PinkElephant

Thank you for the Feedback. The iOS share menu is really very hidden in the EN app, putting the internal sharing first. Had to search for it myself, some time ago. Glad I could help you out on this.

... however EN closes agreements based on GDPR. Probably the best way to really find out would be to contact support by E-Mail on this. I did it when I needed the GDPR agreement, had to briefly explain why I needed it (mostly because I store project information that will contain names) and got it signed in a matter of days.

The Standard iOS share menu with the printing option is right behind this „Share outside“ - option:

Personally on my iPhone I nowadays mostly use the integrated scanner of the EN app itself, not Scannable. Create a note, or go into one, edit mode, then press the "+" above of the keyboard, and pick the camera. It will let you scan, cut the pages, and at the bottom you have a tool to correct it if mistaken. However, the majority of scans on my iPhone I do using the App ScannerPro from readdle, because it is far superior with settings, edits and tools. It even does its own OCR, and sends scans with prebuilt workflows into EN, ready with notebook and standard tags depending on which workflow I choose. If at home and have more than a page or two, I use the ix500 linked to my Mac, but this is playing in a different league alltogether.

You should probably first look after your search index on both Macs: Hold the alt/opt key before clicking on the help menu, then down to the new point in the list, at the very bottom (problem solving), and pick the ones related to rebuild the search indexes. This is the first thing where over time notes can get lost when searching. Do it on both Macs. Then place the starting point identical (like all notes), and use the exact same search terms on both machines. With the current MacOSes (starting with Mojave, if I am not mistaken) spotlight search got pretty restricted, so search inside of EN. P.S. If you want to obscure some stuff in screen shots, there is a very nice toll for this build into Skitch. It has both a crosshair screenshot tool and a pixelator to hide stuff. It comes free from Evernote, but is a separate app that must be installed from the EN website. It saves what it picks into EN notes, so it works 1:1.

Yes, Boolean search would be a feature, at least for those who know who to use it. Probably the „Generation Google“ is lost for this ...

Search in Evernote is not completely Boolean, so the usual stuff does not work. Maybe this can help: https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313828-How-to-use-Evernote-s-advanced-search-syntax

The difference with complying to GDPR for companies / professional use is primary a legal aspect. One has to make it compliant, otherwise there is a legal risk for not taking care. If you use a service with a professional background, you better take care of that. About the rest we do not need to discuss. One may say „I wonder whether I am paranoid ?“. And the other answers „I wonder that as well, but am I paranoid enough?“. So it is not a discussion about how cloud services work, but it is about what you (or I) believe about their privacy. So have fun with your newly won freedom to look after your data yourself.

As I said, EN stores the EXIF data with the picture, when the picture provides them. It is not stripping them, they are all there when the picture is attached to a note. I then ran another test: When I use the the iPhones camera directly inside of a note to take a picture, it will generate EXIF data as well. But much less so compared with pictures taken with the main camera app. One reason may be that some of the EXIF information is stored with the note itself, like the location where the note was created. It may be that this is mainly because EN uses the iPhones camera as a document scanner, not to take „real“ pictures. In documents most people prefer less metadata, because it gives away information you may not want to be send with the scanned document. So the data is not taken away, it’s not generated when the camera is use to scan stuff. If you want pictures that have everything (think about advanced picture information like depth information, live pictures and Deep Fusion Processing ) you need to use the camera app of the iPhone, and send the pictures into EN later.

Yes, issue a support ticket. This here is a user forum, EN employees may come along, but do not necessarily take action.

Yes, probably because EN is not meant to be a prime target of photo storage. There are programs better suited for this task. This does not mean that the EXIF data would be lost. I shared a picture on my iPad from the camera roll into EN, synced the note to the server and to my Mac, and opened this photo there from EN with a photo editing program. There I exported the EXIF data. The EXIF data was kept as in the original photo. So it is still there, you can just not see or edit it in EN. EN behaves like this with many programs: It serves by offering notes as containers that can hold all kind of information and attachments. But it is not build to manipulate the thousands of file formats that are around. For this, you need a better suited program. After that you can save it back to EN.

EN is compliant with the GDPR of the European Union, so it is safe to store data with privacy content there, even as a commercial user. Part of it is based on the Safe-Harbour-Agreement, and everybody may decide based on this facts. They are not hidden, nor is the fact that EN uses a distributed server structure. Servers are located worldwide, hosted by Goggle in its data centers, and the data of any user is located in several data centers, with one copy close to the usual point of entry, and other copies distributed as disaster precaution, and for availability during maintenance. See the video about the recent improvements, it becomes pretty clear that they invested a lot to really boost the machines that run the show. It is a very unrealistic approach that in todays cloud services any „bit“ of personal information would be located in a specified server in a given place. This is different if a company hosts say the SAP database with a cloud company, but the general cloud services distribute copies of data. So if you feel better, go and host your own stuff. Hope you are a good admin, keep the server up to date at any moment and run a solid firewall plus frequent backups. It can be a nice hobby (I am running my own Synology based server, so I know what I am talking about), but pretty time consuming and by all means less safe than cloud hosting.

