Tool Kit: An App That Will Never Forget a File

Some photos are on your smartphone. Others sit on your home computer. Your digital work documents, favorite web clippings and notes from meetings? Scattered like confetti after New Year’s Eve.

If you’ve embraced a digital lifestyle, this situation is probably all too familiar. Thankfully, there are services available to help those of us in need. Dropbox lets you upload files to a central online repository. Google Drive has a search engine with image recognition technology so you can search for a photo of the Statue of Liberty from your last vacation. The Doo app is focused on organizing documents of any kind — presentations, receipts, tickets — on your phone. But the easiest catchall tool for saving anything you might need later is an app for computers and mobile devices called Evernote.

Evernote provides a comprehensive single archive of your digital life, giving you one location to store and find practically everything saved on a computer or phone. And the files are automatically backed up on Evernote’s servers. It even makes sharing things with others far easier than emailing attachments around — but it will do that, too.

The only real downside with Evernote is that it has so many features, which can make getting started with the app daunting. But once you understand how to do a few things with it, you can get working and worry about the rest later.

Here’s the big point to understand: Use Evernote as the place you put everything you might need later. You can drag it in, tap it in or forward it in, and then search for it, share it or post it later. When you need to dig it up, you don’t first ask yourself which device it’s on — it’s in Evernote, from whatever device is at hand.

The free version of the app lets you add up to 60 megabytes of content to your folders every month, enough for a couple of dozen full-size iPhone photos or a hundred big Word documents. The archive can grow as big as it needs to be. The premium version costs $5 a month, which increases the limit to a gigabyte a month, enough for hundreds of photos, and adds a few more features for heavy users.

To begin, download Evernote onto every computer and mobile device you own and create an account. Evernote works on Windows and Mac computers, and on iPhones, iPads, Android and Windows phones and tablets, BlackBerry devices, and even Hewlett-Packard’s WebOS gadgets. In other words, you should be covered. The interface is a little different on each platform, so plan a few minutes to figure out each one.

The best way to start is to toss a photo into Evernote. You can drag and drop an image from anywhere on a computer desktop to the Evernote app, or select the photo icon from the mobile version of Evernote to choose a photo already on your phone. Within a few minutes, the photo will be synced to Evernote’s servers and available on your other devices. By default, everything goes into one folder, but you can create new folders to keep things better organized.

The same trick works for Word files, PDFs, spreadsheets, MP3s and even videos.

And it’s possible to move files to the service even if you don’t have the app installed on the particular device you are on. Each Evernote user is given an email address for the account, and sending a file to that address will save it into the account. It’s a nice trick that lets you forward emails and attachments to Evernote for keeping. You can even specify which folder each forwarded message goes into by putting the destination folder in the subject line, like “@family-photos.”

You can also save the contents of web pages into Evernote. To do so on a desktop or laptop, install the Evernote Web Clipper found on the Products page at Evernote.com. It’s a web browser add-on that creates an extra button on your browser in the shape of Evernote’s elephant logo. Click it, and you’ll be prompted for how much of the page to save. For news articles, recipes or reviews, Simplified Article is best. It strips away the surrounding links and ads, and saves only the text and images of the main content of a page. The Web Clipper isn’t built for phone or tablet browsers, but someone has filled the void with an app called EverWebClipper for iOS and Android that costs about $3 and does the job.

Getting items out of Evernote is easy. Once you find the desired file in the app, use the Export Note menu option on a computer or tap the icon at the bottom of the screen on the mobile interface to export the item to your phone. Then send it as a message or post it to Facebook.

To find something you’ve saved, Evernote has a search function that will find just about any text anywhere in a saved file — it’ll even recognize text inside a photo. That makes it possible to use your phone as an archival scanner, by taking pictures of printed pages and then searching for words in these documents later. One important caveat: The free version of the app won’t search the text inside Word or PDF documents. For that you need the premium upgrade.

Individual items or entire folders can be shared with other people. Look for the arrow icon at the upper right of an item to create a public URL. Once you have that URL, you can send it to others so they can view your items or folders. The premium version also lets you allow other Evernote users to add content to your folders. This can be useful for group planning — say, for a trip for which several people want to collect suggested sights. You’re not restricted to sharing within Evernote, though. The same arrow button presents options to post an item to Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or to forward it as an email attachment.

At first, Evernote may seem redundant to existing tools like email and iCloud, but the service is hard to give up after a week’s use. You won’t want to return to a life of running from device to device for your files. If you start to use the program frequently, you’ll probably find that the premium upgrade makes a lot of sense. With the upgrade, you will have a hard time reaching the storage limit unless you are saving a lot of video. Second, it allows you to search within documents, which can come in incredibly handy. Third, it will let you store copies of important items on your computer or phone, an inevitable lifesaver for anyone who travels without reliable Internet access.

If Evernote has a shortcoming, it’s that its interface is perhaps too enthusiastic. There are controls, options and messages all over the screen, which can be confusing for a new user. Once you’ve figured out its dozens of functions and options, though, it’s an invaluable tool for organizing a messy digital life. Where did you put that gingerbread recipe Mom sent to your other phone? You put it in Evernote.