Increase notebook limit

[Dereck 9]

I've already read the multitude of posts on this topic. I've been an Evernote user since the beginning and I've always thought it was a great product. As soon as I thought of a feature, the Evernote folks have already been cooking it up. Recently I ran up against the notebook limit, I contacted customer support and they gave my the "you should use tags instead" line. I am a Developer myself, and while I do not purport to know how Evernote is built or the whoas of maintaining a system with so many users, I can't imagine any reason why arbitrarily setting a limit of 250 notebooks, improves system performance or usability. It seems that a decision was made that people should use tags rather than notebooks without any regard for how current users prefer to work. In particular, the fact that I choose to be a premium user and and still limited to 250 notebooks seems absurd. At least choose a number that very few people would run up against like 1000, or make the free limit 100 and the premium limit 1000, that way if the limit really bothers someone it will incentivize them to pay for your service. 

[Shane D. 1,798]

Hi All,

I'm officially locking this thread, but I'll leave it here for posterity for the time being.

That being said, it appears that the notebook increase announcement has triggered some good suggestions/feedback/feature requests from you all.

Please create new threads in the appropriate location for those requests so that we can better track and quantify them.

As always, feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions!

[GrumpyMonkey 4,315]

1 hour ago, rezecib said:

@GrumpyMonkey DTLow is correct, note size/count limits are real technical concerns. Notebooks are different because, given that note size and count is constrained, notebooks are just some number of buckets in which to put them; it's not that much overhead to have more. But given that the notes need to be stored, and their entire edit history, and indexed so that they can be searched, and synced between devices, etc... it adds up. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe at some point there was a brief test of no limits (this was mentioned to me when investigating notebook limits), and this caused some problems where very large attachments were being added to notes.

At some point we have to decide what's worth working on, and if it's something that's affecting very few users it's hard to give it priority. My understanding is that aside from the upload and device limits, most of the limits were designed to affect extremely few users and mainly constrain extreme cases (e.g. regularly attaching huge files, having automated dumping of large amounts of data into our service, etc) that could cause problems for us.

Not sure what kind of PDFs you're dealing with, but Premium allows for 200 MB notes, which seems pretty generous to me. PDFs much larger than that are pretty unwieldy, and I've only encountered ones that large that are entire textbooks.

Thanks again for the detailed response. It’s nice to have reasons, even if I don’t agree with the rationale for some of them  After all, if the idea is to constrain “extreme” use cases, and the extreme case is basically me (I don’t automate any “dumping,” but I easily churn through my 10GB of uploads a month)... I don’t feel very welcome around here!

As for the PDFs, if you go paperless, it’s pretty easy to build up large ones, and this is especially true if you are a researcher. My PDFs tend to be between 100 and 500 MB in size. The papers from a faculty meeting tomorrow will probably add up to about 200 MB, and I am working on a report today that is already over 200 MB (high quality photos and the like needed in it). In the old days I had to split things up a lot. Raising the limit to 200MB helped, but it’s still way too low for me. 

Are PDFs this size unwieldy? Not at all. I think you are wrong there (unless you are talking about reading your PDF on a Kindle or something). In fact, I’ve found things work fine up to about 1GB, even on the iPad nowadays (the first generation iPad apparently lacked sufficient RAM to deal with my stuff).

Am I an edge case? Maybe. But, I’m one of your premium members and have been off and on for about a decade, so you can calculate how that works out for you compared to the 190 million or so free users. Not only am I a better investment, I’d be happy to pay more if you want to give us larger note size limits.

Is this kind of stuff technically possible? Sure. I know of a couple of your competitors in the note / database space that handle massive PDFs without breaking a sweat  I’d recommend you up your game and consider increasing the size / number of notes. But, that is a calculation you need to make at Evernote. 

I think, in the end, it isn’t really about me and how much of an edge case I am. The calculation doesn’t need to depend on people bumping up against limits and complaining until things get changed. It’s about making the service flexible  (admittedly, within some limits) in order to accomodate as many use cases as possible without straying too far from your core competencies. 

 

 

[Alan Rew 25]

I'd like to be able to have > 250 notebooks as well.

I find it much easier to locate what I need this way, rather than just using tags.

I don't know why there is a limit - presumably there's no practical limit on the number of notes (except storage space)?

[DTLow 5,698]

26 minutes ago, Alan Rew said:

II don't know why there is a limit - presumably there's no practical limit on the number of notes (except storage space)?

Actually the limits are
- notes 100,000
- tags 100,000
- notebooks 250

These are artificial limits set by Evernote.  Practical limits are another issue; my devices would choke at 100,000 notes

>>I find it much easier to locate what I need this way, rather than just using tags.

Why is that?  Supposing someone said, I find it much easier to locate using folders, rather than using notebooks

[iRQ 5]

I switched to using tags when I continually hit the 250 limit. I still prefer notebooks for separating clients.

Tags are definitely more difficult to use, and more prone to mistakes (wrong tag = "lost" note).

In a given notebook a user can create a new blank note and the note is automatically created in the same notebook. Not so with tags. Create a new note and it has no tags. Add the wrong tag, forget to add a tag, that note is "gone".

A lot of the support for tags doesn't really hold up. For example this list of bullet points includes two that make no sense, and one I'm going to look into.

 

• icreased limit to 100,000 
  • This is literally what people are requesting of Notebooks.
• multiple tags per notes
  • Using a notebook does not preclude a note from having multiple tags.
• unlimited hierarchy
  • I'm going to look into this; I'm not sure what it means.

[Alan Rew 25]

15 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Actually the limits are
- notes 100,000
- tags 100,000
- notebooks 250

These are artificial limits set by Evernote.  Practical limits are another issue; my devices would choke at 100,000 notes

>>I find it much easier to locate what I need this way, rather than just using tags.

Why is that?  Supposing someone said, I find it much easier to locate using folders, rather than using notebooks

Thanks for the values for the limits.

I use notebooks, nested notebooks and tags (lots of tags). For some of my use cases (remember everybody's usage of Evernote is different) a single mouse click on a notebook name in the left panel gives me a useful set of notes to work with. Initiating a search by tag OTOH (or locating the tag out of hundreds & clicking on it) involves significantly more mouse/keyboard action(s). There's always a balance of course between tags & notebooks, but the limit of 250 does seem rather small in the context of the other figures above and i can't think of a valid database storage / efficiency reason for having such a low limit. I probably make things worse for myself by having both work-related and personal notes in a single account, so having separate accounts would allow > 250 folders each, but then there's the extra cost of another subscription, just to work around a low limit :-)

[gazumped 9,830]

13 hours ago, gazumped said:

and new notebook ranges are freely available if and when required

Sorry if that was misleading - I was referring to new free or paid-for accounts,  or using a business account. 

I think you'll find that OneNote,  although it has some features that are better than Evernote,  has others that are not as good;  so a comparison evens out over time. 

[Analyst444 182]

Dereck - The 250 Notebook limit with EN sounds like a very upsetting matter to you. I'm offering a way to "work around" it.

 

 

 

There is a way to "simulate" many more Notebooks, using Tags. (I suspect this will irritate you some, but please bear with me.) Here's how:

 

Create Tags with this syntax for their names: "N-XXXXXXXXXX" (not including the quote marks), where the XXXXXXXXXX is any word(s) you want. (Think of the "N" as implying that you are using a Tag to "simulate" a Notebook.)

 

When you create a Note, assign the appropriate "N-XXXXXXXXXX" Tag.

 

When you want to see a list of these "simulated" Notebooks", click on "Tags" from the main EN screen on your device. That will show you all Tags in alphabetical order. Your "N-XXXXXXXXXX" Tags will be grouped together, looking very much like a list of Notebooks. - - - You could even combine these under a common Tag group name, like "Notebooks". (It would be just like a "stack" of Notebooks.) On the Windows version of EN, this also provides a blank line and horizontal line before the list of such Tags, thus making the set of "simulated" Notebooks stand out even a little more.

 

When you want to see all and only the Notes within a specific "simulated" Notebook, (a) click on its Tag on the master list of all Tags or ( do an EN search for that Tag.

