2026-01-09 RPS - I haven't got a Notion with Joe Houghton

Okay.

So good morning, everybody. Lovely to see you. I just want to welcome everybody on this gloomy day. It's the best place to be, isn't it? In front of a Zoom screen. So good morning and Happy New Year to you all. Just one thing I just need to let you know about. Janet, our chair, can't be here today. She's taking a little time away as her husband died this week. I will send our sympathies to her and tell her that you're all thinking of her at this sad time. So just getting back to today and this talk, Haven't Got a Notion, with Joe Houghton. So probably Joe does have a notion. several of them in fact, and he's here to help the rest of us who haven't got a notion about Notion, although I have forced you to become familiar with its possibilities. As with Joe's encouragement, I have adopted it and use it for organizing digital imaging workshops, and this is how this talk came about, as I wanted to share those possibilities with you all. Joe Houghton wears many hats: photographer, educator, organizer, and all-round digital wizard. He's a productivity enthusiast with a talent for turning complex ideas into simple systems. If there's a smarter, tidier way to get things done, Joe's already found it, probably built a Notion database to prove it, and even written a book about it. Say, 100 Ways to Love Notion. In his talk, Joe's going to open up the fascinating world of Notion, a tool that's revolutionized how some people organize, plan, and create. Whether you're totally new to it or you've opened it once and thought, I really don't know what this is all about, Joe's the perfect guide to demystify it. He'll show us how Notion might fit into your workflow as a photographer and also as a DI workshop attendee and get us all organized for the new year. So a warm welcome to you, Joe. Let me stop sharing my screen. I probably have already, have I?

You've stopped sharing the Notion screen, but that's okay.

We're looking at my workplace.

We were looking at your tree.

Yes.

The trouble with these dual screens, when you move one, they disappear.

That's right. Okay, so let me try sharing my screen. And then, as always, you always move on to my main screen. So I'll put you all back on my second screen. There we go. Can everybody hear me okay? Sound okay?

All good?

Yeah, fine. Lovely.

We are recording, so everything is tickety-boo.

Lovely.

Welcome, everybody. Lots of faces then, and kind of that I know well, but there's probably a few new people. That should be about 15 or 20.

That's what I said. I needed to mute everybody.

It's all right. I've got him.

You've got him?

Yeah.

So we might have a few new people as well who haven't been to one of these talks before. We try and make these talks as nice and kind of friendly and interactive as possible. There's no such thing as a silly question, particularly today when we're exploring a tool, you know, that is designed to help you do stuff and organize things and whatever. So I'm going to share my experience with Notion. I use it in certain ways, but there are many, many different ways to use this tool. It's a kind of like a Swiss Army knife tool, this, you know. And I mean, there's normally with any tool, there's those kind of 20% of the stuff that you use, but then there's all the other stuff. So we'll have a look and see what all the possibilities are in this app called Notion. But as I say, you know, I'm not claiming to be a complete expert in all aspects of it. So I may be able to answer questions or I may not. But if I can't, what I will do is I will go off and find the answers. And then I will add them to the bottom of this page. Okay, because that's one of the nice things about Notion. So this page that you're seeing, I can share, and this is one of the reasons that I love it for online kind of, you know, education and stuff. So when I've put a page together with, you know, pictures and links and all the rest of it, which is how I ground a lot of these sessions now, You can come up to share there, and you can publish it. And once you publish the page, it basically creates that page as a web page on the Notion kind of cloud. And when you get it, when you get a Notion account, you can create kind of pages in your account, if you like. So that page becomes now available on my Joe Houghton Teaching Notion site, and it creates a little page. Name, and that, that is now a link. So I can share that link in the chat. So if I open the chat now and press paste, there is a link now in the chat, and you should be able to click on that link, and that will bring that the page that I'm displaying up in your browser. So, and that page I will leave up. I'm not going to take it down. So, you know, it's, it's gonna be there. But, you know, if this is of interest, or it may be of interest to come back to it, just, just favorite that link, or, you know, drag it onto your URL favorites bar or whatever, and you can come back. Yes, David, I will cover the benefits or not of the paid version. It's quite expensive. depends whether you are gonna get useful use out of it, you know, just like any of these other subscription-based tools. If you're not really going to be using it, you know, for work or for something that adds value to you and saves you time, then, you know, 10 quid a month might be, might feel expensive. But, you know, for me as a working educator, this is now one of my Absolute everyday tools. So it's just the cost of, you know, doing business to use this stuff. Okay, there we go. We got David Wilson in from South Africa, 29 degrees. Wonderful stuff. My wife was born in Constantia, David, and we spent a lot of time in KwaZulu-Natal, just south of Durban in Ramsgate, where her parents lived for several years. So I know South Africa reasonably well. So welcome, welcome. I hope you're not overheating too much. Okay, so David's just put in the current thing, $19.50 a month or $16.50 a month per month paid on an annual basis. Okay, so it's more than a tenner.

