Wanderling Reborn

The ability to OCR a photo is indeed much needed, I'd say the users gave up on this thread because it was clearly going nowhere. There's so many uses for this feature, I am honestly surprised you even ask why would someone want this. The phone is one tool I always have on me, and there's very often a reason to take a quick photo of some text / page / advertisement / address / etc. and have it both searchable and ready to be copied. Personally, I am using an iOS app called "Scanbot" that is a pretty good scanner but it also works on existing images. It creates PDFs with text already OCRd on the device. You can set it to automatically send files to Evernote (or Onenote, or Dropbox, or...) An added advantage is that it creates "proper" PDFs with that can be copied and moved between services without losing any of the proprietary OCR capabilities that only exist on that one service. I can't recommend that app highly enough. However, using any 3rd party tool introduces extra steps that could be avoided.

And there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. It was a discussion on EN alternatives, and as someone who used EN religiously for a while and have been looking at various alternatives for the past 3 years or so, I thought I'd chime in. If it works for you, that's great. I am not trying to make people ditch EN for ON or GD or whatever, I am just providing my (unrequested) POV. Using any service requires a certain degree of trust and hoop jumping. There's simply no way around this.

I honestly don't care. If I don't want them to know something, I'll encrypt it. Otherwise, it's kind of pointless to hide user manuals, remodeling quotes or travel reservations from Google when people use Gmail and Google search and Android phones. Or Outlook.com and Bing and Windows 10 computers. Your emails and daily location data and search queries (and credit card transactions, and Amazon purchase history, and a myriad of other data bits that practically all retailers and services share about you) paint a much more comprehensive picture than a pile of documents and notes you keep somewhere. What worries me more is how good are they at preventing unauthorized access to my data, maintaining it backed up and accessible, and how easy is it to move around. You can always use an alternate paid service like SpiderOak if you're concerned with privacy. Or, just keep everything in encrypted format. I don't know if there's a way to index and search encrypted containers on mobile devices - never had the need - but it's very easy to set up on Windows or Linux while keeping the index itself secure.

I've used a centralized encryption (first PGP Disk, then FreeOTFE, then TrueCrypt) since late 90s. Almost daily. Never, ever, ever had data loss. That said, Cryptomator does encrypt files individually, and not in one huge volume, however there's no way to say which resulting file is what original file without mounting the whole system first.(Perhaps by file size ? But the file names are gibberish).

Cryptomator mounts as a drive in Explorer so getting data out of it is as simple as entering the password and copying the top level directory. No need to convert anything, or decrypt individual files. It's also open source and posted on Sourceforge, so even if the project ever folds, the program and it's source code will remain available. If I ever find a better alternative, switching over would be as simple as moving files between two drives. I switched between a few encrypted storage solutions in the past 15 years, it's about as painless of a process as it gets. Click, drag, drop, done. There are indeed many alternatives, I just happened to like that one better.

The HTML was not the best choice for conversion, and I wouldn't do it again that way. Luckily it's old notes that I rarely re-visit. I am converting them to PDF or Doc as needed.

Hi everyone, checking in to share some experience of using an alternative for the past 7 months. (Actually, I switched to Onenote about year and a half prior to that, but for all intents and purposes EN and ON are somewhat related services.) So, seven or so months ago, I finally bit the bullet and decided to try something I've been thinking of for a while - stop using any sort of dedicated data capture and storage service like Onenote or Evernote, and move all of my data to a file folder cloud based system. A very big part of this decision was the desire to never again have to deal with system migration and file conversion. So, here's my setup. It's been working fine for me, with some things being better and some things being more difficult than using a dedicated service. All of my data is kept in Onedrive, and synced to Google Drive using CloudHQ free service. The sync part is not really required, mainly I did this to figure which service I liked better, but grew used to having my data duplicated. All of my files are in common format - PDF, Office doc and excel, or images. If I ever have to switch over to a different provider, no conversion will be required. I use Google Drive and Onedrive search. Primarily Google because it's app loads faster on my ancient Mini 2. Both services will OCR a document or image with text. For sensitive data, I use an app called Cryptomator. It provides strong encryption, and has very decent clients for pretty much every OS. There's a choice of several similar app, I picked this one for being open source, free, and very cross-platform. (There's also a way to index files hidden in Cryptomator by using another free software.) For capturing paper documents, there's a very good and wide choice of scanner type software available for both iOS and Android, usually complete with OCR. I settled on a program called Scanbot, which is very well thought through and optimized for batch processing and automated saving of captured documents. I haven't touched my flatbed scanner in months. For taking notes, I use a number of apps, basically whatever I feel like, as long as it meets a few main requirements - (1) fast (2) automatic saving to cloud (3) common file format. Most usually it's either Goodnotes or Notability on myiPad, set up to automatically save a PDF version of note to the cloud when I exit the program. Goodnotes is especially great for quick handwritten notes because it automatically (and pretty accurately) OCRs handwriting so the resulting PDF can be searched. There are negatives as well, which for some people may be deal breakers: 1) Storage capacity. AFAIK Google offers 15 GB free (combined with email) and Outlook something like 5 ? (I was grandfathered into 30 GB). Not a problem for me - I only have about 3 GB worth of data, but may be an issue for some people. (But then the cost of added storage is pretty reasonable). 2) Google Drive specific issue: it will not search in large PDFs. Onedrive seems to work fine on them. 3) Another Google Drive specific issue: if you're using Google Drive, it will default to Google Docs format for new documents. I prefer to have physical access to actual files rather than hyperlinks to them. 4) Google Drive is terrible at handling HTML documents. On the iOS, practically unusable. So, if I had to stick with only one service, I'd pick Onedrive. However GDrive has it's own advantages as well: it's faster on older iPads, Chrome's "Save to Drive" command creates a PDF of a web page with hyperlinks preserved, perfect for clipping, and it's generally directly supported by more apps and extensions. Having both services in sync worked the best for me. Sorry if it was a long-winged post.

Xmind.