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How do you begin? I used Evernote a long time ago, but I found it overwhelming. I'm ready to give it another go, but simplify. I had been trying to save web articles. Now I want to be able to search my stamp sets for sentiments (e.g. "Happy Birthday," "Hello," etc.
What is the easiest way to get started? My husband suggests taking a picture of all the stamp sets, but I find that overwhelming. Should I do them in batches? He says that if there are sentiments, Evernote can search the photo.
You don't need to take photos, you can get images of your stamp sets 2 ways. There is Evernote Clipper, which will add any image you find on the net, or Windows has a little programme called The Snipping Tool. You use that to 'snip' an image from the net, then you can add that from whichever file you store all your 'snips' in.
As for being able to search, you can add tags to each note you create- for instance your stamp set might feature Flowers and sentiments, so you could add tags such as Happy Birthday, Flowers, Floral, Anniversary, etc- whatever best fits your stamp set. Then when you want a particular theme, you just search using the key words.
There is another thread on here,called Evernote Tips & Tricks which you could do a search for, that will give you lots of other useful info. I think it's in the Tools section.
I have just been doing what your husband suggested. About 2 weeks ago I began taking photos of my stamps sets, in batches using my iPad. I have Evernote on that and on my phone. After each photo is taken and saved, I "add tag" and use whatever keywords make the most sense to me.
Since I have more than a few sets that include a sentiment such as "hello" or "thanks" along with a bunch of images; I would use tags like Flower, Flowers, Hello, Thanks, Thank You, and finally the all encompassing Sentiments.
I have most of my stamp sets in an old cabinet with four shelves. So each day I would photograph one shelf. Doing it in batches made it more manageable.
I have taken pics of all my sets, and even individual stamps bought at Michael's etc...all that is left is a collection of scripture verse stamps.
Over a period of two weeks I have taken about 250 pictures!!
BUT...now I can easily open Evernote and search for Trees and see the stamps I have with a tree image. Or search for "Hello" and every set or individual stamp with "hello" will pop up with the pictures so I can pick which one I want to use.
Stampin'Up sets were photographed in the clamshell case. As long as I could see all the images I am happy. These are not award winning photos, they are just for my reference only.
Clear stamp sets I laid the plastic sheet with the black images of each stamp that comes with the set on a white piece of paper and took a picture of that. A lot of the PapertreyInk sets come with a small card stock piece with all the images on it so I took a pic of that.
If I had nothing like that available I did a Google search for the stamp set name, picked images, and took a screen shot on my iPad of that. This is then saved in my "camera roll" on the iPad. In Evernote, when I create the new note for that set; I enter the title of the set then instead of choosing to take a photo I choose Upload Photo and pick it out of the photos on the iPad.
It sounds tedious but if you do a little bit each day it's not too bad. And now my stamp inventory is easy to view no matter what I want to look for; easy to add or delete sets and since I upgraded from the Free version to Basic ( $34.99 for one year ) I can access my inventory on my iPhone when I am out and about to make sure I don't buy a duplicate of something I already have or even to check if what I already have is "close enough".
I highly recommend the photo approach. I am a very visual person so I like being able to see each stamp.
Thanks so much! Does anyone know how to search for text inside a photo? I uploaded a few photos of greeting/sentiment stamp sets, and I thought you could search for words within them (love, birthday, etc.). It's not working. I've tried Googling it, but all I find is a video showing how to use "advanced syntax searching," which doesn't make any sense to me. Do you need the paid version to do this? Thanks!
you type the word you want to look for in the search, in the column below that it will gather up all the sets you had with that word...
say you type in mother
then when you look at your photos the word mother will be highlighted yellow on the photographs you have in the notes.
you type the word you want to look for in the search, in the column below that it will gather up all the sets you had with that word...
say you type in mother
then when you look at your photos the word mother will be highlighted yellow on the photographs you have in the notes.
and I have the freebie version
Thanks, Stacy. That's what I've been doing, but it's not working for me. The highlighted words are only appearing where I've typed them in the notes. They aren't being highlighted in the photos of the stamp sets, and the words are very clear in the photos.
After a big fight with my husband, it turns out that you need to be using the app for Windows in order to get that function to work right. I didn't see that info anywhere in my searches. Thanks for all the help. At least you didn't yell at me like I was an idiot.
Just adding my two cents, since I've recently fallen back in love with Evernote...
