Yep 2 - A Document Management Program for Macintosh

A newsletter reader sent along a glowing report of Yep 2, a document management program for Macintosh users. A "document management program" is a fancy phrase for a program that organizes and catalogs your word processing files, pictures, videos, PDF files, and other documents. The program then allows you to search later and find what you want within seconds. If you have a large number of documents on your hard drive as I do, Yep 2 may be the perfect tool for you.

Newsletter reader Porter writes:

I just wanted to take a moment a put in a big thumbs-up for "Yep!", a PDF-tracking, filing and tagging program for the Mac (it also handles photos, text docs and probably all other types of files as well). It is essentially a Finder-type program that lets the user decide what files it displays. Quick note: I have nothing to do with the company or program, I just like it.

Basically it has allowed me to consolidate all my documents - scanned photos, PDFs from Google Books etc., census images and such from Ancestry, even saved webpages - all into one program. You can view (most of) the docs from within the program as "quick view" but also open in the finder, or open with the default program. Most important to me is the ability to create, manage, and view tags for all the docs. I use it specifically for tagging to track location by country/ state /county /city, years, surnames, relation, document type and whatever else may pass my fancy.

By default it doesn't change anything in the files themselves or move them from their initial location. But it can do both, if desired, and very easily. Since I have pix and pdfs and all sorts of research in many different locations (I'm a pretty organized person usually, but just can't seem to keep all my research in one place, so I end up getting massive amounts of duplicates.) I import everything from the various scattered folders, then rename according to my own system, tag, compare duplicates or make my edits, then select the "Put in Filed Documents Folder" option when I'm done making those changes. Yep shows each file's location on the hard drive so I know that everything not already in the Filed Documents Folder is still pending and needs attention.

One rather large downside is the price - $39 for a non-essential program is a bit high. But then, the more I use it, the more essential it is becoming, and perhaps soon $39 will seem like a bargain.

The point of this is that it has really helped me stay organized, find the docs I need in moments, and keep my head above these often overwhelming waters.

I did a quick search on your site and didn't see any mention of Yep! so I thought I'd tell you about it in case you were not already aware and it sounded interesting to you.

Thanks for your site and guidance,
 ~ Porter

I agree. I downloaded the program's 10-day free trial and am trying it out. I have thousands of photos, word processing documents, and PDF files, and I was impressed that Yep found them all and catalogued them quickly. I have genealogy-related documents and pictures as well as scanned images of old books, receipts, medical records, old letters, and income tax returns.

Yep is actually more than a document management program. It also talks to your Mac's scanner and will directly scan images and documents without using any other software.

In addition, Yep allows you to add notes, images, and web snippets to the documents.
 
The Yep documentation claims that it can track over a hundred thousand documents and retrieve any one of them within seconds. I'll take their word for that as I don't yet have enough documents to test that claim.

If you are running Snow Leopard, Yep will load as a 64-bit program.
 
Quoting from the Yep web site:

Now that Yep makes it so easy to keep all your documents organized - wherever they lay, instantly retrievable and searchable, it might just be time to start scanning some of those paper documents into your computer and Yep will help you do it. Yep’s scanning is faster and a lot nicer than the any bundled scanning software you are going to find. Say goodbye to cheesy scanner interfaces from all the big scanner companies.

In addition to creating PDFs by scanning, Yep creates text files from dragged in text without any naming or filing on your part. You can create image files the same way. Keep track of your notes and thoughts without letting the dreary job of filing get in your way. All documents Yep creates are “normal” files on your filesystem. No databases to worry about.

Great program! A bit pricey, but worth it for many of us who have thousands of documents on our hard drives.

I was rather surprised to find that the scanning software in Yep 2 appears to work better than the software included with my Hewlett-Packard scanner. I could never get the Hewlett-Packard software to reliably scan multi-page documents when feeding pages into the scanner's document feeder. In theory, I should be able to insert a document of up to fifty pages, click on an icon, and then walk away while the scanner and software scan all pages and store them as one PDF file. I was never able to make that work with the Hewlett-Packard software. However, the Yep 2 scanning software worked perfectly. For the first time, I have now scanned multi-page documents and saved them into one PDF file.

I think I'll pay for Yep 2 when the 10-day trial expires. Thanks, Porter, for telling me about it!

You can learn more about Yep or download the program at http://www.ironicsoftware.com/yep

You can also watch several video tutorials at http://www.ironicsoftware.com/yep/video.html