Can Harbor suggest a title for a note?

Yes. Leave the title empty, write (or scan, or record) the note, then press Suggest title.

Harbor reads what’s actually in the note and proposes a title for it. A photographed water bill comes back as something you’d recognize a year later, rather than IMG_4471.

Where the button is

It’s a small ✨ Suggest title pill sitting at the end of the title field, in the note editor.

It appears on web, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows, and Android — every Harbor app that has an editor. The harbor CLI doesn’t have it.

The pill is deliberately shy. It shows up only when it could actually do something:

• the note has no title yet — it never offers to overwrite a title you wrote;
• the note has something in it to read;
• the note isn’t encrypted;
• you can edit the note (not a read-only shared note, not one in the trash).

There’s a fifth condition you’ll never notice: Harbor’s servers have to have the feature switched on. On Harbor’s own service they do, so it won’t come and go on you.

Give a note a title yourself and the pill disappears. That’s the intended behavior, not a bug — Harbor doesn’t rename your notes.

What it reads

What you typed, if you typed anything.

If the note is nothing but an attachment — a scan, a photo, an audio recording — Harbor falls back to what it has already worked out about the contents:

• Recordings are titled from their transcript — so you need to have transcribed the recording first. What was said is a better clue than anything else in the note.
• Images and PDFs are titled from their OCR’d text — the words Harbor recognized on the page.

So a scanned document with no typed text at all still titles itself from the words on the paper. That’s the case it’s really built for.

It suggests, and the suggestion sticks

The suggested title goes into the title field exactly as if you’d typed it there — which means it saves and syncs exactly as if you’d typed it there. Harbor’s autosave picks it up a moment later, and the note is renamed on your other devices like any other edit.

So pressing the pill does change the note. Nothing is saved that typing the same words yourself wouldn’t have saved, and there’s no separate step to confirm. If you don’t want the title you got, edit it or clear it — that saves the same way, just like any other correction.

On web, iPhone, iPad, and Windows the suggested title arrives selected, so a single keystroke replaces the whole thing. On Mac and Android it arrives unselected, and you clear it yourself if you don’t want it.

There’s no “try again” button. The moment the title field has something in it, the pill disappears — that’s the same rule that stops it overwriting a title you typed. If you don’t like the suggestion, clear the title field completely and the pill comes back, ready for another go.

When it can’t help

Encrypted notes never get a suggestion, and the button never appears on one. Harbor’s servers hold only the ciphertext of an encrypted note — they genuinely cannot read it, so there’s nothing to suggest a title from. That’s the encryption trade-off working as intended.

A note with nothing readable in it yet gets a quiet line rather than an error: add a little text, a transcript, or an image with text. Usually that means the note really is empty. Two other reasons it can happen:

• You were quick. OCR runs on Harbor’s servers shortly after an image or PDF arrives. Until it finishes there’s nothing to read — wait a moment and press the pill again.
• The recording hasn’t been transcribed. A note holding only audio has nothing readable until you transcribe it, which is something you ask for rather than something that happens on its own. Transcribe it first, then the title suggestion has something to work from.

Yes, this uses AI — here’s exactly how much

The note’s text is sent to an AI provider to generate the title, only at the moment you press the button. Nothing is sent when you write a note, open one, or leave one alone, and there is no assistant reading your library in the background.

Encrypted notes are never sent anywhere, because they can’t be. And this is the only place in Harbor where anything like this happens — the wider position on AI hasn’t changed: your own tools, your own keys, on your terms.

There’s nothing to switch on, and nothing extra to pay for.

What we’d actually do with it

Stop titling notes. Genuinely — for anything you’re capturing rather than writing, skip the title field and let the button do it once the note’s finished.

It pairs best with watched folders: a scanner drops a stack of PDFs into a folder, they arrive as notes named after the files, and pressing Suggest title on the few you’ll want to find again costs a second each. The OCR that makes them searchable is the same OCR the title comes from, so if search can find it, the button can name it.