 

If you think about it, given the above technique, there was really no practical reason for the EN developers to ever have included Notebooks in the design of EN. However, doing so does help those people who would have difficulty abandoning the "Folder/Sub-Folder" structure paradigm that has been around for over 30 years and to help people who were switching from some other note-taking app to EN that used something like a Notebook.

[DTLow 5,698]

49 minutes ago, Alan Rew said:

a single mouse click on a notebook name in the left panel gives me a useful set of notes to work with

I keep a minimal sidebar view; just the notebook and tag icons
but on my Mac I can show both a notebook and tag list.  A single mouse click would work on either list

>>the limit of 250 does seem rather small in the context of the other figures above

I agree

>>i can't think of a valid database storage / efficiency reason for having such a low limit

Be aware that notebooks also serve a non-organization purpose; sync/local, offline, share
Also while the database was structured for tag hierarchy (and multiple tags per notes); this was not implemented for notebooks

[Etonreve 187]

16 hours ago, wahlink@hotmail.com said:

I totally agree with those who feel that 250 is too small for a Premium paid account. I have a small university research lab and its very important to create folders based on different levels of access. I have used Evernote Premium for as long as I can remember an now that I'm up against that 250 notebook limit it is severely impacting teh way we share information. Tags are confusing and not an option especially since it doesn't lend itself to different levels of access. MS Onenote has no such limits and unfortunately if I can't add more notebooks I will have to switch over to that until evernote management addresses this. Kind of sad that the Evernote Premium account has become a second class citizen and offers less value than free Onenote

It’s almost time to renew my Evernote subscription. I may try One Note again even though I don't like it as much. 

[DTLow 5,698]

2 hours ago, iRQ said:

Tags are definitely more difficult to use, and more prone to mistakes (wrong tag = "lost" note).

Wrong Notebook = ?

I'll admit the free form nature of tags bothers me.  I have this scripted on my Mac to limit my selection of tags, and force tags depending on the note type

>>  unlimited hierarchy ...I'm going to look into this; I'm not sure what it means.

There is a huge request discussion on this; the example is based on the use of folders and sub-folders

• Folder
  • sub-folder
  • sub-folder
    • sub-folder
    • sub-folder

>>I still prefer notebooks for separating clients.

Understandable, and do-able if you can keep under the max-notebook limit

One problem,, if you have notes applying to multiple clients - maybe requiring note copies

[DTLow 5,698]

3 hours ago, GrumpyMonkey said:

Are PDFs this size unwieldy? Not at all.

I know we've hijacked @etonreve's discussion and gone off topic, but I'm interested in the handling of extra large pdfs.

While my devices have no problem displaying the pdfs; they have limited storage.  
I have no choice but to offload the pdfs to network storage.  
Instead of a note attachment, I insert a link.

This bypasses the Evernote size limit and works well; but fails when I'm offline.

[Riggar 51]

This is a continuous issue / problem that crops up regularly and I suspect is probably discussed at Evernote HQ fairly frequently. It's a fundamental design problem (did someone say some time ago '250 is fine; people will need need more than that'). Evernote themselves know in their hearts they are going to have to face the consequences some day. The trouble is - undoing this flaw is no small exercise and likely expensive, not to mention the various risk factors that need to be tackled. Actually, I'm well versed in risk analysis and subsequent mitigation having worked for a large Banking outfit in UK - so hire me to get the ball rolling! Joking aside, we are being fobbed off with 'tags' - which is not a solution. Tags are a really useful tool - but that is what it is - tool. The situation is a shame as the rest of Evernote is very good and while I've mentioned costs - we don't know the real cost of those people who don't use Evernote in earnest due to the 250 limit. I'm looking elsewhere to see what's about - I'll keep an eye on Evernote and we'll see what happens.  

[Dave-in-Decatur 2,273]

With apologies for continuing to drift the thread.... @GrumpyMonkey, I'm trying to wrap my head around your scenario. I'm a retired academic, still doing research, and a very long way from paperless. But if I wanted (as I get the impression you're trying) to move not only all my notes from committee meetings (I'm retired! I'm freeee!) and academic conferences, but my entire research library, into digital storage, I'm not sure I'd pick Evernote as the venue. I keep coming back to the Evernote part, rather than Everstore. For entire books (e.g., dictionaries!), wouldn't something like Dropbox be more effective? (I know nothing about Devonthink.) Leave EN for your committee and conference notes, scans of articles and chapters, brilliant breakfast-table inspirations, etc., where, as you say, they are so readily searchable; let Dropbox do the heavy lifting; and maybe sometimes shift a large PDF into EN temporarily for a specific project, especially if you need to search CJK? Just trying to get the picture.

[iRQ 5]

Wrong Notebook = ?

There are two primary methods for getting a note into a notebook

1. Create a new note in the same notebook that is open. In this case the note is automatically in the correct notebook. I like this because there is no extra step of adding a tag to the note at some point after its creation.
2. Move a note from the default notebook or another notebook into the target notebook. In this case it would be possible to select the wrong notebook. The difference between moving to a notebook and adding a tag is the risk of a mistake (and user confidence in the process) is that a new notebook cannot be created as part of moving a note. A new tag can be created when searching for an existing tag, which adds to the possibility of creating a new tag rather than applying the desired existing tag. In that same vein, the interface for moving to a notebook is richer and easier to use than adding a tag. The difference is subtle but I think can be supported that over many new notes the process of moving a note to a different notebook is on the whole less error prone and fraught than applying a tag.

Note in the two scenarios above the first covers a large percentage of instances, so while the second scenario is more subtle, it only applies to a subset of note assignment.

Another subtly of notebooks vs tags is that notebook names accept commas without any confusion, whereas tags parse inputs in ways that can cause confusion. For example adding a notebook for the client Acme, Inc. works without issue in a notebook name. Copying that same name as part of a workflow from a sales quote into a tag causes the two tags to be created, neither of which was the intended outcome, and can create some extra work and confusion.

To be clear, I am a huge Evernote user and evangelist, and have been since May 2009. Tags are amazing and very useful and well implemented. But there is a use case for notebooks that is worthwhile, and I believe the cases where notebooks are a better choice than a tag extend beyond the 250 notebook limit.

[gazumped 9,830]

Not sure what kind of PDFs we're talking here,  but all of my content is within the 200MB limit,  and most of it is below 50MB - there are plenty of compression and optimization tools around for that format,  and -depending on your likely use case- a number of choices you can make about the resolution of images / backward compatibility of PDF formats and whether or not the document has been saved as a readable PDF.  I generally find,  when OCR-ing a batch of PDF files (as I do) that the size automatically drops by 30-50% just because the content is now text rather than images.  I don't ever remember having to split a file into sections.  I did have a phase of moving PDFs from attachments to Google Drive,  but as @DTLow points out,  that's less good if you're offline...

Maybe I just don't collect 'serious' documentation... 

And just for the record,  my take on limits has always been that

1. the Notebook max exists and given them's the rules,  we kinda have to observe them by whatever means.  Higher would be nice,  but in practice my brain can't handle a huge number of choices.  And who says how many is enough?  250 is more than enough for me*,  but it would be nice to have 500 or 1000,  sure.  Want to bet how long it would be before someone exhausts that limit and demands more? (* 95% of my 40k+ notes are normally in one notebook. Extras were created 'only where I had to' for shares, WIP projects, mobile use, and local notebooks.  A current project took me up to about 50 while I do some serious data sorting,  but that is only temporary.)
    
2. the upload limits and note sizes are there because while we all play by the rules (mostly) Evernote represents cheap online secure data storage -even if you're paying for it- and as they found out during the brief heady 'unlimited' period,  a few users will happily move their media storage,  backups and all future downloads into Evernote given half the chance.  I'd imagine that Evernote biggest ongoing issue is traffic - worldwide we're all syncing multiple devices to one server 24/7.  If a few users start to monopolise the bandwidth,  the rest of us will see a general slowdown in everything.  If more join in we could easily move from molasses to paint drying.  Evernote has to make it streamlined and quick.  Hence limits!

[GrumpyMonkey 4,315]

Hi Dave. Thanks a lot. I agree.

