Taggy makes your Evernote tags function as you want them to: hierarchically.
“Does only one thing… and does it brilliantly. I won’t say that I was losing sleep over the state of my Evernote tags but I’m certainly happier now they’re organized. Nice job, thanks.” – Simon London
For many people, it’s annoying that searching for a tag in Evernote does not find notes filed under child tags. Taggy solves this problem. Essentially, Taggy iterates over all of your notes, looks at their tags, and auto-tags them with their parent tags as well.
Example tags: food -> dessert -> donuts
Clicking “Hierarchify” will change notes tagged with “donuts” to be tagged with all three: “food, dessert, donuts.” Clicking “Un-Hierarchify” will change notes tagged with “food, dessert, donuts” to be tagged with just “donuts.”
Using this tagging scheme which Taggy creates for you automatically, organizing your tags into a tree structure will make them act that way during searches.
As an avid Evernote user myself, I made this tool to help Evernote work better for me and it has allowed me to be more productive with my notetaking. I hope that it helps you as well!
FYI: This app requires that you have Evernote installed on your Intel Mac with OS X Snow Leopard 10.6+. You can find Evernote for free in the Mac App Store.
If you have any comments or questions about this app, please submit a comment below.
Great stuff. It’s baffled me for a couple years how Evernote could get this so wrong. Question: now that I’ve turned it on, do I need to re-run it to have the tags work for new items? Or will it automatically apply parent tags?
Hi Kevin, thanks for trying out Taggy! Yes, you need to rerun it. There’s no harm in this, and it should be faster once the majority of your notes are already tagged.
The way I’ve settled into it, is to use Taggy on my large existing notebooks to set them all up the first time, try to remember to manually add parent tags which isn’t so hard if they are only one or two levels deep from then on, and then rerun Taggy once per week just in case I missed anything.
I too have also been baffled by how Evernote doesn’t have an option for this. But I’m glad my little utility can be of use to fellow Evernote fans.
Outstanding!
I read all those endless forums with people debating, arguing, zero solutions. Then bingo – you did it!
Made me think of the quote – Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?
Bravo
Windows version next!
Thank you for your kind words, sir!
Great App! Evernote is an exciting tool: very helpful ! Your addition makes it even better !
Question: the green circle fading out during your 7 minute presentation video: is that an App as well that can be downloaded ? If so: please let us know how we can get it. All those small but extremely nice and helpful Apps add to our effectiveness, in operating the system but also during presentations or discussions when we want to explain things. That green fading circle is surely one of them !
That fading green circle that you speak of is part of the screen capture utility iShowU which I used to record the demo video. It highlights mouse clicks to make it easier for people to follow the video. Any decent screen capture software should include some method of highlighting mouse clicks.
Will there be a version for windows? I’m crying out for it right now.
Thanks,
Mark
The short answer is no.
Taggy uses AppleScript to interact with the Evernote client on MacOS X. Obviously, AppleScript is not available on Windows. While there are extensive developer resources available on the Mac, the developer page for Windows is sparse, and I don’t think Taggy could be written using only those commandline clients.
Hi, the only thing now stopping me from using Evernote fully (apart from lack of keyboard shortcuts in their Web version!) is the lack of hierarchical tags. Are you planning to produce Taggy for the iPad or iPhone please? I’d happily pay for it! And even more for a Windows version.
Cheers and well done for creating this.
There are no plans for any new versions of Taggy for any other platforms. However, if you run it on Mac OS X, all of the changes it makes will be synchronized to all of your other devices, including Windows and the iPhone.
(In fact, for iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, it wouldn’t be possible to create an application like Taggy since they do not support a plug-in architecture. Every application is sandboxed from all others.)
The first thing I did was to clip this page into Evernote. Can’t wait to use it. Bravo! and big thanks.
Your screen capture demo: “I’m certainly not going to through the trouble of manually tagging all of notes with all of their parent tags. That’s just a lot of work.”
And that’s the work I have religiously done for thousands of notes. What a relief to no longer have to do that.
Philip, I am getting the response that it is not available in the US store. Thanks.
First, thank you for your kind words, Dave. Now, about availability: I checked my stats in iTunes and as of yesterday people downloaded Taggy from the US, Mexico, Germany, and Switzerland, and according to Apple my app is available worldwide. Although Apple’s App Store provides an incredible amount of convenience, it’s also a single point of failure. I’ve noticed that every once in a while the App Store goes down or has problems. I suspect that is what is happening here. Please try purchasing the app again tomorrow, and I wish you better luck.
Follow-up: I did some research, and if you receive an error message about Taggy not being available in the US, that’s not true. Simply open up the Mac App Store and search for Taggy from there. It is a known problem that redirects from Apple’s website sometimes don’t work.
Dear Philip,
Could you please make Taggy available outside the Mac App Store?
And will you update it when new versions of Evernote arrive, possibly making Taggy no longer working.
