Duplicate Removal

[RikWallin 2]

In ten years I have 3,200 items and still no Duplicate Removal

 

Why is it, after using this product for so many years there still hasn't been a method introduced to remove duplicate items other than sorting them by title and clicking on them manually?  

 

Hello??  Earth calling Evernote!!!   Three Thousand, Two Hundred Times???   WTF is wrong with your programmers?  

 

Most importantly, why am I paying an annual fee to store all this ***** on your servers when I could be making things far more efficient??   Can someone at Evernote kindly explain this besides the same old: "Sorry, ya can't get there from here" response?

 

Ten Effing Years??

 

With Great Frustration,

Rik Wallin

Dallas, Texas U.S.A.

 

 

[gazumped 11,657]

Hi.  The fact Evernote still haven't gotten around to this presumably means that in their user testing various other things came up with a higher priority.  You can hardly accuse them of inactivity since there seems to be an update for one incarnation or another virtually every week. 

 

What exactly are you looking for anyway?  I have 20,000+ notes with (presumably) some duplicates in there - every time I notice one,  usually because of a search that turns up two identical titles,  I'll check both notes and delete one if it's safe to do so.  Occasionally I've added different comments to both,  or despite the titles they're actually different notes - I try for a standard format,  and occasionally that means duplicate titles,  but not duplicate notes. 

 

All of the above is part of the standard curation overhead for dealing with a big database - and I've dealt with commercial databases of all size up to 400K+ entries. 

 

There's no huge advantage to removing duplicates unless they just get in the way of searches - storage is cheap and your upload credit won't alter.  Granted desktop and mobile users have good reasons for keeping their installations lean and mean - but again looking for duplicate titles is pretty easy and duplicates found in searches can be dealt with whenever. 

 

I suspect that an 'automatic' duplicate remover would generate at least as many queries and errors as it could remove obvious duplicates.  If you clip the exact same web page twice - it'll possibly have changed dates or content between clips,  and your notes will have different created and updated dates.  HOw do you decide what's a clear duplicate,  and what's two versions of a page that you (deliberately) annotated differently?

 

The best that Evernote could do (I think) is to allow a search for notes that are substantially the same,  and allow the user to choose to delete one,  both or neither - but then there's that 'context' feature that is supposed to flag similar notes...

 

Sorry to sound so negative,  but I'm trying to indicate that it's probably not as easy as you think to deal with duplicates,  and even if they are thinking about doing something on this,  it could take a long time to determine what's the best approach. 

 

And of course Evernote don't (usually) comment on features in development,  so the support you need might be part of the next update - maybe...

[jbenson2 2,147]

I've been using Evernote for 7 years and have 35,000 notes. Duplicate notes? not a problem for me.

I check this forum on a regular basis. Duplicate notes do not seem to be a major problem with other users. The subject is seldom discussed in this forum.

 

Why? 

The Evernote search engine is so powerful that a duplicate note will show up during normal use of the program. 

 

 

It appears that Evernote feels the same. Here is a comment from the new CEO yesterday:

 

Evernote’s strength is in its core: notes, sync, and search.

 

Here are two things that you can expect from us over the next several months: we will launch major foundational product improvements around the core features that you [the users] care about most, and we will pull back on initiatives that fail to support our mission.

 

Duplicate Note Removal does not fit in with his core feature improvement criteria.

[RikWallin 2]

Well, based on the comments, I guess we'll just have to wait another ten years or consider moving to another product.  At least you did a good job of eliminating the "wish list" factor and so I'll shut up and move on.   Paperless from Mariner is a piece of junk, One Note is wonky about dragging and dropping loads of PDF's,  DevonThink for Mac doesn't work on anything else but a MAC or IOS device so I'll just keep searching I suppose. 

 

Imagine the $$$$$ pocket change that could be made by coming up with a 3rd party app for 2 or 3 bucks.  Let's see.. $1 from a million users would be....  OH NEVERMIND.

[Aspect 5]

Duplicate detection of similar Evernotes would be useful. Especially when trying to scan, enter & process large stacks of unsorted archival (paper) documents. Likewise with bulk (pdf, digital) imports from other applications. Thou perhaps not essential, given the alternatives.

 

There are a bunch of separate Mac Apps that run Duplicate Detection over any chosen directory in OS-X, but they require Spotlight to run. And I've read that Spotlight does not work in the Apple Appstore version of Evernote - But that it does work with the Direct Download version. Is this correct?

 

Forgive the ignorance, new to this /forum.

 

Also, I agree with RikWallin about the Paperless application. We used it a lot years ago. Then the original developer was taken over by Mariner Software, and has gone downhill ever since. Getting slower & slower, with only occasional updates. Shame.