Request: Add an option to preferences to stop video links from auto-converting to embedded videos.

[bethriley 16]

I have a calendar note with a lot of text links to YouTube videos that I copy and paste to different areas of the note depending on my needs. Recently when I copy and paste a link, it automatically embeds the video, messing up the format of the calendar. Every time I paste a link, I have to do an undo action to make it revert back to a regular link. I guess it's not the worst thing in the world as long as undo continues to work, but if possible I would like to find a way to prevent it from doing that in the first place.

[estevancarlos 33]

Oooh yeah. Turn this off! I make lists of youtube videos for sharing and reference. Automatically embedding them requires many extra steps to remove them when you repeat this many times. Users already had the ability to click on the video to watch it. There was never a reason to automatically embed it.

[Bithead 5]

I would love to see this changed. If people like this new feature, great but this is not useful for everyone. Honestly, I would never actually watch a video within Evernote. There should be a configuration/preference option to set this to either be embedded "or" a link. Let the user choose how this behaves. I have to manually convert every URL back to a link and it's very inefficient.

[gazumped 12,063]

Hi.  Which device / OS / Evernote version? 

[DTLow 5,744]

On 12/8/2020 at 1:11 PM, bethriley said:

Recently when I copy and paste a link, it automatically embeds the video, messing up the format of the calendar.

It's a display thing; the video isn't actually embedded   
Currently there's no method to disable this

I moved the discussion to the Requests forum, and added my vote

[bethriley 16]

Device is web browser. I don't know what version, but I assume it's the most recent one since it's on the web and not in an app.

It looks like it's embedded because it plays in Evernote when I click on it. As far as I know, that's what it means for a video to be embedded.

[stocky2605 402]

have you tried to create a link using CMD-K (not sure if this is the correct shortcut)  (entering plain text and assign a link to it  manually) - maybe this prevents the auto conversion?

[bethriley 16]

6 hours ago, stocky2605 said:

have you tried to create a link using CMD-K (not sure if this is the correct shortcut)  (entering plain text and assign a link to it  manually) - maybe this prevents the auto conversion?

The calendar I made is a workout schedule with links to exercise videos on YouTube. For the past year, I've been copying previously used links (which I have written out in a specific way) to future dates when I plan to do them again. But just recently it has started inserting the video itself into the cell, which messes it up like I said. It would be a lot more work to do everything manually instead of just copying things like I was able to do before.

(Like I said, using ctrl+z does fix it, but it's annoying that it happens in the first place, and I would hate to find one day that undo doesn't work for some reason, or I mess up somehow and have to manually try to put the calendar back the way it was, which is difficult because there's no ruler to let me see how big each cell is.)

This seems to be a recently added "feature," but I think it would be better to be able to go to insert > video if you want to embed a video instead of having it do it automatically when I copy a text link that leads to a video.

[stocky2605 402]

1 hour ago, bethriley said:

The calendar I made is a workout schedule with links to exercise videos on YouTube. For the past year, I've been copying previously used links (which I have written out in a specific way) to future dates when I plan to do them again. But just recently it has started inserting the video itself into the cell, which messes it up like I said. It would be a lot more work to do everything manually instead of just copying things like I was able to do before.

(Like I said, using ctrl+z does fix it, but it's annoying that it happens in the first place, and I would hate to find one day that undo doesn't work for some reason, or I mess up somehow and have to manually try to put the calendar back the way it was, which is difficult because there's no ruler to let me see how big each cell is.)

This seems to be a recently added "feature," but I think it would be better to be able to go to insert > video if you want to embed a video instead of having it do it automatically when I copy a text link that leads to a video.

you could create a request (or rename this thread) to add an option to the preferences whether the links should auto-converted or not.

[Display Name 123 5]

I am a teacher, and I use Evernote, among other purposes, to store pre-fab comments that I copy and paste in my feedback on student papers. Some of these comments have YouTube URLs. I need to copy and paste the YouTube URL, so I need the Evernote note to store the text of the URL for me.

Now, after the big update, it still kind of works, but I am often inadvertently turning the URLs into embedded videos, which is no help to me at all for my use case, and ends up being a headache. Please fix this, perhaps by making a setting to turn off automatic YouTube video embedding. Thanks!