Thanks in advance,
Bart
Hi Bart,
Taggy was originally made available via PayPal. Overall, it was a horrendous experience, both for the buyers and for me the developer. Since Taggy went on sale in the App Store, it has generated more than 100 times as many sales as it did on PayPal. I’m sorry, but the market simply isn’t there to justify the effort of selling it outside the Mac App Store.
Going through Apple, everything is taken care of on both ends: the buyer doesn’t have to worry about installation, refunds, viruses, or anything like that since Apple handles it all, and the developer (me) doesn’t have to do any marketing, payment processing, installation tech support, file/bandwidth hosting etc. It’s a one click process for both parties.
As for new versions of Evernote, Taggy is built upon it’s public APIs. I doubt that Evernote Corporation will change the APIs in the future, as that would break not only my application but also every other application in the trunk. Many, many third-party applications rely upon these APIs. However, I don’t speak for Evernote, and if they do change the APIs in the future, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Philip
Hello Philip,
Thank you for your response.
I now fully understand why you decided to put it up on the Mac App Store instead.
I bought it and I must say I like it.
One feature request maybe (it would be huge) if you could move notes that have certain tags to a certain notebook…
Then when you click ‘hide unassigned tags’ you get only a handful of tags that only apply to that notebook.
I think that is the way notebooks/tags should be used.
To give an example: everything that is tagged ‘invoice’ should go into the ‘Finances’ notebook.
Or, in my case everything that’s tagged ‘Biology’, ‘Latin’, ‘Math’, ‘English’, ‘Dutch’ et cetera, should go in the ‘School’ notebook.
Regards,
Bart
Does anyone know if there is a more general application like this that will create a system-wide hierarchy of openmeta tags that can be searched in Spotlight? Or maybe the developer of Taggy would consider taking on such a project.
Cheers,
Peter O.
Hi, I just find out your app and I think it’s really useful.
I use Evernote on my Mac, iPhone and iPad so I was wondering if these changes that Taggy makes in the Evernote Mac app will also affect the iPhone and iPad versions. But I’m afraid it won’t, will it?
Thanks
Yes, your changes will be synced across all your devices, including the iPhone and iPad!
Although, Taggy can’t take credit for it: Evernote automatically synchronizes your notes every five minutes or so, including changes to tags.
However, the tags in the iPhone/iPad versions are not displayed in a tree structure, just a list. Still, selecting a tag will act as though it’s searching hierarchically after using Taggy.
1. Do I have to re-run Taggy hierarchy every time I add an item that is tagged in a lower level of my tag hierarchy? Do you find this hard to maintain?
2. If you re-run Taggy hierarchy on something that has already been hierarcified, does it cause any problems like duplicate tags or anything?
Thanks,
Don
Hi Don,
1. Yes, you would need to rerun Taggy since Evernote does not automatically organize tags hierarchically for you, unfortunately. It’s not really a perfect solution, but it’s better than nothing. I see it is kind of similar to maintaining metadata in an iTunes music library, for which I use Tagalicious. Like Taggy, Tagalicious and similar programs must be run whenever new music is added to your library.
2. The good news is that re-running Taggy as many times as you want produces no ill effects =)
Still, I personally mostly use my own program just once every month or so, just to keep things organized, and then try to manually organize notes as I create them. Taggy is most useful the very first time, since most people probably have hundreds of notes they don’t want to manually organize.
Philip
Philip,
I think your solution is good and so far, worth spending .99 to save some time and batching this every week during my review.
What I didn’t realize after buying, and perhaps some feedback for future, should you plan it, is the following:
1. Track which notebooks were heirarchified and when. The problem: I did 1 notebook to try it. then forgot which one I tried and couldn’t recall after a few days. It would be nice to show which notebooks were processed and by date. etc.
2. To take the steps above further, it would be great to automate the process to run on any any notebooks you select at a certain time versus having to do each notebook individually. I have WAY too many notebooks and it will probably take me over several weeks to go through them since I dont have time to click and wait for each one.
But, like I said, this helps me moving forward not having to manually kill myself. So thanks!
Jonathan
You know, after further use, I think i’m coming to the decision on how to solve what i’ve described above.
I think I may just do 1 notebook and have a VERY complex tag system. At least with TAGGY then I just solve the batch process on 1 notebook and it goes through my complex tag hierarchy.
Any thoughts, as i’m not sure what i’m giving up ont he other end of the spectrum by doing this in terms of benefits.
Well, I only have one notebook myself, as I didn’t see any functional difference between notebooks and tags. I think notebooks are more of an internal formatting thing, probably stored separately on the hard drive and in the cloud. They are probably good for keeping notes completely separate from one another, or if two different people use the same account. I used to have two notebooks, one for personal and one for work, but now I just have a “work” tag. I think it’s just a matter of personal preference.
Hi Philip, your app sounds really great and I was looking forward to purchase and use it but….. am I doing anything wrong? Is your app available only in the US app store? I live in Germany and here I cannot find it in the store
Any hint?
