New Evernote no longer lets you search via multiple tags :-(

Posted by Tiggerlou
Nov 11, 2020 at 04:32 PM

I just upgraded to the new, very different version of Evernote and it has lost some truly essential features. This is huge, especially since I’m still very busy converting thousands of documents out of Clarisworks into Dynalist (loving it, BTW, thanks for that recommendation). The thought of possibly migrating my thousands of notes out of Evernote makes me want to throw my hands in the air and give up.

This is what I posted to the Evernote forum.
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I’ve been an avid Evernote user for years, I’ve recommend it to all my friends. But as of the new version, it appears that it has lost some features that have been truly *essential* for me. Evernote has been first and foremost, my go-to meticulously-indexed cookbook. It’s one of the major reasons I bought an iPad, so I could use it easily in the kitchen. I depend on it daily for that purpose.

I have three thousand recipes (I know.. I’m a cooking geek), gathered over forty years and dutifully entered into Evernote from multiple sources. I’ve laboriously tagged every one of these recipes by ingredients, seasonal and regional cooking, methods of cooking (air fryer, bread machine, etc), and categories of dishes (quiche, hot beverages, etc). I’ve also used tags to organize several possible dishes for one meal. I might search by multiple criteria, gather all possible recipes for a meal under the tag “Thursday” or “Thanksgiving”, then whittle down those possibilities and then proceed to shop and cook.

Until the recent new version, I could go to my recipes notebook, look to the upper right corner, and click in multiple tags to narrow down my options. I might select these tags: salad + seafood + ginger + Asian cooking. Voila, my three thousand recipes would be reduced to perhaps a half dozen along those lines. Another time I might select the tags for sweet potato + beer, dark + sausage. Or pears + cardamom + baking, sweets. You get the idea.

The fact that suggestions for those tags would show up without having to type them in precisely was a very big help, because I sometimes put an exclamation point ahead of the name of tags to make them more prominent in a list. There is NO WAY I could possibly remember the exact “spelling” of every one of my tags, to enter them into a search box exactly as they are named. I’ve treasured the fact that the box when searching for tags would auto-populate with suggestions. I could simply click one tag, plus another, and another, to narrow down my possible recipes.

These features are the primary reason I have used Evernote for recipes. They are the reason I’ve spent easily *hundreds of hours* over the years, organizing them this way. But now it appears that those beloved features are long gone!

I’ve tried using the search feature, but instead of bringing up tags, it brings up bunches of irrelevant results from notes that aren’t recipes at all. Apparently I can no longer search for multiple tags to narrow down my search, which has been absolutely essential to my using Evernote. I’ve tried typing in “tag:___” but I keep getting “no results” because I happened to type something like “chicken, baked” instead of “ckn, baked”. If I have to agonize over the precise wording of a tag, over and over and over, or scrollllllllllllllllllllll through my extremely long list of tags, meanwhile garlic is burning on the stove, then no way.

Absolutely. No. Way.

Please help. I’m really hoping that these treasured features are not gone for good. From the looks of it, tagging has now been crippled in a way that looks utterly pointless to me. Do I need to now move hundreds of tagged recipes into separate notebooks? But that still doesn’t replace searching for multiple tags. Honestly, what is the point of tagging if we can’t use it to whittle down the notes within a notebook? Are they now completely separate functions? What’s the point of that?

I’m really afraid that my meticulously-assembled cookbook is now unusable, and that is heartbreaking. OMG…. the thought of starting over with some other note-taking app, converting three….... thousand ........ recipes…..... ߘž
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I did get an answer from the forum: I can go back to the Legacy version on a Windows computer, but I can’t do that on iOS. I actually spent big bucks on an iPad—in order to easily bring my recipes into the kitchen. If I’m back to searching for recipes on my computer in my office, that brings me back to the bad old days of printing out recipes, scribbling down edits on paper as I cook, then accumulating stacks of hand-written notes that I never get around to transcribing back into the computer.

I’m told that some features will come back on iOS… eventually…. They didn’t say that searching by multiple tags would ever come back. I am beyond disappointed.

Any thoughts, anybody?