Google Keep is one of my favorite tools to help me stay on track. It's such an easy app to capture those quick notes, those ideas, all those things that bounce around
in your head each and everyday. Now here on the Simpletivity Channel, I usually focus most of my videos on the desktop version of Keep, but today I wanted to focus on five of my favorite mobile tips when using Google Keep. So, let's dive in, and we're gonna start with images. Now, you can add an image to an existing note,
Adding Images & Pictures
or you can even start off with an image. If you have an existing note, like this blank one that I'm starting, you can always hit the plus button down below and choose
take photo or choose image, but even when you're not within a note, in the the bottom right hand corner you have the little picture icon and again, you can choose to take a photo. I can grab a photo right here on my phone, or I can choose that option again, and choose an image, and in this case, it's gonna open up your gallery.
I'm gonna choose this one here, and now I've got my image ready to go. I can add multiple images if I want. They're always going to appear at the top of your note.
But that leads me to my second tip, or the second thing that I love to do on my mobile app, and that is annotating images, something that often gets overlooked.
Annotating Images
So if I click on the image itself, it's gonna open up a new screen, and you'll see in the top right-hand corner I've got a little paintbrush icon.
When I select that paintbrush icon, what I can do is start to make drawings, little swirly things on my image.
Now, I've got a few options down below. That was sort of the pen option. I've got one here that's more of a marker, and the one on the far right is like a highlighter option, but the great thing is that you've got a lot more options if you actually click and hold.
So, if I click and hold for a second on the pen, I can change the color of the pen. I can change the width of that pen. So, now I've got a red, it's slightly narrower than the one I had before, and you can do that with all of these options, including the highlighter.
If I hold on that for just a second, I'll just hold on that, it's gonna bring up more options down below.
Now, if I choose the eraser, one of the things that I like here is that I don't have to drag my finger across the screen, I can just select the different annotations that I want to erase, and in fact, if I hold down on the eraser option, I even have the choice to clear the canvas.
So if I had other annotations, let me just show you an example of that. If I draw here, if I draw there, if I go here and say, hold down on it, and say clear canvas, it's gonna get rid of absolutely everything.
The last one I wanted to show you here, let me just put a little red S on my image, is the selection tool.
So what this allows me to do is I can select that annotation, and I can drag it. It keeps the annotation, the exact size and color and everything, and I can put it where I want it to be.
So, actually a lot more options here when it comes to annotating your images than you may have already thought.
And of course, those annotations are going to save. You can even see it here on the front screen, on the preview screen. So you can keep those annotations. You can continue to edit them as you go.
Now let's stick with images for just one more second for my next tip, and that has to do with converting images into text.
Convert Image to Text
So, here I've got a note which is actually an image. It's something that I've captured from my website, but let's say I'd like to extract that text. Let's say you've taken a picture of a poster, or a label or anything with text. Again, we're gonna select the image itself. That's gonna bring up this view where we see the little paintbrush icon,
but this time we're gonna select those little three dots, and you can see our very first option here is to grab image text. If I select that option, almost immediately down
below it has grabbed all of the text in this image, and it's brought it into the note itself.
Now I can cut and paste this into an email, into a document, wherever I would like to use this text. Now, it's not always perfect. You can see down here, I've got like a capital S on the end of less, but the rest of it looks pretty good to me; it almost looks like it's got it almost perfect from what it is above. And sometimes it may even keep the layout, the spacing, so you might need to adjust that,
depending on sentence structure, but a great way to grab text, if you're taking a picture of something, you can immediately pull it into your note. Now the next tip I want to share with you has to do with a feature that I use quite a bit here on the mobile version. When I'm out running around, sometimes I want to take an audio note. That is often the quickest way that I can
Record & Transpose Audio
Get my thoughts and ideas into Google Keep, but I don't just want an audio recording, I want a transcript of what I had to say.
On the bottom right-hand corner, you can see that there is a microphone app. When you select that, immediately you can start recording what you are saying, and Google Keep will do its very best to convert your text into words so you can use them later.
Alright, so here you can see it immediately started to record everything that I just said, and it did a very, very good job of doing so, as well.
But what I love about this feature is that it is twofold. Not only has it converted my words into text so I can copy and paste this somewhere else, but it's actually also kept the audio file. You see there's a little play button there, so I can actually listen to it.
Now I really use this feature, but maybe you would like to use it. You know, maybe you're practicing a part, maybe you want to practice how you're delivering a speech or something like that. Maybe it's important that you get the different cadences and the volume for your recording.
So, what you can do is you can keep both the audio and the text itself.
Now, sometimes you don't need both. You'll see there's a little X button here. So, I can actually delete the voice recording. I can delete that but I've kept all of that good text which I can use later.
So, if you haven't tried it out, be sure to check out the recording audio notes feature.
Now, the very last tip I want to give you today with the mobile version of Keep has to do with reminders. Now you may be familiar with reminders already.
Time & Place Reminders
Let's see here, I've got a simple checklist.
Let's suppose that this is a grocery list here and so I want to remind myself to pick up those groceries before I run out of milk.
So, here in the top right-hand corner, you'll notice that there's a little bell icon. If I select that, I can select the exact time, maybe I'm gonna choose tomorrow during my lunch break, and I can choose if I want this reminder to repeat or not, which can be very, very helpful.
If I hit save, there you can see it's gonna show me when the reminder is set. I can still see that on the front of the note, and the additional bonus is that this will also appear on my Google Calendar. So, I can see this, I can even access this directly from Google Calendar.
But what I wanna do is I wanna show you the alternative way of setting a reminder which can be very powerful, and that is a location-based reminder.
So, at the top, you see by default time is selected, but I can select place. So, in this case, I can either enter in a specific address or a specific store or location.
So in this case, again, let's suppose that this is a grocery list, so I'm gonna select a local grocery store. It's gonna input the name but it's already saved that specific location that I just chose.
I'm gonna hit save, there I can see what that location is and how this is going to work is that when I'm in close proximity to that particular location, I'm gonna get a notification. I'm gonna get a reminder.
Now, I'm not exactly sure of the distance or the proximity, I'm not sure if it's a half mile, if it's a full mile, I'm not exactly sure what the proximity is, but when I'm nearby, it's gonna give me an alert telling me that, hey, maybe you should check this one off of your to-do list, or pick up these items because you're nearby.
So, something that can be really, really powerful. I mean, how many times have you driven past a store that you needed to get something from, but you just weren't thinking about it at that time. Now you can have Google Keep give you that reminder when you are walking or when you are driving by.
So, there you have it, my five favorite tips for the mobile version of Google Keep.
Now what I'd love to hear next is which one of these five were your favorites, or did I miss something completely. Do you have an additional tip that you would like to share with others? Be sure to leave your answers, and include your comments down below.
Thank you so much, everyone, for watching today's video. I hope you give this video a like, and if you haven't yet subscribed, be sure to do so. We release new videos each and every week.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
