Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
Good.
That’s the way I’d put it.
I'm good.
Today on Ask DottoTech, we’ve got three burning questions you have.
The first is regarding Gmail categories, the second is photos and Dropbox and the third
is sharing in Evernote.
It is practically a celebration of cool tech today on Ask DottoTech.
Ask DottoTech is the show where we have a very simple mathematical equation.
You ask questions; I answer them.
Where do you ask the question?
Right here on YouTube.
You can just post the question into the Comments area or if you’re a subscriber to my newsletter,
reply to my newsletter with questions.
That’s another great way to get to me.
But the whole deal this – ask me good questions, things that are important to you; I will do
my best to answer them.
I don’t always get to answer every question but I’ll do my best to answer it clearly
and concisely in the Dotto way.
So let us begin.
All three questions today have been generated from here in the YouTube channel.
The first comes from Steve who says, “Steve, how do I create new categories in Gmail?”
Steve, you can’t really create new categories in Gmail.
Let’s discuss how Gmail works.
Gmail does this automatic filtering for us, which we see these three tabs or four tabs
that I have above my demo account here of Primary, Social, Promotions and Updates.
These are what used to be controversial Gmail categories.
Gmail assigned these global categories and sort email based on how they fit within those
categories.
Now you can modify how they sort just by dragging email between them but this pre-sorting or
kind of email triage is something that some people like a lot and others don’t.
Now the way we manage it, if you don’t have it or if you do have it in your inbox and
you want to modify it is one of two ways.
We can go under the Settings and configure our inbox, which allows us to turn it on and
off, and it does a good job of explaining what each of these different categories can
and should be or how they look at it.
There’s also a little plus sign right up here that gives us instant access to the exact
same dialog box.
So we can basically turn on and off the categories here but we can’t do much other than that.
We can just basically allow them to be.
Now we can manage how they act.
For example if I'm in my social tab here and I want all of my YouTube email to be considered
primary email, I can just drag that into my Primary tab and now any conversations that
have come from YouTube will now be put in my Primary tab.
So I have a little bit of control from that perspective but not a lot more control.
You don’t have the kind of granular control that you’re probably looking for here, Steve.
But I'm going to show you one other way that you might be able to control the content within
Gmail a little more effectively.
Two episodes ago, in episode 16 I showed you how to create labels.
We see the label I created in the demo account for my newsletter.
This is just a straightforward label that looks for all of the email coming in that’s
a newsletter from DottoTech and it places it here.
It adds this tag to it and I've color-coded it so that I can identify it.
But I can also, if we go back into those labels, so if we go back into Settings where so much
happens in Gmail, we go back into those labels you can see if I scroll down here that I've
created a new thing called Important Stuff.
What this is another label kind of underneath that top label which almost turns the initial
label into a category or into a section and so on.
Let me show you how this happens.
I'm going to create a new label.
I'm going to call it More Stuff so you can imagine what that is.
I choose to nest it under one of my existing labels.
By doing that, I kind of create a little bit of a hierarchical structure in my folder structure
here or in my label structure so that now I've got these two additional storage areas
or these two additional labels so that I can create a little bit more hierarchy, a little
more control over how I store and archive and manage my email.
I don’t know if that helps, Steve, but that’s the only thing I can come up with that allows
you to customize the organization within Gmail.
The actual official categories un-editable even though we can manage how they work.
Next question comes from Brad who says, “Dotto, love your shows.
It’s one of my favorites.”
That’s great.
“I have a question about Dropbox.
I hate it that every time I plug my phone or my camera onto my Mac, it uploads all my
pictures into Dropbox.
I just want them in iCloud.
Help!
Thanks in advance.”
Dropbox is a little aggressive sometimes in how it does things when we first set it up.
Here is how I discovered how to turn that particular feature off because I was having
the exact same problem.
All of my photos were being loaded onto Dropbox which was taking up all of my Dropbox space
and it didn’t matter because I actually use Google Photos.
I like Google’s Photos as my backup system.
So here’s how we fix it.
Just click on Dropbox icon up on the menu bar and there we find the gear setting.
When you click on gear setting, you can go into Preferences.
In the Preferences, you find the Import Preference.
Open the Import Preference and turn off the Enable Camera Uploads.
You can also modify it.
You can choose just what to upload and where to upload things if you want it to continue
to upload and you want a little bit more control.
But this is the magic sauce as far as importing photos into Dropbox.
You set it right there.
Hope that answers your question, Brad.
And finally, Diatry1 who says, “Am I able to share an Evernote note with someone who
does not use Evernote?
I found how to share it but if they don’t have the app on their phone or home computer,
it seems to get lost.”
No, it doesn’t get lost.
Let’s just take this note her which is all of my different questions for Ask DottoTech
and let’s copy the public link.
If I copy this public link and then I launch a web browser of any sort so your friend,
whoever you send it to, you put them into a web browser here.
We’re going to go into Firefox, the web browser.
I'm going to paste the URL which you emailed to them by copying the public note.
It then brings up in the browser instance that particular note.
It shares the note flawlessly so regardless of which browser or which phone they’re
on, they can access all of your information, any information that you choose to share from
Evernote through this system.
Just copying, going into share menu in any Evernote note and saying the copy the public
link.
If I choose that I don’t want that link to be public anymore, I can stop sharing it
at any point in which case they will get a broken URL.
But as long as you keep it public and you’ve copied the public link and you’ve shared
it with somebody, they will be able to open it in any browser.
That’s the way Evernote works.
I hope you found today’s video to be useful.
There are three ways for you to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
The first is please, if you haven’t, subscribe to our channel.
The second is I encourage you to subscribe to our newsletter.
That way you can ask me direct questions and you also hear about all of our upcoming live
events, tutorials, webinars, etc.
And finally, DottoTech a community-funded channel supported through the generosity of
you at the crowdfunding site, Patreon.
I encourage you to drop by the Patreon page, have a look and discover what you can do to
help keep me producing content like this for you.
And there are perks if you choose to be a supporter of DottoTech and the perks are awesome.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!