Idea: Auto-tagging

[GiacomoLaw 134]

I would love a feature which tagged notes atuomatically based on the notebook they were placed in. For example, if I had a notebook for my chemsitry school notes, I could set it to auto tag with year11, chemistry, and school.

This would be a great feature that would really make EN a lot more useful!

[DTLow 5,736]

18 minutes ago, GiacomoLaw said:

I would love a feature which tagged notes atuomatically based on the notebook they were placed in. For example, if I had a notebook for my chemistry school notes, I could set it to auto tag with year11, chemistry, and school.

This would be a great feature that would really make EN a lot more useful!

When I suggested adding a tag to the notes in a notebook my daughter shared me, she gave me the look I often get.  An indication that the tag would be redundant given all the notes had a common notebook

The desktop applications allow for a mass note change.  You can select all the notes for the year and add the tags.

You could search the forums.  There was a service presented that would do some auto filing functions.

 

[gazumped 11,652]

You could also pretty easily set up a template for Chem notes,  pre-tagged with your preferred setup.  When you make a new note (or in anticipation of making lots) copy that template note (or several of them) to the right notebook,  preserving the tags,  but not the created date of the template.  Start typing...

[Al Sargent 21]

Yes, Evernote now automatically puts in some tags. It's a step forward, but not nearly enough. We need auto-tag rules, similar to Gmail's filters, to catch what Evernote doesn't seem to be able to "learn" on its own. Here's why.

In the 15 years I've used Gmail, I've built up literally hundreds of auto-tagging rules (Gmail calls them "filters" but it's the same concept). I've done this because it makes it easier to find stuff in Gmail. All the concepts below that apply to Gmail would also apply to Evernote, to make it easier to find stuff in Evernote.

Here are some categories of auto-tagging:

1) Subset/superset relationships. For instance, when a note from a teacher calls out the name of one of my kids, Gmail automatically attaches the label "family". When a note mentions "401k", Gmail automatically attaches the label "Investments". When I receive a newsletter than mentions one of my company's competitors by name, Gmail attaches the label "competitor". You get the point.

2) Related concepts. When emails come from venmo.com and include the words "you paid", Gmail applies the label "receipt". 

3) Synonyms. My siblings have nicknames and commonly misspelled names. Gmail looks at all these, and applies an appropriate label for the sibling. That way I don't have to search for every permutation of their name or nickname.

Here are some examples of where I go through Evernote and manually tag items. It's a pain. Auto-tagging would save me a lot of time.

1. Apply tag corresponding to notebook name. So for example, everything in my Marketing notebook gets the Marketing tag. Everything in the Career notebook gets the Career tag. And so on. I put notes into one of a couple dozen notebooks. But sometimes a note could go into one of two different notebooks. For example, my career is marketing. So, sometimes I'll use the web clipper to pull in something that could go into the career notebook, and sometimes it goes into the marketing notebook. But to find it later, I'll tag it both "career" and "marketing". That say, since everything has a tag, just search by tag.

2. Tag by person name. Do a search for various spellings of my coworkers names, with quotes, as in "John Doe" or (mispelled) "Jon Doe" or nickname "Doe". Then apply a tag "johndoe". This makes it quicker to find meeting notes for that person. Or an article that was referred by that person. 

3. Tag by content type. Quick, what's the advanced search operator to find all notes with a PDF? It's resource:application/pdf. Not the easiest thing to remember, right? So I'll select all notes, search for resource:application/pdf, and tag as "pdf". Much easier to find PDFs. I'll also search for "docs.google.com/document/", "docs.google.com/spreadsheets/", and "docs.google.com/presentation/", and tag those "google doc", "google sheet", and "google slides", respectively. 

4. Tag by synonym. I take notes for an activity I do, sailboat racing. One type of boat is called a Vanguard 15. But articles I pull in through the web clipper might refer to "V15" or "Vanguard 15". I search for both, and apply the tag "Vanguard 15".

5. Tag by superclass. Also in the realm of sailing, I'll put in articles on boats that are called Knarrs, J/70s (also written J70, without the slash), J/105s, (and, J105), and so forth. All of these are a type of boat called a keelboat. So I'll do all those searches and apply the tag "keelboat". In the realm of work, when I clip an article that contains the word "GDPR" or "HIPAA", I'll add the tag "compliance", againn to make things easier to find.

6. Tag by related concept. Someday I'd love to race a boat to Hawaii, and I use Evernote to gather information I'll need to do those, since you're pretty much on your own in terms of packing food, surviving a gear failure (or worse, sunken boat), and so on. There are two main races, Pacific Cup on even years, and Transpac on odd years. They pretty much have the same challenges. When I use web clipper to pull an article with "Pacific Cup" in it, I apply the tag "transpac". Vice-versa when the article contains the word "Transpac". 

Yes, that's a lot of tagging. And I do even more. All to make it possible to locate notes among the thousands I have in Evernote. Hopefully this shows how auto-tagging would be useful.

[gazumped 11,652]

1 hour ago, Al Sargent said:

Hopefully this shows how auto-tagging would be useful.

Not exactly seeing how this is transferable to general use. 

• It's redundant to tag a note for the notebook that it is in.  I'll concede that it's sensible to tag a related notebook name if your notes are arranged that way.  But how does the auto system know which notes to tag and what other notebook names to attach to any given note?
• tagging by multiple spellings of a person's name - how does the system know who is,  or are the primary persons of interest in a given note?  If I attach a list of attendees to a meeting should it multi-spell every name on the list?
• content type - some types are already covered as you note.  An awful lot of my notes are going to carry JPG or PNG tags
• synonym / superclass - again how does the system know which terms require alternate constructions and (for example) that an X15 is also an aeroplane / rocketplane / hypersonic experimental aircraft?  Which term to use?
• related concepts - I like photography;  there ar literally thousands of topics that could relate to my hobby - and a lot of notes that I clipped for other purposes and actually are not connected to photography.

Don't get me wrong - you have a system which works for you. That's great and fine and it's an interesting example for others to consider - but individuals would have to adapt to their own occupation and interests in light of your principles.  I use something based almost entirely on detailed note titles with most of my 40K+ notes being in one humungous pile of a notebook.  That works for me.

An auto-tag system based on your principles would (AFAICS) be more trouble that it was worth in the weeks or months before the app could accurately interpret the tags required,  and might slow down operations while each new note was multi-tagged with 20 or so options.  Plus desktop tag screens can currently be kept tidy by nesting tags in their own classes - having a huge list of possible tags could make a mess of that layout - and would totally mess up a mobile app screen.

I'd far prefer to set up and maintain my own system - at least I know and understand what tags are being used then.

You do seem to have promoted this idea across several threads,  specifically -

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/104911-auto-tag-based-on-sticker-or-object/#comment-482091
https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/90561-auto-tag-to-file-in-evernote-chosen-notebook/?tab=comments#comment-482084
https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/81508-auto-tagging-scan-software/?tab=comments#comment-482082
https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/43065-intelligent-automatic-tagging/?tab=comments#comment-482070
https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/97777-idea-auto-tagging/?tab=comments#comment-482069

- Please don't do that,  it's against the Forum rules.  One post is enough.

 

[jefito 5,589]

@Al Sargent: to follow onto @gazumped's comment: the next time you feel inclined to write a dissertation and copy/paste it into multiple topics, just write it once, and post a link to that post into the other topics. Thank you.

[Al Sargent 21]

Sorry about that. Was just trying to make it convenient for others to find the ideas. I'll post a link next time.