DT & DTTG with Google Drive: best practices for annotations?

Hi, everyone. I have a lot of digital books on my Mac hard drive in PDF format that I want to annotate. They’re downloaded to the Google drive folder on the Mac, so they’re local. I want to be able to annotate files in either DT or DTTG and not duplicate all those files by dragging them into DT.

Here’s what I think I should do – please tell me if there are better choices!

  • Index instead of import the files in the Google drive.
  • Sync the ipad DTTG database to use Bonjour.
  • Set the ipad DTTG to download files only on demand.
  • To annotate on the Mac, I simply open the file in DT and it’s automatically updated on the drive.
  • To annotate on the iPad, I open the file, annotate using Markup, which is listed in the Share sheet. This creates a new document, which I can then save directly to the Google drive in the right place – which creates a new document (it is unable to simply replace the original). Then the new document is populated to both the Mac & its metadata goes to the iPad. THEN I can simply annotate the new document on the Mac, or on the iPad (which when saved would generate a third document, but I then delete the previous highlighted document.)

This all seems to work, although I haven’t tested it for long. I’m only using one Mac & iPad, and only on PDF files.

Is this a good idea? Is there a better way to proceed? Thank you.

To annotate on the iPad, I open the file, annotate using Markup, which is listed in the Share sheet.

  • You open it from where?
  • Why are you annotating with Markup?
  • Why not just annotate in DEVONthink To Go?
  • I open the indexed PDF files from DTTG, on demand. I didn’t expect to be able to download a file that has only been indexed, but it works.
  • I’m annotating in Markup because the Edit button does not appear for the indexed pdf files. Oddly, on the Mac the files are PDF+text, but are listed on the iPad as only PDF - not sure if that’s relevant.
  • I can usually annotate in DTTG (I’m using the beta). Sometimes the Edit button does not appear, but if I close the file and come back it will usually reappear.

I use Paperpile as reference manager. It keeps all PDFs in my Google Drive. I indexed everything in DT and use DT for reading, search, annotations, find connections, etc. The system works well. I have more than 7000 PDFs. Sometimes I use DTTG for reading and annotate some PDFs, but I prefer to work on my Mac.