Performance Enhancements for Moving Notes

[Stacey Harmon 1,104]

I have a workflow where a couple times a year, I move a lot of notes from one notebook to another (about 700 notes, twice per year). The notes get captured in one notebook, and then once they've been renamed, they get moved to another notebook to join up with other notes that have gone through the same process. 

I'm aware there is a 50 note limit and there are requests to have this increased.

Regardless of if that changes, I cannot drop Legacy Evernote until the performance of moving notes is dramatically improved.

I timed the process. To select and move 50 notes in v10.24, it took 3 minutes and 48 seconds. And during that time, I could not use Evernote as I had to wait for it to finish moving the notes. If I had repeated that process to relocate the notes in that notebook (close to 800), it would have taken a full hour. 

I moved over to Legacy Evernote. It took me less than 1 minute to select all, move the notes, and let it sync in the background. And, while it was syncing, I had the ability to work in other parts of Evernote.

I understand that the syncing process is totally different in v10, and that I may never have the ability to work in Evernote while the system is moving notes around, but, it is a huge problem to have to manage a 1 hour process of moving notes 50 at a time...especially when this workflow can be done in 1 minute over in Legacy.  I considered as a workaround in v10 exporting the notes as a enex file, then importing them. But, I still would have been limited to the 50 note count, and would have had to wait while it deleted all the notes that I exported. Ultimately, I decided it wasn't an effective work around. Legacy is far superior in this regard.

I look forward to immense improvements in this over time and please do not drop Legacy until it is within an acceptable range of note movement. 

For reference, I'm on a Mac, running Big Sur 11.6, with 910 Mbps of bandwidth, using desktop v10.24.

In my experience the more notes a user has, the stickier a user they are. But, with this 50 note cap and lag in moving notes around the system, it makes it very difficult to design workflows that allow for the large aggregation, and movement, of notes.

[s2sailor 2,184]

7 hours ago, Stacey said:

To select and move 50 notes in v10.24, it took 3 minutes and 48 seconds.

You were lucky.  I tried 50 notes recently and it took 15-20 secs per note.  After watching it for a few minutes, I left the house and ran an errand.

V10 has been, more or less, ok for me.  Slower overall but manageable.  This was the first time that I tried moving more than one or two notes ... wow, this was unbelievably slow.  I really hope improving this is somewhere on their task list.

[PinkElephant 8,076]

It is possible to change the 50 notes limit:

Quit EN (not only closing it)

Find the file config.json in the data directory at %AppData%\Evernote. Open it in a plain text editor (Notepad, TextEdit etc.) 

Modify the following code, or if it is missing, insert it. The number will set the new limit, in this case 500 notes.

"qa": {

"multiSelectionLimit": 500

}

Save the file back, then restart EN.

Hint: This change is not approved by EN, so do it at your own peril. I made it on a high specced MacBook Pro, and had no issues.

It will not speed up things, it just makes starting such jobs more convenient before you then leave your desk and fix yourself a large cup of coffee … or even better, take the dog around the block.