I am constantly trying to keep my desk clear of miscellaneous scraps of paper. Anything ranging from receipts to business cards to post-its that manage to accumulate in piles around my keyboard or in the pockets of my jacket and backpack. As these piles grow larger, more unmanageable, and completely unsearchable, I decided to find an effective way to dump everything into Evernote.

On my desk, behind a pile of notes, sits a scanner. After a bit of fiddling, I think I found a pretty nice way to scan directly into Evernote that will work for a majority of scanners. I am currently using a Mac, but there are similar methods that could be used on Windows as well.

The setup is quite simple:

1. Start ‘Image Capture’ – it is a free application that comes with OS X (/Applications/Image Capture)
2. If your scanner is supported (and turned on) you will see a window similar to the one in the screenshot below
3. Select the area you want to scan by dragging a rectangle around the preview of the scan
4. Set the quality of the scan to either B/W or Color Photo (depending on what you are scanning)
5. Give your scan a title
6. Choose PNG, JPEG as the format. If you would rather scan to PDF, keep in mind that images in PDFs will not be recognized by our image recognition
7. Select ‘Evernote’ as the Automatic Task – this is the key step in this process
8. And click ‘Scan’ – that’s all

For the subsequent scans, all you have to do is adjust the selected area and enter a different title. All the other settings will be remembered as defaults.

Now, everything you scan will go directly to Evernote with the title you assign. And, all your notes will be searchable thanks to Evernote’s image recognition.

I hope this process helps others clear their desks.