Yep for Mac

I scan and manage a lot of PDF documents. When they are first created I put them in a folder where they can then be OCR processed, or not, depending upon their source. The next step requires YEP, I use YEP to view and then properly name each document. I often use it to combine documents, which may require me to find related documents in YEP. When I get some time, I move the processed documents into their final resting place (folders organized by type of document, subtypes, and years) in the hope that when I need to locate it I can find it even if I forget the name and/or unique keywords. I know YEP can do a lot more, but for this one task alone it's well worth the cost. When I want to find documents, I begin with Spotlight, if I can't find it, I use a spotlight based tool to dig deeper, and lastly I look in my directories to locate the document. Having several different ways to locate documents makes it easier to find documents when I need them. Someday I'll spend the time to see if something has been added to YEP that will help me be more productive, but until then, it's doing the job I purchased it for. Yes, it's a bit buggy, and some things just don't work as I expect them to, but I've managed to tame it for my needs, and I'm happy.

Once upon a time (ca. 2011), there was no tagging in OS X, and the developers of Yep were actively involved in developing a tagging standard called OpenMeta. Five years later, pretty much everything you can do in Yep, you can do in the Finder. But....I made the mistake of installing Yep to see if it could do some rapid, keyboard based tagging of a directory of 600 or so PDFs. Nope. It brought my Mac to a crawl. And....even though I unchecked all the "preferred locations" to try to stop it slowing my system down, it still displayed a ton of files, seemingly picked at random from across my HD. Maybe it wanted to finish what it was doing before I unchecked the preferred locations. And not only did it display them, it changed the Extended Attributes on all of them. 6000 or so. Now all of those files are detected as changed, even though I did nothing to them, by my Chronosync and Hazel rules, because Yep was copying all my OS X tags to its obsolete OpenMeta tagging system. Even though I unchecked all the locations, so it shouldn't have been messing with anything. Fortunately I have the bandwidth and storage space so backing up an extra 6000 PDFs isn't a problem, but I didn't expect that Yep could wreak such havoc on my file system so quickly, especially when I told it not to display the contents of the folders that contained these files. Avoid.

Version 2 was a downgrade. Yes, I realize that was a long time ago, and I've been waiting for them to fix the problems with the new interface; but it appears that's not going to happen.

Version 1 was an iTunes like app for storing PDFs. I used it for TONS of articles and information I saved off the web. I used it daily. Then with Version 2 they decided what people really wanted was a weak Finder replacement. Not only a weak Finder replacement, but a rehash of one of their other programs. They should have left well enough alone.

NO, I don't want to search my whole hard drive. NO, I don't want to fiddle around just to save something to the Yep catalog, or to see only those things I've explicitly save to Yep. They killed it by assuming their user all really wanted Leap. If I wanted Leap I would have bought Leap.

Yep 1 was awesome.

I own these programs paperless, idocument, devonthink personal and yep. I find myself using yep 99% of the time and always find the others lacking in some dimension. Not perfect but its better than them.

There is something about this app. It draws you. It involves you. You want to use it, cause it's sleek, refined and always 'straight core'. I don't even need the app for my daily use. Since the app is such a pleasure, I've started to categorise different things, like manuals and spec sheets. Just love it and can warmly recommend it!