Recommend me a Windows personal information manager/database

January 10, 2021 2:31 PM

I'm a longtime user of DevonThink as a personal information manager on my Macintosh. I am looking at transitioning to Windows and need a replacement PIM. Specific details inside.

My DevonThink databases comprise several tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of files, and are several gigabytes in size. Most of the files are RTF or OCRed PDFs, with a mix of image and video files.

The key requirements for me are: hierarchical storage (I'm willing to use the file system for this if search is possible); robust searching capabilities, search within any tree of the database (so if I'm searching in folder X, I want to search the contents of subfolders X/X1, X/X2, etc., as well as the files directly in folder X); ability to OCR PDFs, and ability to script input (I use a Python script to scrape my Amazon Kindle highlights and need a way to bring the text file output of that script into the database).

I'm willing to pay for this product, although free or open source is ideal. I've already tried OneNote and it gets painfully slow with a fraction of my database size.

posted by philosophygeek to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

I'm not sure about scripting or OCR, and it's not inexpensive, but Ultra Recall is great, and will do much of what you want.
posted by still_wears_a_hat at 3:34 PM on January 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Look at Zoot - It is powerful but (like DevonThink) it takes a while to plumb it. It will not do OCR for you, but you can use Acrobat itself to do that. It checks most of your other boxes.
posted by yclipse at 7:24 PM on January 11, 2021