Thank you in advance
Hi,
I also really want this app! Exactly what I need to try and get the important bits of info into evernote.
However, taggy is not on the UK app store. From what I can see it is not on any app store preview-it doesn’t come up in searches and if I click on links from google it says its not there either. Has it been removed?
Thanks
Laura, Kat: Taggy is once again available in the Mac App Store. I apologize for the temporary unavailability. It’s available in the US right now, but it may take a day or two to propagate to other countries. Here is the link:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app.....7286?mt=12
Philip, Is it alright if I download your app one time and give it to all my friends, or post it on the web for others to just use?
Hi Don, I assume you are posting here because of some of my other posts regarding my philosophy on filesharing. According to iTunes, 521 people have purchased Taggy so far. I’m not at all worried about piracy. I’m pretty sure if someone wanted to, they could find somebody to share it with them, such as yourself.
I’m not making a living off of this, or anything like that. $521, minus Apple’s 30% cut, minus the $200 it’s cost me for the developer account that allows me to sell it in the App Store, and I’ve made about $250. Nothing to shake a stick at for a weekend’s worth of work, but nothing amazing either. I’m just some guy on the internet who made a useful tool for himself and decided to share it with others, and those others have decided to give me a few hundred dollars in return.
Nice.
That’s how the internet is supposed to work.
If you want to share Taggy with all of your friends and tell them how great it is, that’s fine with me. Sales are driven by word-of-mouth, and the more people who use Taggy and love it, the better for everyone, including me, and including my bottom line.
By the way, Taggy has received glowing reviews so far, so I’m quite happy
http://i.imgur.com/Cwijb.jpg
Believe it or not, the fact that there’s anyone who even WANTS to pirate Taggy is the best news I could have hoped for. It means my application is worth something, and that people want it. Some people will pay me $1.99 for it, some people won’t. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.
And, again, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The more people who know and use Taggy, the happier I am. Share it with whoever you want
Philip
Hi Philip,
just wanted to say thank you! I purchased yesterday in the german App Store your tool and started immediately to use it. My evernote is already looking better. Have a nice sunday.
Laura
Thanks a bunch, Laura! Have a good day
Philip, I’m just starting with EN, so it looks like the right time to start using Taggy. Regarding its functionality on my iOS devices, do I understand correctly that I cannot make hierarchical tags on my iPad but I will see any such tags I’ve made on my laptop when I’m on the pad or phone. Do I have that right?
Thanks.
That’s correct. Evernote syncs everything across all of your devices, so all of Taggy’s changes are synchronized as well.
I love Evernote and I love the functionality Taggy provides. I only wish there was some way to script Taggy to automatically run periodically and hierarchify all notes. If this were the case then I wouldn’t have to remember to do it once a week or so and because I have so many notebooks it becomes quite the tedious process to hierarchify each notebook.
Any possibilities for this?
Again, thanks so much for this functionality. While you’d think Evernote would have built this in, it’s great that this program is available to allow this!
Hi Athena, I’m thrilled that you and so many others have found Taggy to be useful
However, it’s not really under “active development:” I made it for myself one weekend a year and a half ago and put it on the App Store in case anyone else wanted it. So, there are no plans for new features on the horizon.
Any chance of alphabetizing the notebooks in the Taggy drop-down? I have lots of notebooks, and having them display in a random fashion makes it pretty difficult to find a particular one. Better yet, display the notebooks in the same hierarchical fashion as in Evernote.
I purchased Taggy after watching your Youtube presentation. I have a lot of imbedded folders and I have not been very good at tagging them because of all the diverse and quick ways in which I drop stuff into EN. First thing I noticed when I tried Taggy was the number of Folders that show up in your window, pages drop upon page drop and totally out of any sequencial order. OK I said so be it. Well I went through the most important ones that I use that are imbedded and did this for about 30 minutes. Then I went to look to see the tags as you showed in your youtube and none were there…nothing. It did not work. Any suggestions. I paid the money and I took the time so I would like to see this work. Thanks in advance. Even if you sent me some instructions at my email that would be great. Anything.
Martin K. Driscoll
driscoll@gate.net
954-325-9700
1116 Highland Beach Drive
Highland Beach, FL. 33487
Philip – as you are quite the tagging expert – have you come across a useful tool to automate conversion of openmeta tags to evernote and v.v.?
renier
I noticed you haven’t updated Taggy since Evernote 5 came out. Is it still compatible? Will you be updating it soon?
Hi, I am using Evernote 5 and I can’t seem to get the tags to show up in “hierarchy” fashion in Evernote. Any ideas how to get that to work? I feel that Taggy doesn’t seem to help unless I can get that to work.
Hi Bradley,
Evernote 5 removed the ability to drag and drop tags in the sidebar. What you have to do now is go into the dedicated tag page by clicking the “Tags” header in the sidebar. Only there can you drag-and-drop tags around.
Personally, I think that’s a feature regression, but that’s the way it is.
Philip