In fact, Evernote in its current state is not so great for the thousands of PDFs I’ve amassed. It would be great IF there were no note size limits and IF we had selective sync. Then, a search for a historical person I am researching would turn up not only my notes but also everything that anyone else has written about the person. That’s pretty powerful. Dropbox doesn’t index the content of PDFs. Neither does Google Drive. There are very few options for searching a bunch of PDFs on the iPad (PDF applications do it, but it takes ages for them to finish indexing it all). Evernote is still one of the best at getting search right.

What you described is somewhat similar to what I do now. Evernote is mainly for notes of mine. Stuff that other people write goes elsewhere (Devonthink, or an external drive for searching on the Mac). Granted, it might seem like “storage,” but I don’t see it that way. Someone in business might have a proposal that they put into a note, and then they take notes on it there, and use that data to work on the project. I’m basically doing the same thing when I research, except I am taking notes on books instead of memos or draft proposals (I do this too, of course, for the administrative stuff). The difference, from my point of view, is simply length / size.

Just like with the 250 notebooks, other limits also limit the potential of the app. If they are there because the service will collapse under its own weight, then by all means, keep them. But, as with the notebook limit, if raising the limits can be done without inducing any unpleasant side effects, then that’s the way to go. 

 

[DTLow 5,698]

13 hours ago, Naveed said:

Is there a way of increasing the number notebooks now?

Currently (2018) the limit is 250 notebooks  https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005247-What-are-the-system-limits-of-Evernote-
For additional notebooks, you can open a second account

You may have noticed the limit is 100,000 tags.

[Dave-in-Decatur 2,273]

Thanks, @GrumpyMonkey. It's good stuff for me to think about, as I do try to reduce my paper footprint. I have quite a few PDF articles from various sources, related to various projects. I use a word processor/research system called Nota Bene which is fantastic at indexing them and other documents and notes, but is not as portable or completely cross-device as Evernote (it is about to add cloud features, though this is not yet publicly announced). Anyway, thanks; and apologies again, @Etonreve, for aggravating the thread-drift!

[gazumped 9,830]

42 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

my entire research library, into digital storage

Hi Dave - for information (vague pun intended) I was in your position a few years ago.  I've mentioned this (a few times) already,  so apologies if I'm telling you what you already know;  but I used to be an insurance underwriter - one of the guys who guess how much you need to pay to cover any losses you incur and make a small profit for the insurance company. To do that job effectively it's necessary to know a little bit about everything,  and in the bad old days I'd rip pages from magazines,  acquire books,  clip newspapers and fill shelves and boxes with background information. 

Since it was a dynamic library - I needed to find and file things daily - it occupied a lot of shelf space,  plus a couple of file cabinets and several boxes.  For practical reasons I wanted to digitise the information;  it was increasingly difficult to find anything,  even when I knew I had it somewhere - and it was harder and harder to file things away properly.  The hoard had just gone past the critical mass of what one person (plus occasional reluctant helpers) could control.  Plus it occupied an office,  then a bedroom,  then a garage to itself.  Plus some idiot had invented the interweb,  and more and more things were popping up online

That was the start of my interest in Evernote.  Over a 2-3 year period I converted all my paper into notes - as you'll know it's an ongoing process so I'm still curating the stuff and adding new items.  I'm also doing other things,  so the library is still growing.  But instead of occupying a room,  it can travel with me on my laptop while its duplicate relatives are safe at home on external drives.

All my stuff went into Evernote,  and while the ride hasn't always been smooth,  my 17GB database of all types of material is still a lot easier to deal with than the equivalent RW paper...

Sorry for extending the drift here - I'll shutup now. 

[gazumped 9,830]

It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that Evernote might allow more sync'd notebooks at some point,  though there have been dozens of threads over the past 10 years or so where this has been requested,  and while not rejected outright,  the request has been left hanging.  Evernote started out favoring tags over folders,  and the danger may be that another 250 folders will never be enough...  there will always be someone who needs just those extra few spaces - and if Evernote have extended the folder space once,  why shouldn't they do it again,  and again...

If you wish to pay for extra folder space,  then getting extra is simple - start another Plus or Premium account and divide your activity between the two.  You can share folders from one account to the other so (with the usual tag-creation limitations) both sets of notebooks and notes are editable from one account.  Switching between the accounts is pretty easy too - on desktops.

Or you can archive material to one or more Basic accounts,  use tags instead of notebook names,  export some notebooks to archive ENEX files or just plain delete old information.

[Paul A. 421]

19 hours ago, DTLow said:

I did suggest that; but it was with tongue in cheek

The fact is, if users wish to continue using Evernote; they must adjust their method of processing
250 notebooks is a hard limit (for now).

If a user posted they organize notes using folders/subfolders, they would get the same advice

Evernote has a workable solution for handling both issues

Am I missing something? I think it should be a serious consideration.

They don't have to adjust their method of processing if they're willing to pay $14.99/month for Evernote business. It's all a question of how much they value continuing to use Evernote the way they always have while exceeding the 250 notebook limit of the consumer plans. For some people, $180/year (or possibly less if there are discounts available) wouldn't be excessive for the value they would derive.

[DTLow 5,698]

4 minutes ago, Paul A. said:

They don't have to adjust their method of processing if they're willing to pay $14.99/month for Evernote business. 

This is true.  It's just that I consider the price to high just for the increase in Notebook limit 

I will edit my post to include my explanation

 

[Rey San Pascual 4]

2,500 Notebooks should be a minimum. I suppose Evernote can make it 25,000 and make it a non-issue for just about everyone.

[jbenson2 2,146]

13 hours ago, igrobancho said:

1) How many more notebooks would you want Evernote have the capability to synchronize?

Zero - 250 notebooks is more than enough for my 40,000 notes. I keep the number of notebooks down to a minimum.

Tags, along with a structured title using a YYDDMM date code prefix, and Evernote's search ability eliminate the need for lots of multiple notebooks. Stacks also help separate business from personal notes.

[Alan Rew 25]

2 hours ago, DTLow said:

I keep a minimal sidebar view; just the notebook and tag icons
but on my Mac I can show both a notebook and tag list.  A single mouse click would work on either list

>>the limit of 250 does seem rather small in the context of the other figures above

I agree

>>i can't think of a valid database storage / efficiency reason for having such a low limit

Be aware that notebooks also serve a non-organization purpose; sync/local, offline, share
Also while the database was structured for tag hierarchy (and multiple tags per notes); this was not implemented for notebooks

Ah, so maybe notebook handling does become less efficient for larger numbers.

Relative to the max number of notes (100, 000) I think it would be reasonable to have a number two orders of magnitude smaller for the max number of notebooks, i.e. 1000.

[DTLow 5,698]

2 minutes ago, Rey San Pascual said:

2,500 Notebooks should be a minimum. I suppose Evernote can make it 25,000 and make it a non-issue for just about everyone.

Notes have two attributes; Notebooks and Tags

The limit for Tags is 100,000

[DTLow 5,698]

On 9/27/2018 at 4:17 AM, KenSc said:

I too would like to call for more notebooks. The limit is baffling from both a technical and a usability point of view.

Voting buttons for this request are at the top left corner of the discussion.

Not clear about the "baffling"
imho  There is no technical reason for the limit - it's an artficially set number.
Useability is an issue because Evernote originally didn't intend tnotebooks to be the primary organization method
They did not include any hierarchy; the tag feature has an unlimited hierarchy.  These are technical issues.
An attempt was made to enhance usability by adding Stacks, but it only provides a single level.

[DTLow 5,698]

15 hours ago, igrobancho said:

1) How many more notebooks would you want Evernote have the capability to synchronize? Me: Random number out of the blue... 500.

100,000 

I actually use a minimum number of notebooks

My solution for organization is tags; max 100,000 and unlimited hierarchy

I use notebooks for their features; sync/local, offline, share

[iRQ 5]

Hi Folks,

Reporting back after one year. I hit the 250 notebook limit and switched to using tags last year. I'm still using Evernote, and it hasn't been a total disaster.

My conclusion:

1. Notebooks exist for a reason.
2. That reason is as valid at 1 notebook as it is at 251 notebooks.
3. I wish Evernote would allow more than 250 notebooks. If they did I would switch back to using a separate notebook for each client immediately.

 

I did look into Evernote Business, but the upgrade path was too opaque. Actually, it didn't seem like an upgrade so much as a different product. What I mean is that in the Evernote preferences in the Mac app (for example), it shows I have purchased the highest level (Premium), with no action or path to paying more to get more. I would gladly pay for "Ultra Premium" if it would raise the notebook limit.