[BenC 1]

I have the same issue for my use case.

One has to wonder whether or not the EN management team has changed the default for video links to embed them in order to very quickly bump up the MB of data that users of the Basic service tier are storing in order to push them toward premium, paid services.

[gazumped 12,063]

8 hours ago, BenC said:

the EN management team has changed the default for video links to embed them in order to very quickly bump up the MB of data that users of the Basic service tier are storing in order to push them toward premium, paid services.

Hi.  You're using a free service.  It has limits.

[DTLow 5,744]

8 hours ago, BenC said:

One has to wonder whether or not the EN management team has changed the default for video links to embed them in order to very quickly bump up the MB of data that users of the Basic service tier are storing in order to push them toward premium, paid services.

afaik  There's no increase in note size; there's no "embedded" video
 

[Ronald Williams 0]

+1000 for this request. 

Having Evernote automagically convert my youtube links into videos is very disruptive to my notes (which are mostly bulleted lists) - especially when you copy / paste a body of text that contains one of the links. It was a regular text link, just how I wanted it, but suddenly it's gigantic... Seems like a lot of other people have come to the same conclusion, see the related comments in the linked threads below.

My 2¢ : 

- the easiest fix would be to allow users to control the behavior via a preference

- it might be useful to be able to expand videos selectively - consider having the text link be the default and adding a hover option to expand the video

 

 

[sheeptest 3]

Yeah it's super annoying.

Evernote is purpose built for taking text notes. I want to take notes there.

YouTube is purpose built for watching videos. I want to watch YouTube videos there.

I don't want to go through the hassle of setting options on every single YouTube link I paste into Evernote, this should be a global option.

[Sean McCormick 0]

On 1/4/2021 at 11:21 AM, Bithead said:

I would love to see this changed. If people like this new feature, great but this is not useful for everyone. Honestly, I would never actually watch a video within Evernote. There should be a configuration/preference option to set this to either be embedded "or" a link. Let the user choose how this behaves. I have to manually convert every URL back to a link and it's very inefficient.

plus the video doesn't even play in Evernote, it just says it's unavailable. and the "watch on youtube" link in there doesn't work..

[gazumped 12,063]

11 hours ago, Sean McCormick said:

plus the video doesn't even play in Evernote

I don't think there would be so many comments if the feature didn't work at all... maybe try Support to find out why it doesn't work for you?

[matej1990 199]

Well... you can have just YT link (non-embedded video) in the note. First make a space (spacebar), then paste a YT link and again space (spacebar), to create a clickable YT link. It's fast and it works. I use this method in Windows and Android.

Example of integrated YT link and just clickable YT link (notice the space at the beginning):

[Mike P 2,974]

2 minutes ago, matej1990 said:

Well... you can have just YT link (non-embedded video) in the note. First make a space (spacebar), then paste a YT link and again space (spacebar), to create a clickable YT link. It's fast and it works. I use this method in Windows and Android.

Nice. Works for me too.

[friedsr 1]

On 4/7/2021 at 6:36 AM, matej1990 said:

Well... you can have just YT link (non-embedded video) in the note. First make a space (spacebar), then paste a YT link and again space (spacebar), to create a clickable YT link. It's fast and it works. I use this method in Windows and Android.

Example of integrated YT link and just clickable YT link (notice the space at the beginning):

This is really helpful. It's somewhat annoying that you have to apply a workaround for something that should be a preference. But it does work, so now I only need to remember to put spaces around my links and to restart the application every time I want to search. 

[Bithead 5]

I agree 100%, this does work but it's an inefficient workaround. I seriously hope that a configurable option is coming. I was hoping to use Evernote to "improve" my workflow, not hamper it.

[bethriley 16]

On 4/7/2021 at 3:36 AM, matej1990 said:

Well... you can have just YT link (non-embedded video) in the note. First make a space (spacebar), then paste a YT link and again space (spacebar), to create a clickable YT link. It's fast and it works. I use this method in Windows and Android.

 

That doesn't work for my purposes. I need a text link that only takes up a small amount of space or it won't fit on my calendar.

