Evernote 10.103.3

Evernote is a popular note-taking app that I and many other genealogists have used for many years, because it has a good organizational structure (and yet it lets us be messy when we add a lot of information), is easily searchable, and it keeps its data synchronized across many platforms (iOS/iPadOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Web Browsers). I’ve got notes that are 15+ years old. Years ago, it would have be called a “Personal Information Manager” or “PIM”.

There are even books about using Evernote, including How to Use Evernote for Genealogy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Organize Your Research and Boost Your Genealogy Productivity (Amazon – Paperback and Kindle) and articles such as Family Tree Magazine, and Family Locket, and Lisa Louise Cooke has put out videos and guides about it as well.

I tend to consider it and other note-taking apps like Apple’s Notes, Microsoft OneNote, Obsidian, Notion, Bear, and Simplenote to be almost as important in genealogy research as any genealogy software. Arguably they are as important when they functions as your catch-all for information you haven’t organized or placed into your family tree software, research logs, transcripts of phone calls or emails, etc. In my case, any genealogy-related text that’s not in any of my family tree apps will be in one of my note-taking apps, and I’ll take interesting photos and make a copy and scale them down/reduce the quality so they aren’t too large, and include them in my notes.

Over the last week, Evernote has released a few updates to the Evernote client (Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and Web) – 10.103.3, 10.103.4, and 10.103.5, all of which have the same release notes.

An interesting new feature adds image transcription: “Introducing image transcription: you can now extract text from your images, including those containing handwritten text, with ease.” I have not tried this feature yet, but I can think of quite a few ways that it could be handy in genealogy research – dumping family letters, documents, etc. into Evernote and letting it transcribe them. I will try to find some time and try it out and report back.