 

[DTLow 5,698]

17 hours ago, iRQ said:

1. Notebooks exist for a reason.
2. That reason is as valid at 1 notebook as it is at 251 notebooks.

And the reasons are

• To identify notes as   Sync'd/Local, Shared, Offline
• Organization, with these limitations
  • the maximum limit; currently 250 for personal accounts
  • only one notebook can be assigned to a note (both a pro and con)
  • search only allows one note argument, and no negation
  • no hierarchy, other than group into Stacks

Anything else?

>>it hasn't been a total disaster

Thats good to know.  Can you identify some downsides with a notebook > tag switch

I was thinking easier misfiring of notes. With notebooks, the note has to be filed in one (and only one) client notebook

 

 

[DTLow 5,698]

6 hours ago, Riggar said:

The trouble is - undoing this flaw is no small exercise and likely expensive, not to mention the various risk factors that need to be tackled.

You may have more details than me.  My guess is 250 Notebooks is an arbitrary number; it used to be 100.

Notebooks were not set up to be a primary organization tool.  
Their use was related more to sync/local, private/share, offline/online.

Having many notebooks causes an organization problem.  
Evernote recognized this and implemented the Stacks feature; it's a bit of a hack

>>Tags are a really useful tool - but that is what it is - tool.

I'm not sure what this means.
Notebooks are also a really useful tool.
I have 10 shared notebooks, 1 Local, 1 Offline, 1 sync'd, and my default Inbox Stack
I have 350+ tags and make use of the hierarchy feature to keep them organized

[Etonreve 187]

On 12/13/2016 at 8:09 AM, GiacomoLaw said:

Whilst I believe that more notebooks would be great, don't you find its a little cluttered with all of them? IMO, i think that if you hit the limit, it would start working against you, not with you.

My notebook system is not at all cluttered. It's a very efficient system for me and I need more than 250 notebooks. 

[iRQ 5]

16 hours ago, Naveed said:

Hi All, its 2018 and i been reading this thread for the last few days from it inception listed date of 2015.

I have just hit my limit of 250 notebooks, im a plus user. Is there a way of increasing the number notebooks now?

Hi Naveed,

The only option for going over 250 notebooks is through an Evernote Business account (~360/year). Those accounts allow up to 10,000 notebooks.

https://evernote.com/compare-plans

 

RQ

[GrumpyMonkey 4,315]

4 hours ago, Paul A. said:

Am I missing something? I think it should be a serious consideration.

They don't have to adjust their method of processing if they're willing to pay $14.99/month for Evernote business. It's all a question of how much they value continuing to use Evernote the way they always have while exceeding the 250 notebook limit of the consumer plans. For some people, $180/year (or possibly less if there are discounts available) wouldn't be excessive for the value they would derive.

As far as I know (I used to have a business account), the limit is still 250 active notebooks. At any one time, you can only have 250 in the account, and the others are stored in a library. I was perfectly fine with this (I’m OK with just a couple of notebooks myself), especially because this functioned as a kind of selective sync, but the library could not be searched. Now that was a problem. A deal breaker, in fact. 

Is it still the same system now? I don’t know.

Earlier in the thread, an Evernote employee also mentioned that they may be open to removing this hard limit of 250. If that might happen, there isn’t much of a reason to upgrade to business. 

[Etonreve 187]

6 hours ago, Riggar said:

This is a continuous issue / problem that crops up regularly and I suspect is probably discussed at Evernote HQ fairly frequently. It's a fundamental design problem (did someone say some time ago '250 is fine; people will need need more than that'). Evernote themselves know in their hearts they are going to have to face the consequences some day. The trouble is - undoing this flaw is no small exercise and likely expensive, not to mention the various risk factors that need to be tackled. Actually, I'm well versed in risk analysis and subsequent mitigation having worked for a large Banking outfit in UK - so hire me to get the ball rolling! Joking aside, we are being fobbed off with 'tags' - which is not a solution. Tags are a really useful tool - but that is what it is - tool. The situation is a shame as the rest of Evernote is very good and while I've mentioned costs - we don't know the real cost of those people who don't use Evernote in earnest due to the 250 limit. I'm looking elsewhere to see what's about - I'll keep an eye on Evernote and we'll see what happens.  

I use tags, but I'm not always in a position to add them. I also am not always interested in re-Googling Evernote's peculiar search syntax to find them. I want to go to my notebook.

[rezecib 98]

@GrumpyMonkey The limit on Business is 10k.

This was a little before my time, but my understanding is the intent of the different limits is definitely not to pressure people into upgrading to business if they hit the limit, it was just that 250 was a much bigger problem for businesses because it uses a different system for accounts-- all content in an Evernote Business is tied to a single pseudo-account, and normal users in the business simply have access to those. So when you have a business with 300+ employees, 250 notebooks in the business isn't even one notebook per user . Even as it stands 10k is only ~33 notebooks per user in that case (although on the flip side the demand for notebooks is a bit lower because more of it is shared).

Both numbers are ultimately arbitrary, it's just a good idea to have a number picked at some point to prevent abuse of the system. I'm not saying 250+ notebooks constitutes abuse, but you could imagine if someone had tens of thousands of notebooks that would be pretty excessive; the line gets drawn somewhere and then if it starts becoming a problem it will get redrawn. I can't guarantee that it will or is getting redrawn in either case (I believe it affects very few users, although I'm actually curious to see if I can get access to some metrics on that and maybe use it to make a stronger case), but it is something we would like to do.

[Etonreve 187]

Whenever I read the posts of people who say "Why don't you just use tags?" I'm reminded of how Microsoft kept telling everyone how great Windows 8 was when it was awful. Finally, it came out with 8.1.

An organization app that prevents many customers from organizing their information in the way that seems most natural to them is not pursuing a winning strategy. And stop telling those of us who want more notebooks that we're dumb. We're not. Insulting the customer is another bad tack.

 

EDITED TO ADD

This comment has "-1" ranking. That's odd because I don't have the option to downvote other people's posts, only to upvote them. I'm still right about notebooks.

 

[DTLow 5,698]

On 12/20/2017 at 1:50 PM, munobrueller said:

What does this unlimited hierarchy look like?

The screenshot is from my Mac and shows the tags in the sidebar and tag page

The sub-tags can go to as many levels as needed.
In the image, you can see CommonPlace > NoteTypes > Reference > Art

[OneDrop 4]

Absurd and Absolutely ridiculous they would limit to 250 notebooks!!

 

PLEASE ?? PLEASE =>INCREASE THIS LIMIT!  IAM at 215 notebooks right now!  : ( .. . .

?

[gustavgi 303]

On ‎2017‎-‎06‎-‎21 at 5:54 PM, EdH said:

I think 250 was the original random number out of the blue.

Any reason you cannot do some consolidation of notebooks and use tags? For instance, if you have 5 bank accounts and have 5 notebooks for statements, you could have one notebook with all the statements and the statements tagged with the bank name.

This 250 issue has been requested before over the years, and I am sure it is on their radar, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I'd do a local workaround with tags, or just use 250 notebooks and no more.

I think the original limit was 100 but that was early, many years ago.

[iRQ 5]

Same issue as Arcman. One client per notebook. Now hitting 250 notebook limit. Wish I could have more notebooks.

For those saying "You're holding it wrong." I get it. I love databases. I love labels in GMail. I loved del.icio.us. I get why tags are better™. 

But the mental model of separate notebooks for always separate collections of information is much more comfortable and efficient to work with than tags in some situations, such as client specific work.

[EdH 1,668]

15 hours ago, igrobancho said:

Hey Evernote and Evernote Users,

 

So, pretty straight forward request.

Make Evernote have the capability to synchronize more than 250 notebooks.

Personally I would be willing to pay more.

Questions that come to mind:

1) How many more notebooks would you want Evernote have the capability to synchronize? Me: Random number out of the blue... 500.

2) How much more would you be willing to pay for this extra service/feature? I am not an expert in technology... but just a random number out of the blue.... $10/100 extra notebooks.

 

Thanks for your time reading this.

I think 250 was the original random number out of the blue.

