Software advice

[dvorak]

I'm a first year PhD student. Humanities subject - with research that involves many and complex visual images as well as text. Can someone recommend the best research software for collating my own notes and drafts.
I downloaded Scrivener which is helpful. But I am drowning in Word and Excel files. (Plus all those random notes on my phone and envelopes.)
What magic solution am I missing??

I find Evernote quite helpful but there might be something better out there... You can have the app on your phone so any notes will be synced across devices. You can have notes that include text/images/pdfs and with the premium version can annotate and highlight them in Evernote, using tags to make it searchable. It can also search text in photos of handwritten notes (as long as it's reasonably clear!). Having something that syncs across devices is really handy - I can take a photo of something and drop it into the inbox to sort when I'm at my computer. Good luck!

Thankyou. I will explore Evernote.

If you search online there are lots of blog posts about academic 'digital workflows'. I spent many hours of happy procrastination researching this a few summers ago in a quest to align my bibliographic, note-taking, web-clipping and word processing tools. For note taking and web clipping, I toyed with Evernote, but the free version is rubbish and I was reluctant to pay the cost for full functionality. Devonthink has many fans, and is good for keeping on top of lots of notes and web clipping, but is quite time consuming to get to grips with. In the end, I stuck with Simplenote for taking notes and my browser bookmarks for web clipping.