My way to deal with tags

[Abdulaziz 3]

In order to reach a high consistency level in tagging approach I used my tags in the following way.

I have basic prefix for most of the tags e.g.

source: webshot

source: email

source: screenshot

source: ...

site: amazon.com

site: google.com

site: ....

type: bill

type: confirmation

type:registration

..

..

..

For example I relieved email confirming my order at amazon.com so I would tag it as follow ---> "source: email" , "site: amazon.com" , "type: confirmation"

This way the search became super easy by searching using the prefix. The most important thing you reach high consistency level in your tagging approach

note: if you have extra tags (given that you cannot give them prefix because they are unique) you can type them at end keep in mind that this is consistency hole.

This was a quick tip I hope it was helpful

If you have enhancement to it please add it here.

[petraquilitz 5]

That's a great tip. Am going to implement that with my tags! Just one question though: the colon you set after the prefix, is that just for visual identification? Or does it change anything else related to search or find-ability? If not, wouldn't the space between the prefix and the first word be enough?

Thanks!

[May 268]

I find this to be one of the useful way to organise Notes, I do something similar, for example I use a separate mind map in ithoughtshd on iPad to organise some of my Tags. I don't need to use use any prefixes like "source:" though because Tag auto suggestions on iPad are a lot better compared to all other clients and I'm using iPad as my main computer anyway. Plus Tags are already organised sufficiently in the mind map itself.

I also organise Tags by projects (in OmniFocus) and Areas of Interest.

here's an an example:

I also have a jailbreak tweak which allows me to quickly switch back and forth between this mind map and Evernote. You can't organise Tags into any structure on iOS but this workflow solves the problem and gives me pretty much unlimited organisational flexibility.

For example I relieved email confirming my order at amazon.com so I would tag it as follow ---> "source: email", "site: amazon.com" "type: confirmation"

Btw "confirmation" type would be an overkill in most cases in my view, "email" and "amazon" would probably be sufficient... but it really depends on how many notes you have related to confirmation emails... Personaly I have none

[Abdulaziz 3]

yes the colon is just for visual identification, and yes you can use space instead and get the same result.

those two tags will give you the same result

site: amazon.com

site amazon.com

[petraquilitz 5]

Thanks Abdulaziz

[jbenson2 2,147]

I've been using a similar tag format with a 3 character prefix. One example: Personal tags begin with Per-

Instead of a space, I add a dash, so the tag for my paid personal bills is Per-Paid

The reason for the dash is it tricks Evernote into thinking the tag is one word, so I don't have to add a quotation mark at the beginning and again at the end of the phrase. This speeds up my search process.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I've been using a similar tag format with a 3 character prefix. One example: Personal tags begin with Per-

Instead of a space, I add a dash, so the tag for my paid personal bills is Per-Paid

The reason for the dash is it tricks Evernote into thinking the tag is one word, so I don't have to add a quotation mark at the beginning and again at the end of the phrase. This speeds up my search process.

I don't use tags myself much, but I like jbenson2's system. Here is a little write-up with some links to other options.

http://www.princeton.edu/~cmayo/evernote-tag.html

[May 268]

I do find prefixes useful in some cases, for example when I actually do need TRUE sub-tags. Here's an example:

I can use searches with a wild card to get true sub-tag functionality. For example I can just search for tag:"home*" and get results for all tags, I.e Tag:"Home" Tag:"home - bedroom" Tag:"home - bathroom" Tag:"home - kitchen" Tag:"home - living room". This also allows me to tag a note with a single Tag, for example "home - bedroom" instead of having to remember to apply both "home" and "bedroom" tags.

But I actually rarely use this in practice.

And I don't use prefixes or true sub-tags for organization and I've given this a lot of thought.

First of all, the problem with relying on prefixes for organization is that they're just inconvenient to navigate and it's inconvenient to move things around, change things. It's just a lot more convenient to organize, navigate and manipulate stuff in something as flexible as a mind map.

Another problem with encoding hierarchies into tag names to replicate sub-tags/nested tags is that you can use only a limited amount of sub-tags before their names would get too long to be readable and manageable.

Next problem with using prefixes (and also sub-tags in Evernote) for organisation is that you can't organize Tags in multiple ways.

While it's possible to nest tags into a tree structure in the Tag List, i.e. use parent/child tags - any tag can have only a single parent tag.

Here's an example of organizing a tag in multiple ways, I have no limitations in my organizational structure. I can organize anything into any kind of structure, i.e hierarchical or even non hierarchical networked structure.

When you can tag/organize notes in as many ways as you like - why would you want to limit yourself to organizing tags themselves only in a single way?

[CaptainTime 94]

Thanks Abdulaziz,

I appreciate the tips. I have been struggling with what setup to use for my tags and this looks like it fits my style.

[Amie Harpe Longstreet 12]

In order to reach a high consistency level in tagging approach I used my tags in the following way.

I have basic prefix for most of the tags e.g.

source: webshot

source: email

source: screenshot

source: ...

