Create notes from hundreds of files, deriving title and tags from file names?

[w8rn8r 8]

I happen to have come across several hundreds of well aged scans that I'd like to feed to Evernote:
one note per file, deriving note title and tags from the file names.

ENscript not being available, is there another way to achieve s/t along those lines?

I'd found an article (https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/enscript.php) indicating that creating a note from a file should be possible, but as it failed at the my attempt, I'm thinking this might be outdated.

[agsteele 3,055]

The script stuff is elderly. If you are a praying user you can Email files to your Evernote account and the subject will be the note title plus you can add tags and notebook names...

 

[PinkElephant 8,698]

For what you want to achieve, ImportFolders should do the job:

You connect a folder on your desktop with a notebook in your account in EN settings (desktop clients).

Then every file you drop into that folder will be imported into EN, each one into its own note. The file name will become the note title.

You can then work with the notes, especially merging some if you think that this many notes are too many.

Hint: Don't crash the import function by dropping too many files at a time. Drop some, wait the import to proceed, drop the next ones. Works without problems for me with say 10-15 files at a time.

[Mike P 2,949]

40 minutes ago, agsteele said:

If you are a praying user

We are all praying users. "Please God don't let EN ***** up my notes again today. Amen"

[Mike P 2,949]

I completely agre with @PinkElephantthat import folders are the way to go. It won't automatically tag based on the filenames. If you were able to convert the file names into comma separated lists of words you could paste them into the tag field at the bottom of the note. It will still be a very tedious operation though. The file name should appear in the title of the note, so personally I think I would give them all one tag to remind you of the mass import event and then rely on the intitle: search to find the individual notes.

[Mike P 2,949]

1 hour ago, agsteele said:

you can Email files to your Evernote account and the subject will be the note title plus you can add tags and notebook names...

In your account settings there is a tick box for auto-filing. Not tried it but it might be worth experimenting

[gazumped 12,024]

I'll put in my regular plug for Filterize here* - it's a 3rd party subscription app that can process new files as they sync with your online account.  I use it to assign my scans and clips to different notebooks with approproate tags.  There used to be a free level which - if it still exists - could be enough for your purposes.  Just set up rules based in simple tests like "if 'Amazon' is in the note title,  move this note to that Notebook".

Level up your productivity | Filterize

*No connections - just a subscriber

[w8rn8r 8]

Thanks very much for your suggestions!

This is what I am using right now, in a bash window:

for i in $(seq 1 200)
do
ls  | head -10 | xargs -d '\n' mv -t ScanImportFolder
sleep 60
done

Seems to work fine, just takes a good while.

Initially, I seem to to have gone about it a little too fast (sleep count too low), ending up losing a few notes (thanks for that hint, @PinkElephant).
A message popup said s/t like "an attachment could not be loaded", but it disappeared too quickly for me to be able to understand which note it was referring to.
Is there any way of finding out which notes were impacted?
At first glance, the logfile seemed a bit hard to read.

[PinkElephant 8,698]

No idea - maybe a manual sort by note / file title in EN and Explorer will be the fastest method.

[w8rn8r 8]

Forgot to mention: with these few error cases, the notes were created, but without the attachments. So, that simple EN/explorer side by side comparison won't help.

[PinkElephant 8,698]

Show sizes in the notes list. You can’t sort by size in v10, but notes without an attachment will show much smaller than those that imported properly.