[gazumped 12,063]

47 minutes ago, bethriley said:

That doesn't work for my purposes. I need a text link that only takes up a small amount of space or it won't fit on my calendar.

About the shortest link you could get would be " http://bit.ly/try44 " (I use Bitly and edited their slightly longer suggestion to get this.) It goes to a recent Evernote YT video...

Edit - come to think of it,  so does this - X

https://bitly.com/

[Mike P 2,974]

4 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Edit - come to think of it,  so does this - X

Exactly. We have complete control over the text that appears on the page.

[gazumped 12,063]

23 minutes ago, Mike P said:

Exactly. We have complete control over the text that appears on the page.

...Which suggests another small experiment.  If you bury the youtube URL in a text link,  is it still recognised and expanded,  or do you just get the link?  As in: EN video

Edit:  Hmmn.  Workflowy also embeds Youtube videos (optionally) and is not fooled by a link -  

[Mike P 2,974]

43 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Which suggests another small experiment.  If you bury the youtube URL in a text link,  is it still recognised and expanded,  or do you just get the link? 

You just get the link. Incidentally links to Google docs work the same way. So you get:

• video preview or Google doc icon as default
• text link if you use the space before and after hack
• Whatever text you like if you create a hyperlink and paste the link into the link box

[bethriley 16]

Now when I copy and paste text that links to a YouTube video, the cell doesn't go back to its original size even when I use undo. I see that it doesn't expand the cell when I paste a bit.ly link, but I'm not going to take the time to make bit.ly links of every single video that I'm ever going to use. I've decided to use a Word document with a calendar template that I found online instead of Evernote to keep track of my workouts.

(The image below shows that even if YT links were very short it would still look bad. I know that if I used bit.ly links I could do text links, but like I said I'm not going to take the time to make new bit.ly links for every new workout.)

Edit: I see what you mean now about putting a space first. That does keep it from embedding the video. But it also doesn't look as neat unless I go back and delete the extra space. Since I've already moved everything to a Word document, I guess I'll just keep it there.

[Mike P 2,974]

2 hours ago, bethriley said:

The image below shows that even if YT links were very short it would still look bad.

Why don't you just use the ability to have the displayed text whatever you want? This is the same as in a word document. You can add the text, highligt and click the insert link button (or ctrl-K) or just click the insert link and type the text into the text box. Then paste the link into the link box.

[bethriley 16]

On 4/21/2021 at 12:52 PM, Mike P said:

Why don't you just use the ability to have the displayed text whatever you want? This is the same as in a word document. You can add the text, highligt and click the insert link button (or ctrl-K) or just click the insert link and type the text into the text box. Then paste the link into the link box.

That only works when adding a link for the first time, not when copying and pasting linked text.

[Mike P 2,974]

21 minutes ago, bethriley said:

That only works when adding a link for the first time, not when copying and pasting linked text.

You are right. I'm quite surprised that it strips out the text and just pastes the link. You would need to extract the link by editing it and then do the whole process over again. Not straightforward.

[htevernote 0]

It's not efficient but another "fix":
Undo (cmd + z / ctrl + z) right after pasting will convert it back to text.

[KailuaBeach 0]

The Ctrl-z is a nice workaround, but this automatic feature of embedding YouTube videos should be turned off by default. The video is small, you can't expand it, and you can't do most of the things you can do when watching it on YouTube, so most people will want to watch it on YouTube and not clog up their notes with distracting YouTube video images. Please fix this.

[agsteele 3,059]

19 hours ago, KailuaBeach said:

The Ctrl-z is a nice workaround, but this automatic feature of embedding YouTube videos should be turned off by default. The video is small, you can't expand it, and you can't do most of the things you can do when watching it on YouTube, so most people will want to watch it on YouTube and not clog up their notes with distracting YouTube video images. Please fix this.

This is a user setting in Settings / Notes and select your preferred default view for a YouTube video.  This has been with us since late 2022.

[Sayre Ambrosio 525]

28 minutes ago, agsteele said:

This is a user setting in Settings / Notes and select your preferred default view for a YouTube video.  This has been with us since late 2022.

As @agsteelesaid, this has been in settings for a bit.