How often you have come across a great article in a magazine and wanted to save it? Too often! I know a many of you have your own system. From cutting and pasting into a journal or putting them in clear plastic holders in a binder. Hey, whatever works right?

Me, I’m too lazy to cut them out so for the longest time the magazines have just piled up. Yet I must do something – quickly, before A&E’s Hoarder’s come knocking on my door but how? I don’t want to cut them and I don’t want to physically store the cutouts because let’s face it that’s just shifting or downsizing the problem a little bit. I still need to find storage for the binders etc and oh so important, computers have really spoiled me I can’t search them! Don’t know about you, but this momma isn’t growing younger. She’s doing good if she can remember what day of the week it is some weeks.

Enter Evernote – not sure if I’ve written about it here before but oh how I love this tool. You can clip literally EVERYTHING on the web, take photos, record an audio note, even drag PDF’s and scan stuff into notebooks. You can also create lists. Use it to store snippets of information from store or restaurant hours to ideas for blog posts to receipts to research notes for that fab and upcoming book you’re writing.

So… here’s the thing. You can take a picture of anything like a magazine on your phone and upload it directly to Evernote. Evernote will try to recognize the text in the picture which means it can search images too. Works with the stuff you scan as well. How sweet is that?

With all that being said, I started to scan a bunch of magazines. But it was soon obvious the normal method of scanning and adding the images to Evernote was too time consuming. That’s not going to work. There’s got to be an easier way and happy to say I found it! Thanks to the other smart users of Evernote as well. From their blog, I found you there is an ‘automatic add’ feature in Evernote (desktop). To lay it all out, this is what I did to make sure every magazine item I scan will automatically get picked up into Evernote.

1. I was fortunate that my scanner, a Brother Multifunction machine allows me to set up custom scanning profiles. This means, I can set a special folder to save the images to every time a scan is performed using that profile.
2. Once I had that done, I went into Evernote >> Tools >> Account Properties >> File Import tab



3. From here, I click Add, select the browser I want Evernote to import files from then click OK. I can then check the Subfolder box to ensure any images saved inside the sub-folder of that folder also gets imported. Finally, select the default notebook to save the image to.
4. That’s it! Now every time a scanned image is added into the folder, it will also be loaded into Evernote. My only wish is I could assign tags in addition to notebook for finer control but for now I won’t complain because it has eliminated a very big problem for me. You can also do the same thing for receipts, invoices, bills etc.

Oh and if you’re the type who prefers to outsource this stuff. You might want to check out Pixily or Shoeboxed. They will scan stuff directly into Evernote for you. Not sure if they do magazines though.