Any reason you cannot do some consolidation of notebooks and use tags? For instance, if you have 5 bank accounts and have 5 notebooks for statements, you could have one notebook with all the statements and the statements tagged with the bank name.

This 250 issue has been requested before over the years, and I am sure it is on their radar, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I'd do a local workaround with tags, or just use 250 notebooks and no more.

[Seattlitte 5]

On 10/6/2018 at 11:38 AM, s2sailor said:

You show up here as a premium member so I would think this should be working now for you.  Time to contact support.  One last thought, if you haven't recently, log out of your account and then back in to see if that resets you correctly.

Great suggestion!  I logged out (not just closed EN) , reopened, logged in - and I'm creating additional  notebooks beyond 250  - without warnings or issues. Oh, the Heady freedom! 

 

Thanks EN for responding to our requests for this increase.

Philip

[EdH 1,668]

58 minutes ago, gustavgi said:

I think the original limit was 100 but that was early, many years ago.

Well, that's the problem with random numbers. You can throw out whatever you want, and someone won't like it. 

[DTLow 5,698]

3 hours ago, iRQ said:

Same issue as Arcman. One client per notebook. Now hitting 250 notebook limit. Wish I could have more notebooks.

There's the Business Account level - 10,000 notebooks

[michaelzapun 8]

Guys I have to tell you I'm working with OneNote for last 24 hours and so far I'm liking it a lot.  A LOT.  I think its got more robust features that I use (maybe not you) but definately worth a second look if you haven't considered it lately.  I also like that there's a way to "close a notebook" to get rid of clutter on files that I'm not using in a particular week.  I may wind up doing a full length review at some point for those that may want to consider.  

[SeanJaySD 0]

I need unlimited notebooks. Use of tags is NOT INTUITIVE. As someone else mentioned in a different post, if Evernote is to become our "brain" (paraphrased), it needs to operate like the way we are mentally wired.

Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci and other greats had left behind a bunch of "tags" (essentially, Post-it Notes), instead of their detailed notebooks.

There are many requests for this. Can someone from Evernote please respond and let us know when this will be implemented?

I have neatly stacked all my notebooks into different Stacks. I don't have any "unStacked" notebooks. This system is working extremely well for me.

Evernote is a great tool and has become my "go-to", more so than  email. I don't want to see the day when I've reached limits, especially in this day and age when cloud services are constantly and seamlessly adding storage and capacity.

Thanks in advance for your response.

[JMichaelTX 4,105]

On 12/13/2016 at 0:08 AM, marianco said:

250 folders is simply too small a number to organize the information I have.

Sure, tags can be used.  But tags takes more work, more typing, more time to use.  And you have to do a search every time you want to find your data.

To be clear, I'm assuming when you say "folders" you mean "notebooks", since Evernote does not have an entity named "folders".

Actually, tags can be used in a very similar way that EN Notebooks are used, but even better since:

• Tags are virtually unlimited (100,000)
• Tags can be organized hierarchically

For more info, see Using Tags as Pseudo Notebooks 

[CalS 5,041]

14 minutes ago, michaelzapun said:

I think its got more robust features that I use (maybe not you) but definately worth a second look if you haven't considered it lately.

OneNote was a full on cluster the last time I took a peek, from data loading to organizing to my workflows.  Who knows, maybe I have tailored my workflow around the idiosyncrasies of EN  or EN functionality matches my needs.  IAC EN works very well for me.  I hope OneNote works well for you.

[jefito 5,586]

8 minutes ago, michaelzapun said:

Guys I have to tell you I'm working with OneNote for last 24 hours and so far I'm liking it a lot.  A LOT.  I think its got more robust features that I use (maybe not you) but definately worth a second look if you haven't considered it lately.  I also like that there's a way to "close a notebook" to get rid of clutter on files that I'm not using in a particular week.  I may wind up doing a full length review at some point for those that may want to consider.  

It's good to know that you think you've found "the one" (usually takes more than a day to find out if a tool is long-term livable or not), and I hope that it works out for you, but  I don't think it's a good idea to post a full length review in these forums (it that's your intention). Evernote knows that OneNote is out there as an alternative, and some tolerance for discussing it is obviously allowed, but in the past they've frowned on more full discussions on why an Evernote user might want to switch to a competitor. That policy may have changed, but it does feel a little bit impolite to me.

[Etonreve 187]

I reached the 250 notebook limit. What should I do now? I often use tags, but they are not a substitute for notebooks.

 

 

 

 

[DTLow 5,698]

17 hours ago, michaelzapun said:

I'm not forced to sort the Order in the limited ways Evernote forces.  I can move sections and notes to any order I want.  That's huge for me. 

Can you add more details regarding the order.
The note sort options work well for me; there are user requests for a pinning feature.
I'm not clear on the sections comparison.

edit: The Order comment referred to the "pinning" feature
         The Sections comment referred to notebook hierarchy.

>>I may wind up doing a full length review at some point for those that may want to consider.

Not a good idea to post in the forums supplied by Evernote.  Post in the OneNote forum and post a link here.

[DTLow 5,698]

12 hours ago, Etonreve said:

I reached the 250 notebook limit. What should I do now?

Possibly open a second account; giving you potential access to 250 additional notebooks.
You can share notebooks between accounts (limit 500)

See this post on Pseudo Notebooks.  This gives you the potential for 100,000 entries

>>I often use tags, but they are not a substitute for notebooks.

Can you provide more details on this substitution?

Even though both elements are similar (as columns in the Note record);
- Notebooks have unique features
- Tags have unique features

I often substitute one for the other, but in the end I use:
- notebooks for their local-sync/offline/share feature;
- tags for their multi-assignment to notes.

[TK0047 408]

1 hour ago, Etonreve said:

I reached the 250 notebook limit. What should I do now? I often use tags, but they are not a substitute for notebooks.

 

 

 

 

Are there any notebooks that can be combined because they are similar in nature? What is your notebook structure? 250 is a lot of notebooks for sure for me at least. 

[DTLow 5,698]

On 2016-12-12 at 10:08 PM, marianco said:

And you have to do a search every time you want to find your data.

Right - Search based on a Tag or Search based on a Notebook 

I have frequently used Tags/Notebooks in my shortcuts area

[michaelzapun 8]

2 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Can you add more details regarding the order.
The note sort options work well for me; there are user requests for a pinning feature.
I'm not clear on the sections comparison.

Sure.  In Evernote, when you create notes in a notebook, you are forced to use the order assigned by Evernote.  Or you can sort according to Evernote's parameters.  But in my practice, I needed to have notes in a different order.  Example, I always like to have my first note in in notebook (client matter) be "Status Report" and 2nd note be "People in this File" (etc.).  There was no easy way to do it.  In OneNote, you just drag and drop to any order you want. In OneNote you have notebooks, sections (tabs) and pages all of which you can put in whatever order you like.  

[michaelzapun 8]

13 minutes ago, jefito said:

It's good to know that you think you've found "the one" (usually takes more than a day to find out if a tool is long-term livable or not), and I hope that it works out for you, but  I don't think it's a good idea to post a full length review in these forums (it that's your intention). Evernote knows that OneNote is out there as an alternative, and some tolerance for discussing it is obviously allowed, but in the past they've frowned on more full discussions on why an Evernote user might want to switch to a competitor. That policy may have changed, but it does feel a little bit impolite to me.

In hindsight you're right -  that this would not be the proper forum. 

[tavor 666]

2 hours ago, Etonreve said:

I reached the 250 notebook limit. What should I do now? I often use tags, but they are not a substitute for notebooks.

Depends on your use case. If you describe it, perhaps we can help you figure out a way to use tags in lieu of notebooks. 

If you are dead set on notebooks, there's nothing you can do to change the limit, so it's either combine notebooks (and have a coarser organization of notes), maintain multiple accounts, or switch to another app.

I'm closing in on 4k notes and have 5 notebooks which are based on access (local, synced, shared, offline), not content.

[jefito 5,586]

11 hours ago, Riggar said:

This is a continuous issue / problem that crops up regularly and I suspect is probably discussed at Evernote HQ fairly frequently.

It's a static issue in that it hasn't changed in 7 or 8 years or so. I doubt that they have weekly meetings over it.