All right.

Okay, so what is Notion? And there's a link here to the— at the top of the page there, which will get you into Notion there, and you can set up a free account. Okay, so there is a paid account, but there is also a free account, and a free account does lots of stuff. Most of the stuff that I'm going to show you today, you know, you can do with the free account. If you are a registered charity, or a registered educator, you know, if you have an email from— for an education institution, you get— you can get the Plus account for free. Okay, so if there are anybody— if there is anybody in either of those situations in the audience, then that is one way of getting the better account. But otherwise, if you do need the extra bells and whistles, you will have to pay. But there's a free Plus trial which gives you 30 days of everything If you just want to have a play for the next month or so. Okay, so that's, that's there.

More pictures.

Okay, so that's that.

Right.

So what is Notion? And it's very difficult to actually say what Notion is because it does so many different things. It's a flexible Workspace. So it's mainly online. Okay. So I mean, you know, you log into Notion. You can download an app as well. Okay. So you can have Notion as an app installed on your machine, or you can run Notion as I do most of the time in your browser.

Okay.

And what you— the kind of fundamental building block, I think, in Notion is a page. Okay, so you would have, you know, so this is a Notion page that we're in at the moment. Okay, and there's an image at the top there. So, you know, if you want to, you can put, you know, a different image on here. Yeah, very easily by doing that. You've got this little icon here where we can, you know, we can put in, you know, different things. There. I normally for these things just upload the, the RPS icon. So I have a little article images and then RPS, find my RPS logo. There it is. Which one? The square one.

That one.

Okay, and that kind of will upload the little logo and stuff like that. Yeah, so And the page is, you know, like a Word document, perhaps you can type. So, you know, hello everyone. Okay. And you've got normal, you know, typing capability. If you put a link in, so if you've got a web page, so let's say I do, you know, I've got my website account, so houghtonphoto.com. Okay, so I can, I can just put that in like that. But if I, if I copied that link and I paste it in, and it's going to make a liar of me now. Sometimes you have to kind of grab that from the web, from the web page.

Forward slashes.

Did I miss my forward slashes? I did. That's why it's not recognizing it. Thank you. Yeah, colon forward slash forward slash. That's it, isn't it? Right, copy that, paste it. Yeah, now normally it gives you an option when you, when you paste stuff in like that. Let me just load my website up here and just copy it from the URL bar.

Talks and judging. Find all Joe's talk and judging details here. More than 20 talks or workshops and more in preparation.

Sorry, my web browser is talking to me, which it doesn't normally do. Houghton Photography.

There we are.

