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.
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint and text files are titled from the words Harbor read inside them.
• A photo with no words in it — a repair, a plant, a receipt too faded to read — is titled from what the picture shows. This only happens when Harbor has no text for the note yet, and only from the first picture in the note. There’s a daily limit on picture titles; past it, add a few words to the note or try again tomorrow.

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, Windows, and Android the suggested title arrives selected, so a single keystroke replaces the whole thing. On Mac 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 a picture. 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, and a photo needs a moment to be prepared too. Until that’s done there’s nothing to read — wait a moment and press the pill again. Press the pill on a photo after it’s prepared but before OCR finishes, and you’ll get a title from the picture rather than from its words.
• 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

Pressing the pill sends that note’s text to OpenAI, which hands back a title. If Harbor has no text for the note yet, it sends a copy of the note’s first picture instead, scaled down when the picture is large. That is the only moment the button sends anything — 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.

It can also happen without a button press, in a watched folder you’ve switched it on for, which does this for each file it imports. A Google Drive or Dropbox folder titles from the words on the page only. A folder on your Mac or PC asks the same way the button does, so a file with no text yet can be titled from the picture. That switch is off by default and you set it per folder, so the files it covers are always ones you chose. Nothing else in your library is ever sent for a title.

That isn’t the only folder switch that sends text to an AI. Guess the notebook sends a file’s words to a different company, to pick its notebook rather than its title. It’s off by default too.

Encrypted notes are never sent anywhere, because they can’t be. Beyond these, the wider position on AI hasn’t changed: your own tools, your own keys, on your terms.

There’s nothing to switch on for the button, 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.

And if you’re doing it more than a few times a day, stop pressing the button at all. A watched folder has a switch that does this for every file it imports — a scanner drops a stack of PDFs into a folder and they arrive already titled, rather than as a wall of scan_0042.pdf for you to work through. It’s the same call, made for you, up to 100 notes a day from Drive and Dropbox folders — off until you switch it on for that folder. The button is what’s left for the odd note you capture some other way.