11 hours ago, Riggar said:

It's a fundamental design problem (did someone say some time ago '250 is fine; people will need need more than that').

It used to be a hundred, before stacks came along, and was deemed to be a practical limit for the one-dimensional list of notebooks. Stacks were added, so they raised the limit to 250, since you could now do some limited nesting. The thinking behind all of this seemed to be that that tags  are a better, more flexible way to organize content.

11 hours ago, Riggar said:

Evernote themselves know in their hearts they are going to have to face the consequences some day. The trouble is - undoing this flaw is no small exercise and likely expensive, not to mention the various risk factors that need to be tackled.

Which is it:-the fact that there's a limit to number of notebooks or that nested notebooks don't exist? I'd say that the former option would be a lot less risky; the latter would mean a large change across Evernote's architecture on server- and client-sides, and the API that ties them together. Do some folks at Evernote regret this architecture? I'm pretty sure that they do. But it's not something that they're going to attack lightly, if they do.

[aviposluns@invisionapp.com 0]

Does the 250 rule apply only to free plans, or to the paid plans as well.  

I've been trying to contact evernote, asking them this question (which essentially is me offering to pay for an account).  No response yet.  

[s2sailor 1,180]

@Seattlitte glad to hear that worked.

[Shane D. 1,798]

Hi All,

You may have noticed that all threads requesting an increase of the 250 Notebook Limit have been merged into this thread, regardless of platform specificity. 

This was done in order to better enable us to quantify and qualify user requests, and amplify their voice.

While this does not mean this is a feature that will be coming, we certainly want to relay user feedback/sentiment to our various teams.

Moving forward, please put all commentary and votes for an increase of the 250 Notebook Limit here!

[DTLow 5,698]

On 8/28/2018 at 8:53 AM, Etonreve said:

My notebook system is not at all cluttered. It's a very efficient system for me and I need more than 250 notebooks. 

Can you provide details on  your notebook organization?

Some users are asking for nested notebooks.  I use a prefix naming system so my entries organize alphbetically.

[Rey San Pascual 4]

I've been a premium member now for several years. I have resisted moving to OneNote because I'm already familiar with Evernote. I have just bumped against the 250 notebook limit.

I am used to Stacks > Notebooks > Notes. I've reviewed my notebooks and I've deleted a few but it's going to take a big reorganization. I would like to put in my voice to increasing the 250 notebook limit. Even Excel broke their 600,000 row limit.

Otherwise, I'm going to consider the worth of redoing my Evernote organization versus learning OneNote.

[Seattlitte 5]

I've moaned about the 250 limit on notebooks on this thread before, so very excited to hear about increase to 1000.  So took the dangerous step of updating Evernote for my Premium account on my Windows 10 PC, but, after installing,  it just told me that i can not have 250 notes.  :-( What gives?

[Shane D. 1,798]

Hi All,

I'm very excited to announce that we have officially increased the Notebook limit from 250 to 1,000 for all paid tiers.

You can see those new limits here:

https://help.evernote.com/hc/articles/209005247

We will likely lock this thread soon so if you have any thoughts/questions feel free to reach out to me directly if you're unable to share those here in time!

[DTLow 5,698]

 

[DTLow 5,698]

12 hours ago, Seattlitte said:

I've moaned about the 250 limit on notebooks on this thread before, so very excited to hear about increase to 1000.  So took the dangerous step of updating Evernote for my Premium account on my Windows 10 PC, but, after installing,  it just told me that i can not have 250 notes.  :-( What gives?

I recommend you contact support on this at https://www.evernote.com/SupportLogin.action

I'm sure it's something simple.  We were told the limit is increased for paid accounts.

[jefito 5,586]

6 hours ago, Alan Rew said:

I probably make things worse for myself by having both work-related and personal notes in a single account, so having separate accounts would allow > 250 folders each, but then there's the extra cost of another subscription, just to work around a low limit :-)

A second account doesn't need to be a paid one; I use a free account for work (which oddly enough, I use more heavily) and premium for my personal use. Works reasonably well; on the other hand, I have no more than 30 notebooks between them, so number of notebooks isn't any kind of issue for me. In general, any number other than 250 (except maybe ℵ_null) would be just as arbitrary / artificial, though. You say 1000; why not 1001? Or 1024, a good honest hexadecimal number?

But consider: even with 250 notebooks, now they need to be presented conveniently in the UI. Navigating a flat list of 250 is awkward, particularly on mobile devices, so you have stacks, which were expressly introduced to help with this problem back in the days of the 100 notebook limit. So say you distribute the notebooks evenly, now you have roughly 16 stacks of 16 notebooks apiece. That seems reasonably manageable for most devices. So now increase the max to 1000; now you're looking at roughly 32 stacks of 32 notebooks, and you're starting to strain the navigability UI. I'm not saying that this is part of their reasoning, though, but it's be a consideration if it were me designing things. Of course, maybe that all goes away if they were to implement notebook nesting, but it's not clear that that's happening any time soon either, and it opens a whole other can of sandworms to boot.

Performance-wise, I have no idea why allowing more notebooks would be any more or less efficient than the current system. The SQLite database used in Windows has a notebook table and seems straightforward enough; I'm not sure how that might affect in-memory search-related caches or particularly favor tags, though. I would think that performance is a wash in that respect.

Beyond that, there's the search problem: you can only search one notebook at a time (except for All Notebooks and a single stack). Without loosening those strictures (and changes to the Evernote search language are rare), things really come down to tags being generally a more flexible way to organize things, with notebooks being the containers that you can share, or designate collections of notes that are available offline on mobile devices.

[JMichaelTX 4,105]

31 minutes ago, Shane D. said:

I'm very excited to announce that we have officially increased the Notebook limit from 250 to 1,000 for all paid tiers.

Many thanks for increasing the Notebook limit.  I'm sure this will make many users very happy.

Unfortunately, for me and I suspect many others, it is too little too late.  For my workflow, without having nested, sub-notebooks to go with the increased limit, it does me little good.  Yes, I know we have Stacks, but that limitation is too severe to help me.

But, I am hopeful.  After resisting the requests of many, many users for many years, Evernote has now finally seen the light and fulfilled this request.  Maybe it is just the first shoe to drop.  Maybe sub-notebooks will be supported before long.  If Evernote did that, it would be huge iMO, not only for us users, but also for Evernote as a company.  It make Evernote a major contender for real project management, client management, property management, and other genres that really need a solid hierarchical structure.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,315]

15 hours ago, rezecib said:

@GrumpyMonkey The limit on Business is 10k.

This was a little before my time, but my understanding is the intent of the different limits is definitely not to pressure people into upgrading to business if they hit the limit, it was just that 250 was a much bigger problem for businesses because it uses a different system for accounts-- all content in an Evernote Business is tied to a single pseudo-account, and normal users in the business simply have access to those. So when you have a business with 300+ employees, 250 notebooks in the business isn't even one notebook per user . Even as it stands 10k is only ~33 notebooks per user in that case (although on the flip side the demand for notebooks is a bit lower because more of it is shared).

Both numbers are ultimately arbitrary, it's just a good idea to have a number picked at some point to prevent abuse of the system. I'm not saying 250+ notebooks constitutes abuse, but you could imagine if someone had tens of thousands of notebooks that would be pretty excessive; the line gets drawn somewhere and then if it starts becoming a problem it will get redrawn. I can't guarantee that it will or is getting redrawn in either case (I believe it affects very few users, although I'm actually curious to see if I can get access to some metrics on that and maybe use it to make a stronger case), but it is something we would like to do.

I didn’t mean to imply the limit was there to upsell folks. I happened to be at the Evernote conference the day they rolled out business, and my general impression was that it was more focused on collaboration and sharing in the early days. The 250 limit has never bothered me. Making the library searchable, though, would really make a difference. That would solve my selective sync issue.

My point is that limits (notebooks, notes, note sizes, etc.) should be relaxed as much as possible as a policy. The policy up until this point seems to have been to wait for users to encounter friction and complain about it. In my opinion, that’s too late. If the limit could be raised (regardless of whether it only affcts a few users), it should be. Obviously, if 251 notebooks would crash the servers, then let’s not go there

[DjBea 7]

39 minutes ago, Shane D. said:

Hi All,

I'm very excited to announce that we have officially increased the Notebook limit from 250 to 1,000 for all paid tiers.

