Bulk editing of names of notebooks and tags

[PitakM 11]

I use Evernote for almost a decade for my work (until just recently) and for private note taking. Nowadays I use it also for my study on psychology. 
In this long period I had several systems for organizing my notes. Every couple of years I adjusted it because my work flow had changed. This implies renaming stacks, notebookes and tags, including moving notes and notebooks around. The syntax of my tags are highly structured to make it easy for me to use. 

Problem is that with that many notebooks and tags a change of work flow is not easy to accomplish as in EN notebooks and tags have to be renamed one by one. This is a tedious job which takes a lot of time and is fulnerable for making errors.

It would help me a lot if Evernote had a bulk editing facility for (re)numbering and (full and partial) renaming of notebooks and tags.

[PinkElephant 8,070]

If you say that when changing things manually, errors can happen, changing it with a bulk (batch) process is even worse. It is like blowing gasoline into an already burning fire. You can move or tag a free selection of up to 100 notes in one go into another notebook - that's quite a lot, and with a little hack this limit can be pushed up to appr. 1.000 notes. This means you can change or add tags as easy as pushing a huge amount of notes into another notebook with one move.

With tags you can select any number of notes with the existing tag, and rename it. For tags, combining several short tags works better than using large, combined ones. A simple example: If you want to tag with year and month, don't create a tag like "Jan 2023". Create a tag "Jan" and a tag "2023", and apply both. If you want to change the "Jan" for a "January", you rename just one tag, and all notes with a January tag will get the renamed version. This is as bulky as it gets, provided you have chosen your tags wisely.

The title is a free text field - you can imaginate any system of putting numbers into it, but still you need to change these titles one by one.

Since v10 doesn't support any scripting in the clients, chances for anything further client based are dim. You could however familiarize yourself with the API, access your account through it and run any fancy scripts right on the cloud server database. There is an extensive list of API commands, allowing practically full access and manipulation of notes through this tool. This means however coding it, not just clicking through some menus.

https://dev.evernote.com/doc/reference/

[gazumped 11,652]

For different reasons I needed to process a large number of notes recently,  and found that the third-party app Filterize was still able to process v10 notes in bulk.  I added a tag to all my notes (using Evernote Legacy) and created a rule that said "if a note has this tag,  and this condition,  change it as follows."  I can change titles,  add (and remove) tags,  and move notes into designated notebooks.  I'm not sure whether Filterize can create or rename notebooks - never had cause to look;  but you might want to have a look at it for at least part of your issues...

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

23 hours ago, PitakM said:

It would help me a lot if Evernote had a bulk editing facility for (re)numbering and (full and partial) renaming of notebooks and tags.

Any numbering system would be one that you have created, since AFAIK Evernote doesn't number them (apart from the randomly generated ID number that each note gets). So it's basically all renaming. I've never worked with as complex a system as yours, but I wonder whether, rather than mass renaming of notebooks, it might be simpler to create new notebooks with the desired names and then move notes en masse from old notebooks to new ones, finally deleting the old, now-empty notebooks. Not knowing the details, this may be a dumb idea, or an obvious one you've already tried. Just a thought.

[PinkElephant 8,070]

It is much better if this is the idea to use Tags instead of Notebooks. The difference is simple: A note IS in one (and always 1 and only 1) notebook. This is why all this moving around - renaming action is needed. It is pure inefficiency, burning the oil for no light.

Tags are assigned - each note can have zero, or many (there is a limit) tags. It is much easier to assign or remove tags, because the notes location in a notebook is not changed by the tag actions. Taken to an extreme it can be all notes in one huge single notebook, and all control done by tags.

This tagging works much faster and is more efficient than changing information by moving notes through notebooks (or renaming the notebooks). Side effect: With only a small number of notebooks, nobody needs a complex naming scheme any more.

[AlbertR 521]

Like some others here I cannot see a real (and save) need for bulk editing notebook and tag names itself. It's better to (re)assign notes to new tags and books and delete the old ones later...

But it would be nice to get a possibility to work in a note list like in a grid to re-organize notes. I've logged this as a christmas wish before 2 years - but nealy noone reacted to this 😞. Maybe I should do some advertising 😉