCR is better than EN OCR.  I just did a search on Desktop 6.25.1 and V10 (desktop, browser and IOS) and found 326 notes with 6.25.1 and 256 notes with V10, a difference of 70 notes.  Most of the missing notes have the search term in the PDF.  Though one note with the term was created using the EN clipper, weird as that is a text and image note.  The PDF notes are mostly scanned receipts.  I didn't go all scientific on this just checked the first five that were missing and took a look at the bottom of the list.

As I've mentioned in these forums before I saw this problem some years back and worked with support.  It was recognized by EN as an issue and had to do with how the font was being viewed by the EN OCR engine, I paraphrase here.   Still not fixed.  So net of it all if I were to fully move to V10 I would be missing 70 results in a fairly common for me single word search. 

Really nothing to do with V10 specifically, more an ongoing issue with the OCR engine EN used.   Unfortunately these are the kind of errors you will never catch unless you are really sure a note exists but is not appearing in your search results and you go at it a different way.  That's how I identified the problem back then. 

I actually thought this should have been an Achtung! for EN when the issue was unearthed.  It  just reeks of bad data management no matter the size of the effected user base.  Another reason I am sticking with 6.25.1 with its local database as search is simply more accurate.  🤷‍♂️

[PinkElephant 8,178]

There are different strategies to OCR something, and they lead to different results.

There was a thread explaining a little how EN builds the OCR result. They build sort of a tree from OCR results. It is important to understand that it is only created for the search index, not to enable the extraction of text. In fact you can’t extract this sort of OCR, because it is not stored as a text readable for humans.

ScanSnap OCR on the other hand uses the leading Abby Fine Reader software. And it’s main goal is to overlay a picture with a text layer, not to build an index. This text can be extracted and used independently from the scanned picture document.

Both approaches have their merits, but they don’t deliver comparable results.

Once there is a text layer in a pdf, EN will use it and not try to OCR it again. To really run a test it would be necessary to scan a number of documents twice, one with and one without being OCRed before import. Then import all into EN, wait a little for the server to work on them, and test the search results against each other.

[CalS 5,281]

Point of it is that all the missing notes were OCR;d by SS prior to synching to EN.  The notes span five years.  So EN overlaid those SS OCR results or they should appear in the search set per the desktop..

Whatever the strategy search with 6.25.1 is more accurate than V10 or pre V10 IOS and Web.  EN OCR does not effectively work with all PDFs.  No emotional baggage for me,.  It is what it is.  One needs to be able to rely on the completeness of search, PDF and image OCR included.  Missing 70 notes isn't a one off.

[PinkElephant 8,178]

This probably would deserve further analysis. Tech support was quite interested in solving my search differences - they were less in the OCR, more in the sharing status of the notes, and in the age of the notes.

[CalS 5,281]

3 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

This probably would deserve further analysis. Tech support was quite interested in solving my search differences - they were less in the OCR, more in the sharing status of the notes, and in the age of the notes.

Got the t shirt on this one, to no avail.  If they are interested and reading the forums they know where I am.  

[PinkElephant 8,178]

Uhhh - „they know where I am“ always sounds like a SWAT team at 3 in the morning 😱

[CalS 5,281]

17 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

Uhhh - „they know where I am“ always sounds like a SWAT team at 3 in the morning 😱

Pretty sure the EN SWAT team won't be showing up at my door!  I'll turn on my VPN just to be safe.

[boardtc 8]

I want to avoid having to export 1 notebook at a time, So I uninstalled Evernote in Windows. Then I installed Evernote_6.25.3.9348 legacy and when I logged in it only showed my notes up t0 2018! When I uninstalled and reinstalled current all my recent notes are there.

[PinkElephant 8,178]

Did you follow the procedure described in this help document ?

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052560314-Install-an-older-version-of-Evernote

[217d30612be3 4]

Does anybody have the change-log for Windows version 6.25.3.9348 (and/or know of any improvements it brought/issues it created)? I'm stable and happy on 6.25.1.9091 and wondering if it's worth it.

[agsteele 2,955]

This is the iOS sub-forum. Pop over to the Windows 6 area and have a trawl around. You could well find your answer there.