You can see those new limits here:

https://help.evernote.com/hc/articles/209005247

We will likely lock this thread soon so if you have any thoughts/questions feel free to reach out to me directly if you're unable to share those here in time!

Awakening ?

Support tells me "it's impossible" to get more than 250... 

[Shlomi 0]

I encountered the 250 notebooks limit on my windows client (version 6.4.2.3788) and was able to solve it (after deleting many notebooks).

1. sync (failed)

2. Help -> Activity Log (found out that the sync failed because of a specific note)

3. deleted the "problematic" note and emptied the trash.

Hope that helps.

 

[Etonreve 187]

3 hours ago, michaelzapun said:

Guys I have to tell you I'm working with OneNote for last 24 hours and so far I'm liking it a lot.  A LOT.  I think its got more robust features that I use (maybe not you) but definately worth a second look if you haven't considered it lately.  I also like that there's a way to "close a notebook" to get rid of clutter on files that I'm not using in a particular week.  I may wind up doing a full length review at some point for those that may want to consider.  

I tried OneNote over a year ago and didn't like it as much. I hope that Evernote increases the notebook limit and doesn't institute new price hikes so I don't have to explore OneNote or other apps again. But I will if necessary.

I look forward to your review.

[DTLow 5,698]

5 minutes ago, DjBea said:

Awakening ?

Support tells me "it's impossible" to get more than 250... 

My understanding is not that it was  "impossible".  It's a # that went from 100 to 250, and now 1000

[jefito 5,586]

On 9/28/2018 at 3:19 PM, iRQ said:

Sad to see people are still talking about tags here.

This feature request is "Increase notebook limit".

Evernote supports notebooks. They have a limit of 250. This feature request is to increase that limit.

Sure, everyone who mentions tags understands the request for notebooks. However, most of them are not Evernote employees, and cannot therefore change the Evernote service or applications. Indeed, some of them may have also requested it themselves, or at least voted for it. But more to your point, not all users understand that tags could be used as a workaround in case Evernote doesn't change this; in other words, it's informational, and not at all antagonistic to the idea that the some other users want the notebook limit increased,

[DjBea 7]

2 minutes ago, DTLow said:

My understanding is not that it was  "impossible".  It's a # that went from 100 to 250, and now 1000

I have an archive of the email of the support written "impossible for technical reason"....
Maybe evernote team start to listen... 
Maybe they will add encrypt for whole notes... we can dream !

[KenSc 1]

I too would like to call for more notebooks. The limit is baffling from both a technical and a usability point of view.

[DTLow 5,698]

On 2017-06-05 at 7:36 AM, DJW400 said:

The tag approach is too sloppy of an organizational form for me.  I like the tree form.

The Win/Mac platforms have a tag hierarchy feature (tree form?).  I use it to keep  my tags organized

I also apply a naming standard so my tags can be easily retrieved; for example coulour-red, colour-blue, colour-yellow

[Etonreve 187]

I completely agree, 250 notebooks are too few.

[DTLow 5,698]

30 minutes ago, JMichaelTX said:

without having nested, sub-notebooks to go with the increased limit, it does me little good

Tags have a limit of 100,000.  There is a hierarchy, but it's only available on specific menus on specific platforms.

I don't think we'll ever see nested, sub-notebooks.  It's a much bigger project than changing a # that had no obvious technical base.

>>it is too little too late

I'm sticking with tags for organization.  
Not because it's "too late".  
I use Notebooks and Tags for two different purposes and an  overlap gets confusing.

[Etonreve 187]

On 9/21/2016 at 9:02 AM, ARCMAN said:

I am an Evernote premium user. I use the app extensively for my Handyman business. This is the way I use it currently:

Clients (notebook stack)

     Client 1 (notebook)

          Note 1

          Note 2

     Client 2 (notebook)

          Note 1 

          Note 2

It is my understanding that Evernote premium users are limited to 250 notebooks. I am on my second premium Evernote account in order to accommodate my current needs for Evernote. My second Evernote account is nearly full and I will need to open up a third account soon. I understand this is good for Evernote but it's horrible for me not only because of the cost but it a major pain to sign out of one account and sign into another account on my iOS device. Am I doing something wrong here? Or maybe Evernote just isn't the right thing for my business. 

Thanks, 

Danny 

      

 

I agree. Evernote should be responding to the needs of its customers and many of them want more notebooks. It's absurd that you should have to pay for two, and possibly three accounts and I understand the frustration and inconvenience of switching between accounts. I recently reached my notebook max and someone suggested I open a free account in order to have more notebooks. In addition to the space and access limitations on free accounts, I don't want to have to sign in and out of two different accounts.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,315]

Thanks Gaz, for the comments. As I recall, the unlimited period was not note size, but upload amounts per month, so it is a red herring. I’m not asking for unlimited uploads or unlimited note sizes. I actually think 10gb is fine for a month of uploads. At the time of the unlimitd thing (not even something requested by users), it may have been just 1 or 2gb, so we’ve come a long way. also, as i recall, i recommnded against the unlimited idea, even though i’m one of those data hoarders, because i do think some limits are a good idea. 

 

1. How do you make a big PDF?

In practice, 200mb per note is too small for my use case. Why? I get a couple hundred pages of meeting materials per meeting, I scan them at 600 dpi grayscale (a nice balance of readability + ocr accuracy) and then I OCR (optical character recognition) the PDFs using Adobe Acrobat Pro (why not Evernote? That’s another discussion). This is often over 200mb, but sometimes the documents are full of color, so I have to do the whole thing in color, and that will make it even bigger. I have gone 99.9% paperless for about a decade now, so some of the PDFs include books, dictionaries (one of my research topics), etc.

2. Optimization?

Could I reduce the quality of the PDFs? Sure. I’ve done that in the past, and written about how I tried to optimize stuff for Evernote. But, the Chinese characters literally become smudges, and photos of old manuscripts and so forth (already difficult to read in manuscript form) become illegible. Big PDFs are perfect for legibility, and I can now search my own database of hundreds of thousands of files to find even the most obscure references (hampered a bit by OCR quality, but it’s still pretty good), so I’ve got no interest in ruining the quality of my PDFs or a workflow that I’ve been using successfully for so many years in order to fit myself into an arbitrary limit (it used to be just 25mb per note) that is good for the majority of folks (most of whom don’t pay or use the app that much). It doesn’t make sense to me. I’ve accepted that it’s a lot of data in aggregate that will never fit into Evernote (especially without selective sync on the Mac), but there are certain individual files that are simply critical for my work. In those cases, I begrudgingly turn to other apps.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=2033

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=127

3.Alternatives

In my case, using Devonthink (database / note competitor available on Mac and iOS) is the best solution. It smoothly syncs through Dropbox (Dropbox has no problem with more users than Evernote and more data flowing through it, so I don’t buy the “bandwidth” argument, especially now that Evernote is housed inside Google, one of the largest and most powerful server farms in the world). It also syncs with encryption. The app even has a password / fingerprint lock on iOS that works seamlessly. I am not aware of an upper limit with the app or Dropbox, but I’ve found it best to limit things to a few dozen gigabytes per database (equivalent to Evernotes notebooks). My mobile devices have 256GB storage, so we are good to go. Sounds perfect, right? And, it even costs less per year (no subscription cost for Devonthink and Dropbox costs less than Evernote). There’s just one problem. Devonthink is phenomenal with searches in romance languages, but CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) is hit or miss. Facepalm here. All of this data, and I can’t rely on the searches! Dropbox? It doesn’t search inside of files. Drive? It only indexes the first 100 pages of PDFs. So, here we are

Whatever faults Evernote has, search has (with many exceptions reported and discussed in these forums over the years) generally been quite good. And, the OCR for handwritten notes is OK as well. This is really nice, especially on iOS. Yesterday in a meeting I could pull up notes at three different points that were helpful for the discussion and would have been impossible to locate in a timely manner if I had been working with paper. Thanks Evernote! What I am trying to say is that Evernote works really well, but it could be better, especially for those of us who have gone paperless. IF it doesn’t degrade the experience of other users, why not raise the note size limit? 