I don't take pictures of my stuff unless I absolutely have to. I use the Web Clipper. I use Google Images to find my stamps, dies, or whatever. I use the Evernote Web Clipper to save the image. I've got it set up so that I can just right-click on any photo, and tell it to "Clip Image". It automatically saves the picture, and puts it in a brand-new "note", in my "inbox". I only use my inbox for stuff that needs sorted.
So I go through, find lots of pictures, right-click and save image, until I've found all I need. Then, I open Evernote, go into my inbox, and take each new note and label or tag as much as I want, and move it to the appropriate notebook (stamps, dies, etc.).
I also assign each stamp set a number. My stamps are all stored in sleeves or cases, with that number on it, and they're all in numerical order. I can type the word "thanks" into Evernote, and find every stamp that has that word. Then, I can use that number to quickly find the stamp itself.
As for the search function not working... I do use my Windows computer for most of this, and I am actually using the paid version, at the moment. However, the program's ability to "read" words in a picture is sort of hit or miss. It has to be a very basic font. For me, I've found that it really doesn't take long to just tag each note with whatever I think might be most helpful in a search. I use the tag "Birthday", for instance, all the time. Once I start typing "bir..." the computer auto-fills in the rest, so it goes quickly.
Alternately, if "tagging" seems like too much of a hassle, then you can simply type all of the information in the body of the note. Anything you type is searchable, even if the image isn't. I love that I can access this from any of my devices, but I do agree that setting it up was much easier on my desktop computer.
And for the record, it took me at least three tries over the course of a few years to finally accept Evernote - it wasn't love at first sight. ;)
__________________ ~ Kitty ~ "If you can dream it, you can do it." - Walt Disney
I'm in the process right now, after 16 years stamping. It's taking a long time. I try to find my stamps online and clip the images, but many of mine are not available. Maybe the company is out of business, or maybe the set is out of production. Sometimes the image is available but is at a poor resolution or so small I can't use it. When that happens, I stamp the images or set and then scan it with my Fujitsu ScanSnap.
I use Picasa to crop my images (it's not available any more but any photo editing program will work). From there, I can save them to Evernote. I currently have 400 individual stamps or sets saved in my notebook, and I still have a long way to go until it's complete.
Here's one of the scanned pages that I did today. It's a bunch of singles from Starving Artistamps of various themes, so I will crop and upload individually. They will be put into one of several Starving Artistamps notes, based on theme (these are mostly Doodlebug, but I also have Halloween Doodlebug, several realistic leaves, cowboy, etc.)
As for tags, I try to imagine how my mind thinks when I want to make a card, and use whatever terms come to mind. I may go back and clean up my tags later, but for now it's a bit of a brain dump.
__________________ aka Sue. Or Sue-odd.
No blog for me. My gallery chronicles my card-making successes and mishaps.
One thing I have noticed is I let the one on my work computer update more often than the one at home (because, I don't always "like" how things change ) :mrgreen: ( with lots of things. closet control freak ) so, sometimes that makes a difference on how this program works and looks between them. ( at the moment they both have the newest update installed on mine)
Coming back to add that the searching and highlighting the sentiments feature is only about 80% accurate on my iPad.
I did add tags to all my photos so when I search in Evernote anything I tagged "hello" comes up. All the sets tagged with hello will show up in a row down the right side of my screen. When I tap a picture it moves to the left side and then the hello will be highlighted.
But I have a few that Evernote doesn't recognize. It seems to depend on the size and clarity of the font used. It does recognize a very small hello in typewriter font, but not one that is 1" high. A very small handwritten hello in the old Autumnal Leaf Prints set does not get recognized either.
Since I used tags on all my photos to search with I'm not bothered by the 80% success rate of the highlight feature.
Coming back to add that the searching and highlighting the sentiments feature is only about 80% accurate on my iPad.
I did add tags to all my photos so when I search in Evernote anything I tagged "hello" comes up. All the sets tagged with hello will show up in a row down the right side of my screen. When I tap a picture it moves to the left side and then the hello will be highlighted.
But I have a few that Evernote doesn't recognize. It seems to depend on the size and clarity of the font used. It does recognize a very small hello in typewriter font, but not one that is 1" high. A very small handwritten hello in the old Autumnal Leaf Prints set does not get recognized either.
Since I used tags on all my photos to search with I'm not bothered by the 80% success rate of the highlight feature.