Right, let's copy that. Let's just try pasting it in now. Yeah, there we are. So I grabbed a URL from my URL bar and I want to include that in my Notion document. So I can include that now as a URL and then I just get the text of the URL. If I paste it in again, I can include it as a bookmark. Okay, and a bookmark gets this little kind of bar. Okay, so it's kind of more like a graphic. So that's, and that's now a button. So if I click on that button, it will open up in the browser the Houghton Photography website. Okay, so it's just, just like the URL. So, you know, whether, whether it's the URL that you click on, yeah, or whether it's the, it's the, it's the button, but this is a bit more visual, isn't it? Yeah. Each thing that you put, each line that you create in a Notion document, and this is where it kind of starts to differ a little bit from things like Word. Okay. If you hover over the line, you can see on the left-hand side, there's that little 6 dots. Okay. So each of these things counts as a, as a kind of block of information. And you can move these blocks around. So if I grab that little 6 dots handle, for instance, I can move this and you see the line so that I can move that dot up to here, that up to here, and it moves. But I can also move it. Let's say I want it over here on the right-hand side of that line there. Now I can put it there. And now I've got this, this kind of hidden thing, and I can change the size of that and the width of that and stuff like that. So you've got, you've got the ability to create you know, more complex layouts and stuff on pages by just moving blocks around. This stuff isn't necessarily particularly intuitive if nobody's ever shown you how to do it. And a lot of this I've just discovered by trial and error, you know, by figuring things out. But there's lots of— there are lots of videos on YouTube on kind of, you know, how to use Notion and stuff like that. So if you were building up a, you know, a kind of session on, on, you know, learning to use Notion. So, so let's do that. Okay. So let's, let's go, go off to YouTube. YouTube.

Okay.

Am I not in? Oh no, I'm in Notion now. No Microsoft. There we are. Right, let's go off to YouTube and let's find, let's find a document in YouTube. Okay, so Notion. Okay, so here we are. So this is, this is, this is a short video here on what is— Please just hear me out. No, no, all work management platforms are the same. monday.com is the one you'll actually love. We all crave clarity and organization. All right, so we have a video here from Notion itself. Okay, and there's, there's always that share button. So if I grab that video URL from YouTube and come back to my Notion document, that's a URL and I can paste it in as a URL like that. Yeah, or as a mention, as it's just done there. But what I can also do is I can embed the video in the page. So if I say embed, now it's embedded that video in the page and we can play that video. We all need clarity. Now in place. Okay, so rather than just having a link that would jump us out to YouTube somewhere. We all crave clarity and organization. By actually embedding the video, you, you, the video is now in, in Notion itself. Okay. Presumably it brings the adverts with it. Well, it didn't. It didn't. No. So it looks like it just, it takes you straight to the video. Now, I don't know whether, whether if you, if, and because this is now, because I shared this as a web page, Now I've just added that in. If you refresh your page in your browser, yeah, that will appear straight away in your browser, yeah, because I've updated the Notion page. And this is why I love this for education, because you can actually be quite reactive in the moment. You know, somebody asks a question and you can add something into the web page, or you can go and find a new resource, paste in like this video or whatever, and then it's immediately available to everybody else who has that share link. So this is lovely. And again, I don't have to have that full screen either. So now you see those little handles there, I can make this a bit smaller, you know, if I don't want it to take up the whole screen or whatever. And I can, you know, I could stick it on the end of that line there and stuff like that. So we can move move things around and whatever like that as well. So the possibilities here for people to create information pages, yeah, about stuff that they're involved in, you know, Peter's community group, for instance, yeah, you know, you can include images as well. So if I want to put an image in, Okay, so you can you could just go to Finder, and we could we can go find a find an image. Okay, so let's let's find a let's find an image. I don't know. Here we we've got a JPEG here of the Bailey Lighthouse. Okay, so I'm I'm just going to bring that image in, and and I can just drag from Finder or from from Windows Explorer, and I can drag that image into my. Notion document. So, or you can just do a copy and paste. Okay, so there's the image, and now it's, it's a little bit big, that image. So, you know, I'm probably going to want to resize it a little bit, or I can maybe move it in here, and then there we are. And, and now I can, you know, resize it and whatever. Okay, so you can drop images in if you want to add make that image now a link, you can right-click on it and you can add, yeah, a link to that image. So if I wanted to make that image a link out to, okay, or something different, let's, let's make that a link out to RPS.

