I encountered some annoyances in migrating from Evernote, and came up with my own workflow for dealing with them. While others have commented on some of these issues here before, I didn’t see a clear workflow that I could learn from, so hopefully this will help others doing the same thing.
Problems
- The new version of Evernote doesn’t work with the DT import script, and limits export to 50 items at a time.
- What are just PDFs in Evernote, become groups with a PDF and a (mostly) blank document enclosed. I just want the PDFs.
- Evernote doesn’t embed OCR information in the PDF on export, but keeps it on their server, so you need to re-OCR everything.
- Images need to be re-ocr’d as well, but to avoid having the text in a separate annotation file in DT, you need to convert images to PDF.
- Some images appear as formatted text documents on import, these should be converted to PDFs and OCRd.
Solutions
- Install Evernote Legacy, the old version of Evernote, which does work with DT and also doesn’t limit how much you can export at a time.
- Create a smart group in the Evernote import group that searches for all documents of the kind “formatted text” whose size is less than “1kb”. After import you can select all of these items and just delete them. Unless you have notes with only a word or two in them, this should be safe.
- Create a smart rule to find items of the kind “formatted text” whose size is larger than “1kb” and convert them to PDFs. (Move the original to the trash.)
- Create a smart rule to find PDFs in your Evernote group whose word count is less than 1. Set it to OCR these PDFs. This will re-ocr all the PDFs that need it. (Move the original to the trash.)
- Create a smart rule to find images in your Evernote group and OCR them, converting them to searchable PDFs. (Move the original to the trash.)
- Create a smart group in the Evernote import group that locates all PDFs with a word count of more than one. After running all the smart rules, drag all these PDFs to a new folder, outside of the Evernote import folder.
- Create a smart group in the Evernote import group that locates all groups whose size is less than 1. After doing all the previous steps, select these and delete them. You should be done now. However, if you have some word or XLS documents, etc. you may need to find and drag them into the new folder and then delete the remaining groups.
This is far from the kind of import experience I would have hoped for when migrating thousands of documents (12,487 to be exact) to a new app, but once you have it set up it works pretty smoothly. It is best if you do it in small batches, one notebook at time. I had a number of false starts as I learned to set up rules, but now it seems to be working without errors. I hope this can help others trying to do the same thing.
UPDATE: Now that I know about @BLUEFROG’s excellent script, and read the step-by-step instructions for using it, I was able to streamline this process greatly.