It seems the more I use Evernote, the more I think of cool new ways to use it.

Over the weekend, I was leafing through a photography magazine, and I remembered an old project goal of mine to somehow index all of the great tutorials in my photography magazines so I could easily reference them when I needed them. My original idea was that I would create a simple Excel spreadsheet that listed each tutorial with the magazine issue and page number. A further idea to that was I could tear out each tutorial and bind them in a big folder and use the index to find everything. The only problem is that I hate tearing up magazines – occupational hazard! I like to keep everything as is, but the problem with that is that the metre-high stack of magazines was just impossible to leaf through each time I wanted to look up how to do a certain thing.

And then it struck me like a cartoon thought bubble – I could scan all of the articles and put them into Evernote! Initially, I opted for a ‘local’ notebook rather than a synchronised one that’s uploaded to the Evernote servers, as each individual scanned page was around 3MB and I didn’t want to go over my limit of 1GB of notes a month. But now that I’m halfway through and see that the total scanned pages only equals 130MB, I’m going to convert it into a synchronised notebook, as there are more benefits to doing it that way: I can access the notes from any mobile device, and I can take advantage of Evernote’s handy optical character recognition system for doing searches on the text in the articles. Definitely glad I plumped for a premium account, as free accounts only get 60MB worth of notes a month

Scanning articles is a bit clunky as sometimes I would scan it in wonky and words on the extreme left or right of the page would get chopped off. I worked around this by checking each scanned page, re-scanning it if absolutely necessary, or otherwise just typing in by hand the text that was chopped off below the scanned page. However, I have lots of photography magazines in electronic versions through Zinio, and it was so much easier to transfer those tutorials – I simply opened them up on my iPad, did a screenshot of each page I wanted, and then transferred them to my computer. Now, I think I’m going to buy more electronic photography magazines than paper ones – and they’re actually cheaper than buying them through my local newsagency, as most of them are imported from the UK.

Using Evernote as a repository for photography tutorials