This is what I've found. Evernote is known not to recognize all graphic script fonts, so adding a tag for those is the workaround. OCR recognition is the technology used in all programs for the purpose of recognizing graphic text. Not recognizing all graphic script is normal for any software using OCR technology.
For text that Evernote doesn't seem to pick up, just type the words in your note below the image. I have not done this with every set, but those where the lettering may be hard for OCR to recognize
Thanks for all the tips, everyone. I now have all of my stamps cataloged. I was thinking about cataloging my embossing folders, but I'm not sure how to do that. I don't remember their names, and it would be too labor-intensive to emboss a piece of cardstock with each one and then take a picture. Any suggestions? I'm probably going to do my dies too, but I have the names of those.
sometimes you can find images of embossing folders on line ( say amazon and places that carry multiple brands) ( that may save you some time on the embossing/shooting/photo processing part)
Thanks, Stacy. I did that a lot with my stamps, but I'm going to try it with my embossing folders too. Evernote came in very handy today while I was at my not-so-local SS. I couldn't remember whether or not I had a particular stamp, so I opened up the Evernote app on my phone and checked. My wallet is a little lighter, because I didn't have the stamp, but at least I was sure that I wasn't buying a stamp that I already had.
I started with efs and dies. I used the manufacturer, e.g. Darice embossing folder or die, as my search and clicked on images. Copied the image and pasted into Evernote. I add the manufacturer and category type as tags. This has saved me from making duplicate purchases and was well worth the time. I have separate notebooks for each. I'm very slowly working on my stamps. New purchases are done immediately. With older stamps I take a photo of the index page and tag it by category.
I haven't done my embossing folders yet but I thought I would slide a dark piece of card stock ( like navy or black) into the folder to photograph only. Not actually emboss. I'm hoping that will show the pattern enough for my purposes.
When I first looked at Evernote I thought they charged for it - now I see a free version. What do you all use - and do you need premium or other upgraded versions - thanks so much. I've got SO MUCH to inventory, and continually start over with new thought process. Thought I'd check this out again. Thanks for your help/guidance.
I started with the free version. I upgraded to the paid version of $34.99 for one year only because of the storage limits on the free version. Using the free you can only add and save a limited amount per month. I didn't want to have to stop cataloging stamp sets and wait an entire month to be able to add more. It was hard enough to make myself do this tedious job so I wanted to get done as soon as possible. By upgrading I was able to take about 300 pictures of sets and individual stamps; add as many tags as I wanted, save it all in the app and have the information shared from my iPad to my phone, all in about 3 weeks.
I'd also like to mention that if you have Microsoft Office on your pc/tablet, then that comes with a free program called One Note, which is like Evernote, but I myself find it more user friendly.Probably because I store my stamp info by manufacturer per page, with a cross reference of theme per page, as I have so many different brands. I find it much better for resizing images, and moving them around on a page, but thats just my opinion.
I purchased the plus program because I wanted to be able to access it when I don't have Internet and have access on more than one device.
I use it on my iPhone, iPad and laptop, and sometimes on my Windows computer.
I don't mind paying for it because I use a program quite a bit.
On the free version you can only think across two devices which might be fine for some people, I like having the option of unlimited devices, sometimes when setting up notes within Evernote different devices have benefits.
It was quite handy I already had all my stampsets scanned on my desktop computer so it was easier to just drag The image to create the note. And the iPad is handy if you're wanting to dictate information within a note.
Like a lot of other people, I started with the free version, but upgraded when there was a deal for a year. Evernote seems to be one of those things that gets better and better the more you use it.
But I would totally start with the free version. As others have mentioned, the biggest difference between the free and paid versions is the data limits, and the number of devices you can use it on. But otherwise, they look and work the same, so you can certainly figure out if it's something you like before investing any money.
The more I learn about it, the more I love it. The search function is amazing! I'm really "smart phone challenged", but was able to look something up in seconds this morning, while out shopping. (I use it for all sorts of things now - not just stamping stuff.)
__________________ ~ Kitty ~ "If you can dream it, you can do it." - Walt Disney
Yep, me too. caved on the upgrading to evernote plus because, I started un-mounting stamps and that had me plugging in more things to the inventory and waiting for the time limit to be up got old after a few months.
so, wait for it, eventually they will email you an offer.
(and since then it looks like a drop in the bucket at the end of the months usage but, at least there is no hurry up and wait time that you have with the free version)
Those who use Evernote
