Evernote for Genealogy: Should Evernote Be My Digital Archive?

Evernote digital archive“If I put a PDF copy of a newspaper article or a jpeg photo into Evernote, can I get a copy back? I am putting them there for safe keeping and an easy way to archive them but I want to be able to use them in other places in the future.”

Recently Pam sent me the excellent question above. She’s been using Evernote for a couple of years, she says, “but not very well.” I’ve heard that before! I like how she’s now thinking carefully about not just organizing her genealogy research materials (which is important!) but also digitally archiving them effectively.

As I told Pam, folks have tried to accomplish this in a variety of ways. Here’s my two-cent’s worth on how I look at it.

First, I don’t save newspaper articles to PDF because you have to have a Premium Evernote in order to annotate PDFs and have OCR applied to them. (At least the last time I looked last week.) Personally, I prefer web clipping the article as a note and saving it directly to Evernote.

I haven’t found a simple free way to export a PDF that has been saved to Evernote back out as a PDF. This is a weakness of Evernote. (Click here for a blog post about this.)

organized videoIf you are keen on saving items to PDFs, I would suggest not bothering to store them in Evernote. If you really want a “note” of the item in Evernote, you could use this technique: First, save the PDF to your hard drive (using my Hard Drive Organization Premium Videos).

click_PDFThen right-click the PDF and “Create a Shortcut.” Drag and drop the short cut into a note. Now with one click of the shortcut in the Evernote note, you can instantly open the document on your hard drive and make any additional notations in the note about the item.

If you would rather save the PDF to a cloud service such as Dropbox rather than your hard drive, you can right click the PDF in Dropbox and select “Share Dropbox Link” and then paste that into a note. This, again, gives you one-click access to the item.

I don’t worry about making Evernote the holding tank for absolutely everything. Sometimes other technologies and services are better suited for the task at hand. But it’s pretty easy to create connections so that Evernote is still your central service. There is another alternative called CloudHQ, which can help you export items, but it is a paid service, and I don’t think the value is there for the price when you can use the method I’ve already described.

To get more answers to questions like these about using Evernote for genealogy I invite you to follow this blog.

Resources:

  • Ultimate Evernote Education abbreviatedEvernote for Genealogy Quick Guides for Windows and Mac will help you begin using Evernote immediately and effectively.
  • Become a Genealogy Gems Premium member to access the Ultimate Evernote Education: a series of videos that take you from beginner to advanced user.
  • Click here to find even more resources for using Evernote for genealogy!

Here’s a Cool Way to Export a Web Clipping Note from Evernote

export notes and filesRecently I posted on How to Solve a Pesky Evernote Web Clipper Problem. In that post I explained how to save an Evernote web clipping as an image file.

Genealogy Gem reader Pat wrote in about how she likes to extract notes. She writes:

Hi Lisa,
I just ready your post about getting a note in Evernote out of the program and into another format on your hard drive.  To get a text note out just open up the note and print it, to a pdf printer like Cute PDF.  The only problem I see so far with this, is that CutePDF wants to call (everything)”printed” this way (as) Evernote.pdf, so you have to change the file name to avoid writing over the previous file. And, although I’m not a Word user I think it will allow you to import or open a pdf file and then save it as a doc file.

Thanks for all your information.  I love listening to your podcast during my commute. – Pat

Genealogy Gems Premium Membership and PodcastThis is a great tip. Genealogy Gems Premium Members can hear more about CutePDF in Premium Podcast episode 77. (Not a member yet? Become one here.) I’m also a fan of Primo PDF. Let me show you how the process Pat describes works.

How to Export a Web Clipping Note from Evernote to PDF:

1. Install a free PDF creator program (for example: CutePDF or PrimoPDF.)
2. In Evernote’s menu click File > Print.
3. Select PrimoPDF from the General tab.
4. Click the Print button.

Export Evernote note as PDF

5. In the pop-up window select ebook (select Prepress if you want a higher quality document.)
6. Click the Create PDF button.

Using PrimoPDF to export a note from Evernote as a PDF
7. In the Save As window select where you want to save the file.
8. Rename the file.
9. Click the Save button.

Save an Evernote note as PDF

10. And there you have it, your note as a PDF file!

Newspaper note from Evernote in PDF

Evernote for Genealogy Quick Reference Guide

Resources

Need more Evernote help? My Evernote for Genealogists quick reference guide (image right) is available for both Mac and Windows users (pick up the one that goes with your computer’s operating system, not your mobile device).

Click here for digital download pdf guide.
Click here for laminated printed guide.

How to Save & Open Genealogy eBooks & PDFs to Your Mobile Devices

How to Get Started in Evernote, and the Ultimate Evernote Education

How to Add Text to a Web Clipping in Evernote

Premium Podcast episode 74: PDF Pandemonium (Premium membership required)

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