Hi Abdulaziz,

Have you looked at the values automatically populated in the "Source" attribute on each note? For notes that are created using the Evernote web clipper, Evernote automatically populates this attribute with the value web.clip. For any notes emailed to your Evernote account, the source attribute is populated with mail.smtp. Notes added from a particular application will have the name of the application such as Clearly or ms.app.outlook, etc. I do not know what other values might be populated in the source field because these are my primary methods of getting notes into Evernote, aside from files I drag into an import folder on my local drive or scan in with my scansnap. Also, for notes that come from an email source, the name of the person who sent the email is automatically captured in the Author attribute on the note. For notes clipped in from the web, the Source URL attribute is populated with the URL for the page clipped. I hope this information is helpful. Based on the examples you provided, I thought you might be able to streamline your tagging process by taking advantage of some of the information Evernote is already capturing for each note created.

Amie

[Abdulaziz 3]

Based on the examples you provided, I thought you might be able to streamline your tagging process by taking advantage of some of the information Evernote is already capturing for each note created.

Nice hint Amie, Thanks!

But what if I need to filter all amazon.com notes that came from my email, or for example all my snapshots that are related to amazon.com.

is there a search or a filter in Evernote supporting the auto captured information?

[May 268]

Based on the examples you provided, I thought you might be able to streamline your tagging process by taking advantage of some of the information Evernote is already capturing for each note created.

Nice hint Amie, Thanks!

But what if I need to filter all amazon.com notes that came from my email, or for example all my snapshots that are related to amazon.com.

is there a search or a filter in Evernote supporting the auto captured information?

It's not all that useful in practice, for example I can add anything by email and so on. And there are also some notes that I use purely as images, or photos, or my personal photos and I don't want them to be mixed with notes that just happen to have some images, e.g. Webclips and what not. So I still tag photo notes with a tag "photo" and so on.

But yes, there's a filter:

Search - Source

Email source:mail.smtp

Web page source:web.clip

Mobile source:mobile.*

Application source:app.*

Delicious source:delicious

Search - Resource

Audio resource:audio/*

Image resource:image/*

GIF resource:image/gif

Ink resource:application/vnd.evernote.ink

PDF resource:application/pdf

But again, it's not very useful, I used those searches maybe a couple of times in a year

[Abdulaziz 3]

this is one example of how easy is the filter with the "prefix approach"

This is my Online shopping notebook and each note in it must have at least two tags "site: ..." and "product: ..."

when I filter first by site: apple.com I get only the products under apple (see attachment for details)

[petraquilitz 5]

Wouldn't you be able to achieve the same result by adding the tags "site" and "popClip", for example into the search field like such:

tag: site + tag:popClip

(that would require that the notes be taged with "site" and "popClip" as separate tags, of course)

That way you wouldn't have to repeat the "site:" or "product:" part of the tag all the time, and you'd get an alphabetized overview on that new tags page, instead of everything appearing either under s or under p. Or is there another difference that I'm not seeing right now?

[Abdulaziz 3]

the reason I have site prefix is to fulfill this demand "Please Evernote show me all notes that belong to internet sites" Evernote will reply with a list of note that belong to specific sites, in other word note with "site: prefix"

without this you have to remember the site name e.g. amazon.com in order to find its note, so you will miss the listing feature of all sites as shown in my reply above.

of course you can take out the prefix if you dont want the listing feature and the "consistency enforcement" in your workflow.

[May 268]

Wouldn't you be able to achieve the same result by adding the tags "site" and "popClip", for example into the search field like such:

tag: site + tag:popClip

(that would require that the notes be taged with "site" and "popClip" as separate tags, of course)

That way you wouldn't have to repeat the "site:" or "product:" part of the tag all the time, and you'd get an alphabetized overview on that new tags page, instead of everything appearing either under s or under p. Or is there another difference that I'm not seeing right now?

Yes, those "site:" or "product:" prefixes are unnecessary. They could be helpful on desktop clients when you're adding Tags, for example when you start typing "site:" - you get auto suggestions for all Tags that start with "site:". I find it to be unnecessary on iOS though, because auto suggestions are a lot better there.

Personally I don't use prefixes, unless I need TRUE sub-tags functionality which is very rare. I gave an example in my previous post with "home - *" Tags.

the reason I have site prefix is to fulfill this demand "Please Evernote show me all notes that belong to internet sites" Evernote will reply with a list of note that belong to specific sites, in other word note with "site: prefix"

Yes, this is another example of using true sub-tag functionality, but if you don't need to see all notes related to all websites or all notes related to all products then you don't need this.

[Abdulaziz 3]

Yes, those "site:" or "product:" prefixes are unnecessary. They could be helpful on desktop clients when you're adding Tags, for example when you start typing "site:" - you get auto suggestions for all Tags that start with "site:". I find it to be unnecessary on iOS though, because auto suggestions are a lot better there.

Personally I don't use prefixes, unless I need TRUE sub-tags functionality which is very rare. I gave an example in my previous post.

I agree.

The only this you will miss is the listing feature, if you dont need it then I totally agree with you on the prefix point.

[Vico 7]

I use prefixes, for tags, but only to specify very special tag types, of very frequent use: namely @ for contexts and ! for priorities (yes, I use priorities. I can feel your indignation... :-)).

However, I do not like more elaborated or extensive prefixes. That's because I prefer not to embed hierarchies in tags. I prefer to combine tags, and intersect them in searches. "source: screenshot" I would rather split into "snippet" (or other word. sorry for my English...) and "screenshot" (or "web" or "email"). The same that you would do with "less special" tags, e.g. "print" and "service" to search for printing services (instead of "service: print").