Tool Tips: Evernote

With our venue booked, paid (halfway anyway), and signed for, M and I are taking a bit of a breather.  He's in a play right now with performances the last two weekends, I'm heading to New York this weekend for some family time and to see MOH/Sister star in yet another play (I'm surrounded by talented people!), and our 2 year anniversary is two weeks from now.  So our weekends are pretty busy this month and it seemed like a good time to take a break from the whole wedding process.  We're still over a year out, and while I know lots of May 2012 brides already have their caterers, photographers, florists, and coordinators booked... I think we can take a month off.

Does that mean I've stopped looking at wedding inspiration and researching vendors?  Of course not!  I have a list of caterers in my back pocket (ok, gMail) waiting for us to go back to Culpeper and meet with them in May.  And I've spent a few hours looking up photographers and emailing them for rates.  But there's definitely less urgency than there was when we first got engaged and I felt like we were rushing to find a venue.  And now that our spot is picked, I can focus on more enjoyable tasks, like looking at invitations and picking out decorations. 

So what do I have to share today?  How about an awesome new tool?  Fun, right?

Screen Cap from Evernote.com

Friends, this is Evernote.  Now you all know I am ALL about being organized, right?  M and I keep Google Docs on everything, our budget is kept in a super efficient Excel spreadsheet (with macros and everything!) and I use gMail labels like they're going out of style.  But the heart and soul of my organize-y little world is Evernote.  I could write sonnets to how much I love this app.

Evernote has a quick and easy getting started guide, so I won't bore you with details on how it works.  Instead, let's talk features - specifically, wedding related features.  (I apologize in advance if this sounds like an infomercial - it's hard for me to talk about how much I like this app without going a bit overboard!)

Visual Inspiration

I'm a pretty visual person.  I need to see all my wedding choices together in order to really figure out which ones I like the best.  Inspiration Boards have always been an essential tool for brides, but Evernote lets you create dynamic boards - just search with some parameters and it'll show you all your thumbnails for the notes that match in a handy grid.

Screen Cap from Evernote.com

I have a Saved Search for "Paper Products" - anything I've tagged with stationary or invitations.  This makes it extra easy to see all my current paper ideas, and quickly compile, oh say, a blog post about invitation styles (...coming soon).

Everywhere Access

I tend to use Evernote in a few different places - my work computer, both our home laptops, and my smart phone.  Luckily, everything is synched up.  I can snap a picture of flowers on my phone, file it in Evernote, and see it on my computer evermore.  Or I can clip an invitation I like off the web, and quickly pull it up on my phone to show my paper-obsessed cousin exactly what style I was thinking about.  No more trying to google search "Purple invitation with grapes" on my tiny mobile browser to find the image I spotted a few weeks ago.

Android Screencap [src]

Honestly, though?  I'd take Evernote for the web capability alone.  It has browser plugins that lets you just highlight the picture you want, click "Clip to Evernote", and then a popup screen to fill in tags and file it in a folder.  Couldn't be easier to save your wedding inspiration.  So even if you have a no bells-and-whistles phone, it's worth it to create an account.

Screencap of Evernote plugin for Firefox

Staying Organized

Ah yes, the meat and potatoes of this post.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most brides reading this blog probably have a folder on their computer with a ton of inspiration images saved.  And that folder has subfolders and creative titles and other mnemonics to help keep those pictures organized.  Here's what I really like about Evernote - labels.  Just like the tags we all use for blogging, Evernote lets you assign different labels to a note.  So that picture from Style Me Pretty of the awesome cake you love can be filed under yellow, brown, cake, and flowers.  Which makes it easy if you want a quick inspiration board of everything "Yellow and Brown" you've found so far, or all the cakes you've saved!

[src]

Now lets say it's not a picture you want to save, but a quote or a snippet from a ceremony that you lurve and don't want to forget about?  Yep, you can clip those too.  They won't show up with cute little thumbnails (unless you highlight a picture as well) but they'll be saved and what's more - searchable!  You can search by text in your notes, or in your images!  Oh yeah.  So snap a picture of that florist's business card and rest assured you can find it later by just searching her name.

And here's the best part - Evernote stores the url for every clip you take from the web.  So if you're, say, writing a blog post and want to make sure to give credit, it's easy to look up where you found that particular image or quote. 

Okay, that's it!  Hopefully I've convinced you all that you should go sign up (for free!) and start using Evernote for all your wedding needs.  Or maybe you have another way of organizing your inspiration?  I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Also, if you'd like to see my wedding "folder" full of inspiration and whatnot, here's the link!  Wedding Notebook