There is a program in the Macs AppStore called Exporter (only this, not one of the many exporters with a names addition). It is for free, so you can give it a try anyhow. It exports Apple Notes to a markdown format and stores it in plain text. The notes are grouped in folders based on the notebooks they were in. Image attachments, tables and URL-Links are claimed to be exported correctly - this was just added with the latest release. The version 2.1.1 was released a few days ago. How you can import from the folders into EN is another question, but it should solve the export side of the venture. And markdown sounds good, because it is close to HTML.

You can restore a single note to a prior status using note history on the server, but it is note by note. If you want to save your complete EN database from your local disk, you can use a backup program that is able to copy single folders (this means not by TimeMachine, but for example with Acronis for the Mac). Then you can simply grab everything in your EN folder and stuff it away. Restore means then that you restore everything to a prior status, which probably is not very useful. But it is possible.

You can export them as ENEX files and archive them outside of EN. If you want them back, you can re-import.

Because on my Mac performance is still o.k. (No, looking at the data volume, syncing activities and that I have installed everything, from the main app over Helper, Skitch and WebClipper, it is excellent), I can’t really help on this. I am running a MacBook Pro 15, 2018, i7, 32GB RAM, latest Catalina and EN apps, no betas. In fact I do NOT want to find out what could change this comfortable situation. Maybe you should give a try to involve support, they have better means to Analyse what is going on on your system.

Yes - from how I read it the 5secs are there to give EN enough time to fetch the link to the new note (the step before the wait) before it is called. So if you are on a strong WiFi with a good internet connection every time you use the shortcut, probably a shorter waiting period is no problem. This is what I like with shortcuts: Thousands of opportunities, and everybody can tailor and improve them. Have fun !

Bubble Browser was / is a program (for the Mac ?) that used to show relations between notes or tags in a graphical way. I used it a while ago, forgot about it, and retried it appr. 8-9 month ago. But it seems to be dysfunctional, always bombing when analyzing the relations between notes. It did not only crash, it took down the whole Mac on its way to nirvana. The web site was not modified in years, support does not answer etc. Is this the type of program you would trust all your EN accounts content to ? I do not ...

???

There was bubble browser as well, but it seems to be discontinued. One can still find it on the Mac AppStore, but it bombs on launch, the website was not touched for years, and mails are not answered. One should think about the fact that you need to give these apps FULL access to your notes to use them. They could read every note in your account, extract whatever information is there and use it for whatever purpose. IMHO this is a lot of trust based on very little of fact - especially when the tools come for free, and have no obvious business modell.

Everybody needs to find his own way to organize stuff. IMHO a need to describe tags is an indicator of over-organizing. Tags are like a multidimensional folder, which is instead of pushing copies of a note into a folder each, the one and same note is tagged to make it easier to find it, or even more to group it together with otherwise in the same context. If I need a description of individual tags, I likely have too many, which is contrary to the idea of grouping notes together. I will likely have to few notes per tag than to make this work. If I want to describe my tagging system as a reminder, I can easily create a note with a description for reference. Personally I use the tagging assisted by the tag proposals when I enter the first letters „free style“. My hierarchy is one level deep, the second level does not carry a reference to the first one. Maybe I would use hierarchy more structured if it would be supported by the iOS app as well. Every several month or so I go to the tag view on my Mac, check for tags with only a few uses and decide whether to keep it or to join it with another tag. Notebooks are important to very superficially cluster notes, but even more important is the possibility to use them to control information flow, like sharing to other people or selecting offline notes for a mobile app.

I have not tried it, if it really keeps all offline data even when you switch it off. But by uninstalling and reinstalling the App you just force-create the status it would have if you would get rid of your offline data by other means. So you will not loose anything, if getting rid of the offline data is your goal. And it means having a fresh setup, without any leftovers.

Yes, this is the standard procedure to force a sync. Now we have sort of a cliffhanger here: Where is your problem ? Did you follow the advise, and it didn’t work ?

O.K. Then you know that burning to the ground is not just theoretical (sorry for that). My first Backup is TM on the Mac, to the NAS. Since I have most on the iCloud Drive as well, this alone should keep me safe. For secondary backups I run Acronis True Image on all computers (PCs and Mac), plus the Synology HyperBackup on the Syno. About Google, I agree in general. They are in one class with Amazon and Facebook, all living like vampires off the data they generate from their users / customers. I just mentioned Google Drive because they have a good product, and you don’t need to mind about it when encrypting before uploading. EN is hosted as well in Google data centers, but out of reach from the Google tentacles. They run a very efficient and secure cloud platform. By the way, we have a nice privacy legislation here in Europe now. First you can have all data related to your person extracted and send to you for review. And this means everything they have - we have reports from people that received several DVDs full of stuff, going back 10 years. This is free of charge, 30 days time limit, severe fines applied. And then you have a right to tell them to delete it - completely. They call it the individual citizen right to be forgotten. Nice job done in Brussels, I really appreciate it. Anyhow it is a bit hard to keep away from them: No accounts created (no YouTube or Instagram as well), use another search engine (DuckDuckGo in my case), avoid Chrome browser, no Android phone, no Google maps etc. You can’t evade them completely, but reduce their grab a lot.

About Windows I still can’t say anything. I will check when I fire my PC up the next time. But I had a connection issue on my Mac some weeks ago as well. In the end I solved it by completely erasing any software from Fujitsu from the Mac, reinstall and set it up from scratch again. Since then it worked again. But I do not think this is related, because Mac and Windows are very different OSes, and use different Scansnap clients.