.org.

So that links now to an external web page. So now when I click on that, yeah, takes us to rps.org. Okay, so very, very quick and easy to start making, you know, public pages with information and images and videos and text. that you can share, because all you need to do now is just, is just go up and share that and publish it. Okay, and once you've published it, you just share that link with everybody. And anytime you want to update your page, as long as they've got that original link, you don't have to resend anything. You don't have to send an update to them or whatever, because the link is the, is the key, and the page is automatically updated when you update the master. Yeah. Is this making any sense at all to anybody?

Yeah.

Can anybody see any uses for this in their own lives? Gordon, you're nodding furiously. Yeah. What are your thoughts on this? For project work, when you're building a project, you know, like a photo book or something like that.

Yeah.

All your ideas together, it's a place to drop it all in, put some images in. research information and a place to put it all. Yeah. And this is the idea, if you like. Notion is, it's kind of difficult to get your head around because it'll do so many different things, but it can be used almost like a mental notebook, you know, a place to just drop stuff. So for things like a project, absolutely ideal, you know, come in, And the nice thing about Notion is that it's cross-platform. So you can install Notion on your phone and your iPad or your tablet or whatever. You can have it on your computer. And when you open Notion up on whatever device you're on, because you're logged into your Notion account, yeah, all your pages. So one thing I haven't shown you is the left-hand side. So you see this little icon at the top here, this opens up the bar. at the back. Okay, and this, this bar has various things in it. Okay, so you've logged in with your account, you've created a Notion account. Okay, so there we are, and that's my, my Notion account. Okay, but I've also got, because Mel and I work together on stuff quite often, so Mel has shared some stuff with me from her account. Yeah, so I've also got Mel's Notion there, and if I go into that now, I can get into, you know, the stuff to do with the workshop organization and stuff. And this is Mel's, yeah, stuff where she shared some of this stuff with me and given me edit access to things and read access to other things and whatever. So you've got the ability to switch between accounts as well. So as a collaborative tool, If you've got several people and you want to, you know, work on the same pages or whatever, then you can do that. Okay? And then what we've got down the left-hand side here are— so you can mark a page as a favorite. Okay? So there's, there's the, the current page, the notion for amateur photographer. Okay? Here's a page on a talk I was doing couple of times this week on creating panels. Okay. And, you know, we've got, we've got embeds to, to all kinds of things in there. Yeah. So lots and lots of, and I mean, you can see I've got dozens and dozens of, of Notion pages now for all these different things that are, that I do training on and stuff like that. And they're all in the one place. Now, if I log on to Notion on my phone, yeah, All those pages are available to me as well, because when you log into Notion, basically you're logging into your electronic space in your— in the kind of Notion ecosystem. So all the pages that I created on my computer are immediately available to me on my phone or on my tablet, or if I'm traveling and I log into Notion from Mel's PC because I've gone to visit Mel. Yeah, I can sit at Mel's PC, log into Notion as me and all my stuff is available to me. So because it's online, it's very flexible like that. Yeah.

What's your—

yeah, go on. How many people could you have in a group then, Joe? I don't know what the limit is, but it's, you know, dozens, I think. It's not— So if somebody was doing a project to produce a photo book, invited 3 or 4 people to join, Helping them to do that, then you can collaborate. Yeah. So you could set up one page, John, and you could all then drop photos in or drop ideas into that page and stuff like that.

You make them guests. They don't have to be members. They make— you can make them guests of your page.

And this is, this is on the free option.

Yes. Yes. I use the free for a good 18 months before I started paying because my pages got big because I was doing the whole organization of the workshops. That's not something personal people would probably get into.

