Everyone’s primary source of research today is the internet. It’s time to ditch the old highlighter pen and use these free modern tools to annotate anything online.
Data comes in all forms these days. When you’re conducting research, you’ll need to read online articles, pick up physical books, watch videos on the internet, and even listen to podcasts. You need to highlight and annotate these different sources and remember why you bookmarked something. That’s where these free tools will come in handy.
1. LINER (Android, iOS, Web): Easiest All-Format Highlight and Annotation Tool
Liner has been around for a few years now and is among the best highlight and annotation tools on the web. Recent updates have made it better than ever before, and incredibly simple to use on multiple devices to sync together.
Install the app on your phones and the extension on your browser, and then sign in with the same account. On mobile devices, share any link to Liner to open it in the app. There, highlight any pieces of text by long-pressing (yellow and green colors available in the free version).
The highlights will appear in one list after you exit the annotation page. You can group multiple annotations or links into one folder (the free version allows up to three folders). Searching the Liner app gives you all your highlights and titles of the links.
Download: Liner for Android | iOS | Samsung Galaxy Store (Free)
Download: Liner for Chrome | Edge | Safari | Firefox (Free)
Note: Liner says its app for Samsung phones, available on the Samsung Galaxy Store, is more updated and considered the “official” one for Androids.
2. TLDRticle (Chrome): Save Highlights and Annotations in Google Docs
Evernote and Microsoft OneNote let you save highlights and annotations in their own apps. There isn’t any similar system to save highlights to Google Docs. Until now. TLDRticle is the easiest way to add research tidbits to your own Google Docs file.
Highlight text on any web page and click it to see two options: TLDRticle it or Comment. This copied text or comment will be automatically added to the default Google Doc file for your research tasks. You can create multiple Google Docs within the TLDRticle dashboard, and choose which file to add it to.
To bring up the dashboard, press the extension icon or the shortcut (Ctrl + Alt + Z). You can use this dashboard to search the current web page for multiple keywords or numbers, which will be automatically highlighted. So when you scan through a long article, it’s easier to find the material you want to paste into the Google Doc.
The extension also makes it easy to take screenshots of the current page and automatically add it to the doc, and you can also highlight images similarly. Of course, whichever page you use TLDRticle it on is automatically added as a large header in the file.
Download: TLDRticle for Chrome (Free)
3. TagX (Web): Highlight and Annotate Parts of YouTube or Other Videos
So much online content is now in videos that you also need a tool to highlight and annotate these. TagX works with YouTube, Vimeo, and other common video links for you to mark the interesting parts of any video.
The app annotates a video in two ways: Tags and Tracks. Use Tags to mark the start and endpoint of any section, and why it’s interesting. If you use the same tag in multiple sections, you’ll create a “Track” for that. It’s a bit like creating a mini-playlist out of any given video to highlight a certain topic in that clip.
Once you’re done tagging, you can share the TagX URL with anyone. You can also customize the layout of how the link will look to new viewers. You don’t need to register to use TagX, but you’ll want to sign up to save your creations over time.
4. Notecast (Android, iOS): Highlight Last 30 Seconds of Podcasts
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for (var i = 0; i Some of the best minds in the world are having their best conversations on podcasts today. You can’t do research without listening to a few episodes. Notecast wants to be the highlighter tool for podcasts in a smart and natural way.
Like any of the best podcast apps, add a series and start listening to an episode. Once you hear something you want to mark for later, tap or long-press the highlight button. A tap adds a small bookmark, while a long-press lets you add tags or notes to that point in the episode.
The highlight will mark the last 30 seconds of the podcast, which is a smart feature as you don’t have to go back in time. Plus, Notecast will also automatically transcribe that part, giving you a text note along with the audio clip. It’s fantastic and hopefully becomes a standard feature in all podcast apps eventually.
The free version of Notecast allows you to capture two notes per podcast and is supported by ads. The paid version has no limits on notes, and also includes weekly email summaries of all your notes.
Download: Notecast for Android | iOS (Free)
5. Readgraphy (Android, iOS, Web): Annotate Real Books on Your Phone
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for (var i = 0; i Sometimes, you’ll have to rely on physical books for your research. In the modern world, you don’t need highlighter pens and sticky notes for annotations. Take out your phone, snap a photo, and highlight it in Readgraphy.
The free mobile app makes it easy to add notes while you’re reading a real book. You can take a photo immediately, or add images from the gallery. Crop the book’s page, and then use the different colors to highlight lines. It’s just like how you would do it in the real world, but now it’s all on your phone.
It’s good practice to add a few notes and tags in each highlight. For example, the page number or the text of what you’ve highlighted. This makes it easy for Readgraphy to search for it later, or to export it in notes. You can check all your notes in a web browser too.
The app lets you search in Google Books to add titles, and then create notes in each title. The free version can convert images to text 30 times per month, allows up to 100 notes, and does not export to PDF. The paid version has no such limits.
Download: Readgraphy for Android | iOS (Free)
Compile Everything in a Notebook
These different highlighter and annotation tools are not the end of your research toolset. They’re tools to mark the data you need while you continue to find items. But it’s just as crucial to revisit these highlights and compile them into a different research notebook or journal.
Again, you can try online tools for that. Both Evernote and Microsoft OneNote are designed for such research, and there are free alternative notebook apps worth checking out too. In these, you can form structured notes based on past highlights, rather than a hotchpotch of random annotations.