Annotations

Hi All,

I’ve been using DevonThink Pro Office for some time for my history dissertation… a few months back, I indexed a bunch of photos of documents, and was going through them and using the annotation keyboard shortcut to create rich text notes that were linked to the photos… Whenever I created the annotations, they would not appear in the database folder in which the photos were indexed, but rather in a separate “Annotations” folder by default. When I opened the folder, in list view, the annotations would be named as follows “Annotation: filename.jpg”

Today, I returned to make some more annotations, but only after having updated the DevonThink software several times, and after having moved the database from my MacBookPro HD to my iMac HD.

Now, when I make annotations, they appear as RTF files in the SAME folder in which I have the pictures indexed, which makes it harder to browse through the pics in thumbnail view. I now have to manually move the annotations to the “Annotations” folder, where the naming convention has changed such that the files are now “filename.jpg (Annotation)”.

Is there any way to fix this? I’m not that concerned about the filename convention as such (I’d really only be accessing annotations by doing a search, or clicking the link to the annotation in the picture file), but would like to avoid having my annotation files crowd the folders where I’ve indexed my photos.

Thanks in advance!

The filing location of annotations was changed because a number of users requested filing them in the same group as the referenced document. When a group’s contents are sorted by Name, there’s a ‘physical’ association of the annotation to its target document. This seems preferred by most users.

To make it easier to make multiple selections of annotation notes in a group of your image files, try sorting by Kind. Then move the annotation notes out of the group containing image files.

I think the best approach is for DEVONthink to not assume where the annotation should go, but prompt. In other words, open the Group Selector panel when an annotation is first created and ask the user where to put it. (Formerly, I liked the method @Bill DeVille describes - but changed my mind a while ago for exactly the reasons @hmalik reports.)

I use this method in my own custom annotation scripts, usually created by cloning an in-built script as my starting point. It’s also not difficult to modify the in-built annotation scripts - though the fix will likely get overwritten on the next DT version update. A moderate familiary with AppleScript is needed.