But you were able to invite guests to—

I was able to do an awful lot with the free version for about 18 months. Yeah, I ran it all. Just as it got bigger, it just needed a little bit more capacity.

Just had a good question there, it's just come up from David. Is there a way of downloading all the images in a Lightroom collection and effectively creating an electronic photo book? I don't think there's a direct way of linking Lightroom straight into Notion, but what you could do would be export all the images in the Lightroom collection into a folder, And then you could certainly, you know, drop all those images from that folder into a Notion page, but it wouldn't synchronize between. But yes, so, I mean, there's a gallery option. There's a gallery. So let's, I mean, look, you know, this is one of the things I wanted to do was explore ideas. Okay, so let's do a, you know, a photo, a photo, you know, gallery page. Okay, so let's go off to, let's go off to Lightroom. Fire Lightroom up. And I'll go and find a collection that's got some images in. And let's see what we can do. Okay, because always the best way of doing it is to try it, isn't it? And we are recording. So, so we'll We'll see. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? Exactly. That's right. I'm going to say it's a friendly audience. All right. So here's— this is an image from my talk last night with Edinburgh. We were editing portraits last night. So let me go down to my collections. And let's find a collection. OK. Of stuff that hopefully isn't too old, so there might be some things in it. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! What's family at Donner Day? Okay, so look, we've got it. We got a few shots there that are that are available to me because they're on drives that are connected and stuff. Okay, so what I'm going to do is select those four shots. There, and let's export those. Okay, so I'm going to pop those into a folder. I'm going to put them into my print photos folder, and we'll just call that RPS Notion. Okay, don't need custom names. Just just leave the name as the file name for now. That's fine. JPEGs. We'll call them 1200 pixels on the wide edge and show in Finder at the end. Okay. So that's going to export those 4 images into Finder, and it normally brings Finder up once it's done. And there's the RPS Notion collection being created. Okay, there we are. Okay, so I've got, I've got no foul foot. So let me close Lightroom down now. And we'll come back into our photo gallery page. And there's my 4 images. Okay. And if I want to just bring them in, yeah, I can just bring them in like that. Quick as that. Okay.

Excellent.

And now if I share that page, okay, publish. So that straight away creates it as a thing. I can say make that discoverable on the web if I want to. Okay, and then you can, you know, adjust the title and put in some notes and all the rest of it. Okay, and then I copy that link, pop it in the chat, and if you click on that link in the chat, that photo gallery page should come up with those photos. Straight away. Quick as that.

I think something you did just then, Joe, about making it findable on the web answers one of the questions that somebody asked about. Once you've shared a link, does that become available to the whole world or can you keep it just private?

