Evernote for creative filing

It’s no secret that I love Evernote. Here’s a new use I’ve found for it. If you’re a designer or involved in the visual brainstorm process you will likely find this useful.

The problem I’ve faced is that though I’m good at looking at a lot of inspiration over the course of a month I struggle with a way to catalog the things that inspire me. I regularly use Bloglines to read material. It provides a way to “keep post as new” or clip an article but I rarely make it back to those files, and it’s cumbersome to browse them.

I also find myself on different computers when I have the free time to browse. I use a desktop to edit on at work (where I rarely have spare time), I carry a laptop, I use my home computer on occasion, and I use my iPhone for blog reading about 50% of the time. I needed a system for filing and amassing digital images (primarily JPEGs) from all of these sources. The images also need to be viewable from anywhere.

Enter Evernote.

I created a notebook called “Ideas.” About every week or two I create a new post within that note called “Inspire #,” incrementally increasing that number just to keep track of things.

With the Evernote Desktop client I can literally drag a JPEG directly from the web browser directly into that Inspire note. Drag. Drop. Evernote automatically syncs everything.

[photopress:ev02.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

[photopress:ev01.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

A few alternative variations are required to make this solution fully ubiquitous. First, on the iPhone there isn’t a drag and drop.

1. Click and hold your finger on an image for about 2 seconds, you’ll be asked to Save the image.
2. Launch Evernote. You from the title screen choose Saved Photo Note.
[photopress:iphone_2_1.png,thumb,pp_image]
3. Save it to your “Ideas” notebook.
4. When back in the Evernote desktop application select your Inspire note and the newly uploaded image note. Do this by selecting the first note and either Command-clicking (Mac)or Control-clicking (PC) the image. Right click either of the selected notes and choose the last option, “Merge Notes.”

If you are on a computer that does not have the Evernote desktop application on it (like my poor OS X 10.4 machine at the house) just save the image to your desktop. Then using the online version of Evernote attach the images to the Inspire note.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about another use for this image archiving technique.