I’m new to DEVONthink and have an obstacle in my DT workflow. I want to capture web pages I find interesting into DT, and after some experimenting I found out I get the best results from either exporting web pages as Reader PDFs from Safari or Clipping to DT as Clutter-free PDFs.
The problem soon arises: many web pages embed contents from YouTube, SoundCloud etc. What is the best way to capture these web pages? I find webarchives suboptimal but seemingly works.
Web archives and HTML pages are still the best options in case of interactive or multimedia content. However, especially for multimedia I would recommend to download the multimedia files instead and add them to the database. This is more convenient and works while also offline.
Thanks for the advice! I considered this too but decided it was too cumbersome to go through the page and download each file. Maybe I should look for ways to automatically download all the YouTube / SoundCloud media embedded in a web page.
I settled on a solution that works very well for me, so I’m sharing it here. Hopefully it’s somewhat helpful to others.
Open a multimedia web page in Safari for macOS, e.g. a page with embedded YouTube videos.
Go to File > Export as PDF. In the exported PDF, the embedded video will show up as a thumbnail image.
Copy the URL of the embedded video.
Add the URL to the thumbnail in the PDF. Here is an article on how to do this in PDF Expert. Edit: I just found out you can add links in DT, no need to use other tools such as PDF Expert.
This solution works the best for me because when I save articles containing embedded YouTube or SoundCloud links etc, I may still want to access those media when viewing the saved PDFs in DT, but they are not important enough for me to download them. With the above solution, I can still go to the embedded YouTube video with a simple tap, as long as the video is still on YouTube; in the case that it’s been deleted, then so be it.