4. Limits

The same could be said for notebooks. I’m fine with 10.But, that’s just me. If it doesn’t degrade the experience, why not have 100,000? It sounds great to me. In fact, as I recall, the Mac team experimented with something like this, but there was a UI issue or something. Maybe I’m wrong. But, I think priorities and design direction have changed so much it’s worth revisiting.

As for note size limits, if there aren’t so many of us that need them raised, and we are (by definition) paying users, why not raise it? There shouldn’t be a significant impact on anyone. I’m happy. Everyone else is happy. And, then we can move on and talk about selective sync

[DTLow 5,698]

3 minutes ago, Etonreve said:

I don't want to have to sign in and out of two different accounts.

Look at sharing notebooks with your main account; limit 500

[Etonreve 187]

On 9/21/2016 at 9:26 AM, jefito said:

Evernote are pretty set on tags over notebooks, historically. Maybe they will increase the limit, but I wouldn't bet my business on it. Is there some reason that tags wouldn't work for you?

I vastly prefer to organize information by notebook. I use notebooks for clients, projects, classes, and subjects.  In addition, there some are some situations, such as when I'm using saving notes on my phone or using the web clipper in certain instances, when I can't add tags. Adding tags is also not something for which I always have time. I do not always have time to go back and tag notes. Evernote is supposed to reduce organization time, not increase it.

People shouldn't have to justify their need for notebooks. A company that makes a one-purpose organization tool should make the app flexible to the actual organization needs of its users.

 

[JMichaelTX 4,105]

8 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Tags have a limit of 100,000.  There is a hierarchy, but it's only available on specific menus on specific platforms.

As you know, the tag hierarchy is ONLY a hierarchy of the tags themselves, and has no impact on notes and notebooks (except in EN Win).

While we have been forced to use tags where many of us would have preferred to use Notebooks, I believe that the basic notions of Notebooks (aka folders) and Tags are quite different.  In the macOS itself, I make very good use of both folders and macOS Finder Tags.  They are complementary with little overlap.  But then that is my design (of folder structure and tag structure). 

But please, let's not get into the eternal debate of tags vs notebooks here.  If anyone chooses to use tags rather than Notebooks, then fine.  But some of us recognize the value of hierarchical notebooks, while other don't (or choose not to).  If anyone wants to discuss tags vs notebooks, please provide a link to one of the many existing discussions of this debate, so everyone can discuss it there.

[iRQ 5]

Sad to see people are still talking about tags here.

This feature request is "Increase notebook limit".

Evernote supports notebooks. They have a limit of 250. This feature request is to increase that limit.

[cosmicgate 0]

This is an bug issue that has not been fixed. I am sorry, I did not found the "BUGS" section here.

First I'd like to have more folders to create. I found I have reached 250 folders long ago and I am "suffocating".

And when I delete other folders to make place for new, I cannot syncronize and I need to reinstall evernote everytime that happens.

Alredy wrote to the support twice, and I you still have not taken action.

I'll segregate my payment plan or search for other options for productivity management.

 

p.s. Having first page in Russian not in international English is almost insulting for a Bulgarian. Please correct that.

[Etonreve 187]

7 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Look at sharing notebooks with your main account; limit 500

What about the storage max limit and lesser functionality of a free account? Or the fact that the free account can be accessed only from two locations?

I hate to think of doing this, but what is the impact of archiving a notebook or deleting a notebook? I assume the notes first have to be removed and moved elsewhere.

 

[Allen Long 0]

One of the features of Evernote is to organize by notebooks.  Over the years, I find that I need to pull all related notes from a particular notebook and place it in a new notebook. I have been with Evernote almost since the beginning of its starting.  Now I am limited in my organizing.  Argh!  This is frustrating.  Any chance that this could be changed?  (BTW, I do have a Premium account)

Any ideas?

 

Thanks,

Allen Long

[DTLow 5,698]

8 hours ago, iRQ said:

This feature request is "Increase notebook limit".

Evernote supports notebooks. They have a limit of 250. This feature request is to increase that limit.

Confirmed.  The request is posted at the top of the discussion.  
There are voting buttons to indicate your support.

If you're interested in work-around solutions, participate in the discussions that follow the feature request post.
Tags are one of the solutions suggested.  
There's also suggestions for archiving unused notebooks.

                                Don't be sad, put on a ? 

[DTLow 5,698]

2 hours ago, JMichaelTX said:

has no impact on notes and notebooks (except in EN Win).

??? Why the EN Win exception

>>But please, let's not get into the eternal debate of tags vs notebooks here.

My point was on surviving with no Notebook hierarchy 

[Etonreve 187]

On 2/10/2018 at 3:11 PM, DTLow said:

This isn't a web clipper discussion, but personally I clip into my default notebook (@Inbox) with no tags.
Notebook and tag assignment come later when I process my inbox(es)

I have minimal notebooks (I use tags for organization) so its quite easy to have the right notebook selected.  I suspect this wouldn't happen often with many notebooks

If I'm in a hurry, I clip to my default notebook. Otherwise, I select the appropriate notebook by typing in the name. The smart selection process often prompts me with the correct notebook. As I noted elsewhere, sometimes the web clipper does not give the user the option to choose a notebook or tags. It saves the note to the default notebook and then the user has to open the note and assign it to a notebook and add tags. I usually don't have time for that.

The web clipper is extremely relevant. Most of my notes are created that way and on my phone.

 

 

[kinshuk4 14]

When using web clipper for Evernote, if we have a right notebook selected, we don't have to use a mouse at all, but when we use tags, we have to definitely use a mouse. 

[marianco 8]

I just reached Evernotes 250 notebook limit.  And I'm irritated.

I am a physician. I study subjects including all of neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, endocrinology, immunology, neurology, general medicine, gastroenterology, nutrition, pharmacology, technology, computer programming, web design, photography, videography, exercise and sports, language, culture, etc.

250 folders is simply too small a number to organize the information I have.

Sure, tags can be used.  But tags takes more work, more typing, more time to use.  And you have to do a search every time you want to find your data.

I am not an office clerk. Time is important. 

Both tags and notebooks are simply pointers to the actual data.  if 100,000 tags are allowed, then why not 100,000 notebooks?

Further, since notebooks only have two level hierarchy, why not more levels?

Please make Evernote much more useful for us.

Weaknesses like this are openings for competitors. 

 

[Etonreve 187]

On 3/16/2017 at 2:24 PM, DTLow said:

 

>>  unlimited hierarchy ...I'm going to look into this; I'm not sure what it means.

There is a huge request discussion on this; the example is based on the use of folders and sub-folders

• Folder
  • sub-folder
  • sub-folder
    • sub-folder
    • sub-folder

 

 

I think it's a different issue, but the notebook stacking feature is not that easy to use. I haven't used it in years because it was awkward and often I found myself having to create additional notebooks in order to create a stack.

[DTLow 5,698]

31 minutes ago, marianco said:

Both tags and folders are simply pointers to the actual data.  if 100,000 tags are allowed, then why not 100,000 folders?

You might want to edit your post and change Folders to Notebooks

I agree both tags and notebooks are technically just pointers however they have different purposes and weren't designed to be interchangeable for organization purposes.  

I'd suggest you need to consider your approach to tags.

[Etonreve 187]

12 hours ago, DTLow said:

 

>>I often use tags, but they are not a substitute for notebooks.

Can you provide more details on this substitution?

Even though both elements are similar (as columns in the Note record);
- Notebooks have unique features
- Tags have unique features

I often substitute one for the other, but in the end I use:
- notebooks for their local-sync/offline/share feature;
- tags for their multi-assignment to notes.

1

Notebooks are my basic form of organizing projects, clients, accounts, and classes. For most people, that isn't too difficult to understand. An obvious advantage is that if you were working on a project and needed to share it with someone you would just share the notebook, not a bunch of notes pulled up by tags. Tags are for topics and characteristics that cross notebooks. I use tags, but it is more work to create them and it is not always possible to add a tag when clipping a note. I also tag liberally, so there is no guarantee that a tag search will display only the notes relevant to the notebook topic.

People who prefer notebooks should not have to contort themselves to Evernote's system.

[DTLow 5,698]

4 minutes ago, Etonreve said:

Tags are for topics and characteristics 

Agreed

>>that cross notebooks.

I see this as a benefit; not as a restriction.