Scanning Old Magazines And Removing Unwanted Pages In Evernote

Scanning Old Magazines And Removing Unwanted Pages In Evernote

Recently in the DocumentSnap newsletter I wrote about how I am going through a bunch of my old magazines, scanning in just the articles I want and recycling the rest.

Here is how I am doing it:
1. Cut out the pages from the magazine
2. Scan the article with my Fujitsu ScanSnap directly into Evernote
3. Remove the pages that I don’t want from the article

The last step is strictly unnecessary, but for some reason it just bugs me having pages in the PDF that don’t belong.

This is a problem with magazines of course, because inevitably at least a few of the pages will have an advertisement or another article on the back side.

I’m going to step you through how I accomplish this. The example will be on the Mac using Preview.app, but you can do the same thing on Windows if you have a PDF editor.

Scan The Article Into Evernote

In this example I scanned a 4 page article, but there are actually 6 pages in the PDF: one from another article altogether, and the other an ad for “lifestyle franchises”.

Again there is no harm leaving them in, and it is probably not worth the time to remove them, but I just do it anyways.

Once in Evernote, open the PDF in Preview

Right click on the PDF in the note and choose “Open With” and choose Preview (or the PDF editor of your choice).

Right click, Open WIth, Preview

In Preview, remove the unwanted pages

In the sidebar on the right-hand side, go to the pages that you want to get rid of and hit Delete.

Save and exit back to Evernote

In your PDF editing application, save the file and then quit Preview.

Voila! Now when you open the note in Evernote, you’ll find that the PDF only has four pages. The other two are gonzo.

(Photo: limonada)

About the Author

Brooks Duncan helps individuals and small businesses go paperless. He's been an accountant, a software developer, a manager in a very large corporation, and has run DocumentSnap since 2008. You can find Brooks on Twitter at @documentsnap or @brooksduncan. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply 6 comments

Corrine - March 7, 2013 Reply

I can't figure out how to do this with my Mac.

roland - July 27, 2011 Reply

trying to do this on a windows machine, "open with" comes up with adobe reader 9.1.
Review of pages shows up on the left, but am not able to delete them.
what am i doing wrong?

thanks,
Roland

    Brooks Duncan - July 27, 2011 Reply

    I don't think you can do this with Acrobat Reader, as it is just for viewing PDFs and not editing them. To do this, you'll need either the full Adobe Acrobat (if you have access to it), or some other PDF editing application.

John - March 19, 2011 Reply

New to this site and this is an old post so not sure if anyone will see this but…

I am considering purchasing a ScanSnap1500M (from this site I might add) and use it to archive a number of old magazines that are taking up a lot of space. After a web search I have found a number of people who seem to have had good luck using the ScanSnap line to scan pages from magazines.

I am wondering if anyone has any insight as to what problems I might run into. My biggest concern is how well the ScanSnap will feed the flimsy magazine pages… Do most people scan the pages alone or with a "carrier"?? How often does the ScanSnap wrinkle or shred pages from magazines?? Is it a good idea to place a 'stack" of pages in the scanner or is it safer to sit there and feed it a page at a time?

I have Adobe Acrobat Pro already for dealing with the resulting PDFs..

Thnaks

John

    Brooks Duncan - March 31, 2011 Reply

    Sorry for the delay in responding. I have scanned magazine pages using my ScanSnap quite a few times and have never had any problems. I know what you mean that you'd think there would be issues given how flimsy the sheets are, but it's been so far so good for me.

    That being said if you did run into problems, the S1500M comes with a carrier sheet so you could put the problematic pages in there and you should be good to go.

    I've scanned stacks of magazine pages with no problems; I didn't need to 1-by-1 them.

    Hope this helps!

Healy Jones - August 4, 2010 Reply

Hi Brooks, I assume you are on a Mac (I think I read that in a different post you did sometime ago) but if you are using Windows you can use OfficeDrop's ScanDrop application to scan directly to Evernote – and first you can delete pages, rotate, apply tags + pick your destination folder. Ever since we got into the Evernote trunk ScanDrop has been growing like a weed…. http://www.officedrop.com/scandrop-scanning-softw

Leave a Reply: