Removing image thumbnails from the Evernote note list and custom keyboard shortcuts

Newsletter housekeeping: The latest version for PC & Mac is 10.110.3. You can grab it from the download page. Latest mobile version is 10.110.2.

Many thanks to Rob and JB who have supported Taming the Trunk over the last week, its much appreciated. If you find this article useful and have it in your pocket to support my efforts, you can tip me a coffee here.

Evernote has always displayed a thumbnail image in the note list when you view your notebook in the Card or Snippet view. Which image was chosen to be the thumbnail has always been a bit of a mystery and we never had much control over it.

In the latest desktop version of Evernote, we can now remove a thumbnail from a note when we want, this will be useful.

Here's a screen grab of a couple of notes of mine.

The thumbnails generated for these notes are a bit rubbish. There's no image in either note but there is a Word document, so I presume its throwing in a thumbnail in for that.

If you right click one of your notes in the notebook list, there's a new option to Remove thumbnail.

You can also get to this option by using the three-dot menu at the top right of the note editor.

When you apply it, the notes look like this.

Much better.

Now for the elephant in the room. We still can't pick which image gets used as a thumbnail.

I know this is being thought about and I hope the removal of thumbnails is the start of the process to let us pick the thumbnail. A simple right-click on an image and "Set as thumbnail" would be great.

Back in April, Federico the product lead at Evernote posted on Xitter.

One of the reasons setting a thumbnail image for a note is important is that when you're scrolling through notes you can visually see the note you want much quicker, at least I can.

Would setting an image as a thumbnail be useful for you? Let me know in the comments.

Customising keyboard shortcuts

I mention this nifty little feature quite a lot and most times I get a message or an email from someone who says, "I never knew we could do that!".

So, here's the quick low-down.

You can see all the keyboard shortcuts in the desktop apps by using the little keyboard icon at the bottom of the side bar. You can also go to the Help menu and select "Keyboard shortcuts" or use CTRL+/ or CMD + /.

This slides out a bar on the right of the screen where you can search for some shortcuts.

Some of the shortcuts are fixed meaning you can’t customise them but a whole bunch can be changed to save you spraining your fingers.

Just click on the shortcut you want to change and you'll see this.

Click Edit to customise the shortcut. Disable to er, disable it! You can also restore it to defaults.

Have a play with them. I use the feature quite a bit myself to save me some finger gymnastics and speed things up.

Do you customise your shortcuts? Let me know in the comments.

...and finally

Would you like to chat with a notebook using AI?

Evernote are after feedback right now to help guide the development of a new AI feature that would let us chat with a notebook.

Here's a mock-up of a screen that may help explain things a bit better.

My own thoughts are that it would possibly work better if you were chatting with all your notes and not just a notebook but that then brings in privacy concerns. I'm not sure I'd want all my notes accessed by the AI so if it was on the notebook level at least I could choose to put my private stuff somewhere else.

Leave some feedback on the Xitter post or in the comments here and I can pass it on.

Evernote are after specific use cases.

Have a great weekend

All the best

Jon