(Archived) Scanning to Evernote - PDF or JPG?

[garyFL1 11]

If I am importing paper documents from a Scanner (Fujitsu 500M) via Mac into Evernote (which works awesome in just pointing the target application as Evernote) - should I be exporting them from the scanner and into Evernote as a PDF document or a JPG file (I have the option to do either). So far, I dont see the benefit to bringing it into Evernote as PDF, because you dont preserve it in PDF, right? I know with JPG I get a preview thumbnail on the Mac and my iPhone. With the PDF, I don't...instead of a preview - its just a generic PDF document representation icon. Are there any benefits to PDF in searching or otherwise?

Will you have PDF export down the road if I do bring it in as PDF now? Do you have upcoming PDF preview on the web client or iPhone? (PDF preview does work on the Mac desktop client I know)

Thanks....soon to be a subscriber as soon as I can figure all of this out.

[engberg 89]

I'd recommend using JPG or PNG instead of PDF if you are only storing images. This will give you text recognition within the images, and make it easier to manipulate the images on different platforms later. PDF is better for formatted content including text, etc.

I also wouldn't bother using the highest resolution on your scanner unless you're scanning something with extremely small text. You'll save storage that way, and may even get better recognition results for larger text.

[garyFL1 11]

Thanks for the response. That is helpful.

I guess the thing I am confused about is this: if I upload the file as a JPG, or a PDF, it doesnt appear to me as if I could ever pull the file off of Evernote in its preserved native format, is that correct? I know that whatever the format, I can still always "Print to PDF" on the desktop side of my Mac, but I just want to confirm on the file preservation. It appears in the Evernote desktop application that it saves things with a "*.evernote" extension (NOT a PDF or JPG). I'm just thinking down the road - if I am going paperless, and rely on Evernote to hold documents, articles that I scan and then throw away - if I ever stop using the service or go to something else, what am I left with? I know typically when I just scan something to the Mac or PC folder, I still have a PDF or JPG file at the end of the day. But, when I scan to evernote, It doesnt seem to me I have either. Am I missing something?

Thanks

[engberg 89]

We always preserve the original bits of any image or PDF that you submit to the service, but we don't always have a great UI (yet) for getting the original out. For example, to get an image out of a note on the Mac, you can drag and drop the image from the client to the desktop, and it will create a file there with the original content.

To get a PDF out of Evernote, you would right-click on it to open it in Preview, and then you can save it to a file from there.

There are similar steps on Windows, involving right-click or double-click. We plan to improve the consistency of this in the future, particularly regarding drag-and-drop.

Thanks

[garyFL1 11]

Perfect. Thanks!

[geechorama 1]

The "*.evernote" files should only appear in /Users/xxx/Library/Caches/Metadata/com.evernote.Evernote. These are just metadata files used for spotlight indexing/searching and don't contain the real note data.

If you want to take a gander at the original content files, look in /Users/xxx/Library/Application Support/Evernote/data/, although, as Dave mentioned, you shouldn't need to access these under normal circumstances.

[garyFL1 11]

Thanks Andrew....that actually totally clears it up. Thats exactly what I was doing too to see if the native file was preserved: Spotlight searching. I see that the native file is just assigned a random filename though based on the path you provided above. Why is this not tied to the name of the note as a title?

Thanks for the clarification. I feel much better now about dumping more stuff in here.