Creating a “Just for Me” Photo Album with Evernote and the iPhone

If you visit the front page of Evernote’s Web site, one of the largest things you’ll see is the phrase “Remember Everything”. Evernote provides lots of theoretical examples of what this actually means, but I think that to really implement this admittedly abstract idea, we need to approach it with the idea that it’s a habit. Seeing videos of people snapping photos of business cards and wedding cakes and families gathered around fondue pots are fine for inspiration, but they don’t fully convey the requisite attitude toward the things we encounter every day. Before we really wade waist-deep into this, let’s talk vocabulary.

“Everything” is a rather, well, definite term. I think we can all agree that Evernote isn’t necessarily suggesting that we utilize their product to remember the name of the tattooed head case that poured our latte four months ago, certainly, but for the guy keeping a meticulous log of every food and beverage service professional he encounters during his adult life, the weirdo barista’s name is precisely the kind of detail he’d like to remember. The word “everything” in this context does carry an implied notion; a better way to say it might be “Remember everything you want to remember.”

Whenever my wife and I head off to a wedding or a rodeo or whatever, part of our preflight checklist is to make sure we grab our digital camera and that the battery is full of juice. Clearly, we do this because we’re going to what is probably going to be a momentous occasion for somebody and we want to make sure we are equipped to snap a pantload of photos so we can all sit around in loafers, laugh and reminisce over them while we sip a glass of Bordeaux. We’re not alone in this practice, I’d wager. Now, contrast this type of occasion with our weekly trip to the dry cleaners. Unless you’re like our barista-obsessed buddy from earlier, most of us probably don’t care to remember this at all, let alone do the Bordeaux thing while looking at photos of your dress shirt with extra starch.

But, there exists a middle ground between these two, I think; the kinds of things we might want to revisit at some point (but maybe not) and that will be like a trip to the dry cleaners for everybody else. I like to call these “me memories” — the arguably mundane details of life that, thanks to our many and disparate neuroses as humans, we find valuable.

For example, the image at the top of this post was taken earlier today (as I write this) at the home of a family member. As you can see, it’s a red sink accented nicely by some pink and red flowers.

Two things.

1. I’ve never seen a red sink before.
2. The combination of the sink and the flowers instantly brought the following scene (the setting, in particular) from Dumb and Dumber to mind:

So, I saw the sink and flowers, thought of this scene from Dumb and Dumber and proceeded to laugh myself stupid, alone in this bathroom for not less than a minute. As I emerged from the bathroom, typing feverishly into my iPhone (I washed, don’t worry) and giggling like an idiot, my wife asked what was so funny. I was in the process of creating this note in Evernote:

That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. There are probably three people who I know that would find that amusing, but this was something I wanted to place in my “me memories” on the off-chance that I’ll either search for it specifically one day or just happen upon it while searching for something else.

I know I’m “the Evernote guy” or whatever, but I throw lots of pictures like this into Evernote. As I look at the last hundred-or-so notes I’ve created, here’s a sampling:

• Pictures of the two prescriptions I received from my doctor when I came down with what I’ve dubbed “Six Day Throat Death”.
• A “lost dog” poster my daughter saw as we walked out of a store (she suggested we keep our eyes peeled for the missing pooch).
• A picture of the screen taken during a round of Pictionary for Wii we played at a small birthday party for my wife.
• A picture of a bowl of homemade ice cream that, when totally frozen, looked like feces.

I could go on, but every single one of those is a) totally real and b) permanently ensconced in my Evernote account because I had my iPhone with me. The guiding principle here is that I had no plans of sharing any of these things with people and only tenuous plans of ever visiting them again myself. With Evernote, I’ve got piles of room to shove all sorts of things like this, just in case I want to go back a decade from now and see what caught my eye as I wandered through life.

Hint, if you already kinda do this and you want to see a quick list of all of your notes that contain a photo and that originated from your mobile phone, issue this search into Evernote:

source:mobile.* resource:image/*

What about you? Do you capture weird stuff just for you? Tell me about it (seriously – I love hearing about this kind of thing).