It's no secret that I love information and knowledge and (thus?) am enamored with information and knowledge applications.

For over 4 years one of my favorite information managers has been Evernote. It's no pushback ways of getting information in combined with "search as you type" has made it a must on my machines.

Between that sentence and this were several other paragraphs about version 1.5 of the application and a comparison with the Apple Newton's rolling tape. You don't see those paragraphs because, like this one, they're really not needed to share what I want to share.

Get To The Friggin' Point, Ruud!

The crux of this post is that Evernote does recognition of text in images.

Because it was demonstrated as such in one of the first promo videos, the popular example of this is that you could snap the label of a wine you really like so you can search for the name later on and buy it. Or something. It's really very weird and leaves the impression of reality-disconnected geeks trying to come up with a "normal people" real world use example for something they toyed up.

photographing wine
labels
and adding
them to Evernote
is likely
to not turn
you onBut I digress.

Provided you're an avid wine drinker who frequently consumes said liquid in quantities large enough to be prohibitive of you recollecting its details, photographing wine labels and adding them to Evernote is likely to not turn you on.

What is, is the fact that you can use Evernote's wine-label-scanning geek-abilities for the Good. And fun. But I'm more talking about Good because that's the type of job you do.

<reads all that again>

Right… <shoves mug of espresso to the side> There, that might help with staying On Topic.

Evernote The Image Manager

Whenever I come across images, icons and buttons which might one day perform a useful function on a web site, I grab, download, recreate, create or otherwise cause them to become into existence on my hard drive.

Some common ones; "Buy now!", "10% Off!", "If you liked this post, subscribe!", "Share this!", "Buy at Amazon", etc.

I have had a folder based archiving system for this so that my new shiny "Buy Now" button would go into the "Buy Now" folder. As any 5-minute computer owner knows; this does not work … for long. Pretty soon you run into a "10% Off – Buy Now!" button. Now what?

Tell you what: Evernote.

Add those images to Evernote which had – what? <waits for the class to scroll back up> That's it: optical character recognition! Tada!

This means that apart from the tagging you can do, you can retrieve your creative based literally on the text in them.

How?

• Open an Evernote account: you need one because the OCR happens on their servers, not on your computer
• Get the software (optional): you could use the web interface instead but you'll love the desktop version
• Add images
• Wait a bit: OCR happens on their servers – premium users get priority, free users don't. It's that simple.

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One fascinating comment

It seems to be great as an image manager with especially the recognition feature. I might open up a free account and try it out.

La Digue  ^#