(Archived) "Smart" tagging and notebook placement

[inkedmn 8]

Currently, all incoming notes (from email, clipping, etc.) are added to a notebook called "@inbox". From that point, I rename the note to something sensible (assuming it has no title or is an unnecessarily long web page name, for instance) and apply the appropriate tags, then place it into one of my several notebooks based on the topic/content. I do a good deal of clipping and am looking to automate this process (to an extent, at least).

So, here's my vision of "wild success" with respect to this feature request:

I clip an article from my medical insurance website. Because this article contains the words "Kaiser" and "medical", gets tagged with those words and added to my "family medical" notebook. Or, if I forward a work email to Evernote that originated from my employer's domain and contained the words "Foo Project", it would be tagged as "project" and "foo" and added to my "work" notebook. Etc.

I don't pretend to think this would be a simple feature to implement, but this would save me boatloads of time in moving things around and organizing things.

Thanks very much for all of your hard work on this product, I use the ***** out of it and it's wonderful

[numberjay 0]

If you can do without online synchronization, then EverNote 2.2 'categories' do all you're asking and then some...

[missdipsy 2]

Ahh, yet another example of something the old EN did! I love Evernote in it's current incarnation, and web synchronisation is far too useful for me to consider downgrading, but there were some real gems in the old version that haven't (yet) been implemented in the new one. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that some of them eventually make a reappearance!

Smart tagging would be wonderful, and the old EN did it pretty well from what I remember. I've seen EN staff refer to saved searches as though they are an equivalent feature in previous posts, but I really don't think they perform the same function at all.

[engberg 89]

Saved Searches provide a lot more flexibility than the 2.2 auto-tagging did, since you can combine several sets of criteria into your search. The 2.2 feature was limited to a single criterion from a short list of options. E.g. you couldn't use it to find all of the untagged notes with images created in the last month, which you can with saved searches:

resource:image/* -tag:* created:day-30

[crane 40]

Yeah, but don't forget about the category intersection panel. It would have been simple to use that to find that subset.

We need to remember that auto-tagging is not the same thing as searching - auto-tagging was great for organizing. Searching, even the whiz-bang saved searches is good for searching. Not the same thing.

[engberg 89]

Manually intersecting those three categories every time you want to find the relevant notes would definitely be an option, but this is going to be a bit more work than just clicking on the (single) named Save Search when you want to see the relevant notes.

I.e. the manner in which you can dynamically find notes meeting certain criteria has changed in a way that is more powerful for some uses. If you were used to the old metaphor of assigning categories, you may prefer the old UI, of course.

[crane 40]

I'll be honest - the saved searches are pretty much useless to me. I might use one every four weeks or so, and more often I find that I just type something into the search box. For instance, I have a saved search to find notes with no tags. It's easier for me to type -tag:* in the search box than it is for me to scroll down to the saved searches. Hell, I can't even see most of my tags without scrolling. I'd use the saved searches more often if I could put them closer to the notebooks that they are used with.

[phraktyl 0]

I'd be very happy if EN implemented something similar to how Flickr does it. Whenever you send a message to Flickr you can use the syntax tags:tag1, tag2, … in the message. Flickr parses those out and adds them as tags to the post.

So you could forward something to EN and include tags:@work "Foo Project" and those tags would automatically be added to the note. Don't think it would be hard to implement, and would be incredibly useful.

Flickr tags help