Yeah, it does. So when you come up into those share settings, yeah, you can turn the search engine indexing on or off. So if you don't want this generally discoverable on the web and, you know, searchable by Google and all the rest of it, then just turn it off. And now only people who've been— who you've given the link to will be able to find that page, if you like. Okay, so yeah, that's how you can do. You've also got options to share that now on socials. So I could share that page directly onto Facebook or via email or on LinkedIn or WhatsApp or whatever. So that, you know, it makes it very easy to do that. The other thing you can do with pages is You can make them available offline. So that kind of downloads the page into a version that is on your machine. So if you lose internet connectivity, okay, you can still work on the page even though your internet's glitchy or down or whatever. Okay, and then the next time that you connect to Notion and the internet is working, it will synchronize the changes back up. Into you know your your general Notion account, and then those that those pages will be you know visible to all your other devices, and everybody else will see them and and whatever. You can make a page full width. So you see by default this page has got this kind of 800 pixel-ish, I think, or 1,000 pixel wide. But there's there's big kind of gaps at the page at the edge. If you want to make it full width, you can just check that on, and now the page is made full width. Okay, you can, you can change the text size. My eyes are going these days, so I'd like to have my text size big. Okay, so there we are. Yeah, so there's lots of things you can do there. And if you scroll down, you can export the page as PDF or as a web page or into Markdown and stuff. But PDF is quite useful. So if I export this page as a PDF now, Okay, so you might want this as a handout, or you might want this, you know, to print as a flyer or something. Okay, so let's just pop that into Downloads for now. Okay, and I'll call it RPS Notion doc. Okay, .pdf. There we go. So that's exported, and if I go into Finder and into Downloads now, and we find that Page, sort by date modified. There it is. And if I open that up as a PDF now, there it is as a PDF. Yeah, you know, just straight away. Okay, so you could just send that, email that as a PDF, or, you know, print that out or whatever. So lots of possibilities here. There's analytics as well. So once you've published a page and you've shared it with people, okay, then this will over time— so, so far, you know, I've had 6 views on this page, okay. It updates, I think, every hour or so, something like that. So, you know, a lot of you clicked on that page and you're saying, well, why haven't I got 35 views on the page yet? Because it just takes a little while to process the analytics. But over time, if you share a page, you can see whether people are visiting it and stuff like that, which is, which is nice. So that's, that's the analytics. You can translate a page if you've got text on a page. You can translate it into, into different things. So let me go back to my Notion page here. Okay, the Notion for an Amateur Photographer page. Okay, so if we come in here and we ask to ask— I've never actually tried the translate option, but let's try translating that into French. Okay, now, okay, so look at that, as quick as that, we've now got all the text for that whole page translated into French. I'm not a native French speaker. Do we have any French speakers? Does it look okay? Yeah, but that was pretty quick, wasn't it? And if we want to come back to translate, let's see whether we can translate it back into English. Yes, we can. Okay, there we are. So that's put it back into English now. Right, so that's pretty cool as well if you're dealing with, you know, people from different countries or have different native languages and stuff like that.

Yeah. Okay.

One of my, one of my other kind of loves apart from, apart from photography is artificial intelligence. And Notion, like most of these tools these days, has got AI kind of baked into it. Now, this is something that I think is restricted to the paid version, Mel. Did you get the AI capability before you paid?

I do. I have to admit I don't use it, but yeah, I think I did.

But you did get it, right? Okay. Let me just reload that page because it doesn't seem to be giving me edit rights now. Oh, look, translate into English, duplicate to edit. Okay, so when you do the translate, it looks like it makes it a read-only. Page. So now I've duplicated the page and I've got it back as an edit. Okay, so give me an introduction. So what I did then, yeah, was I just pressed space on the line and that opens up the AI editor. Okay, and the AI that it's using is Claude behind the back. Okay, so which is a very powerful kind of AI writing kind of tool. Okay, so now you can, you can type in a prompt, you can ask it for something. Okay, so create me, create me, create me a short user guide to Notion. Aimed at amateur photographers. Now watch, look, no hands, okay? So it's writing this, writing this out as we speak, as we watch. Okay, look at this, it's giving us an action plan.

Even tells you when to upload to Plus.

And if you're happy about that, you just accept it. And that now becomes part of that document. Is that AI facility available to you on the free Notion? I think some of the AI is. Try it. Is anybody in Notion on the free?

Yeah, I've just had a look, Joe, and it's available for 30 days free.

Right.

But then you had to go on to the paid.

Right.

Upgrade.

Yeah.

So if you're on the free version past the 30-day trial, then you don't get this AI capability. That's one of the bells and whistles for the paid version. But for the first 30 days while you're on the free trial, you get access to everything. I find this really, really useful. Now, I mean, you know, with AI in general, the more you know about a subject, the more you get out of a good AI because You know, the AI can tell you stuff and most of the time it's good, but sometimes it tells you things that are just completely wrong. And, you know, if you're a subject matter expert, you can spot those things and you can then edit them out. AI is quite dangerous in the hands of somebody who is ignorant because you believe what you see. Yeah. And, you know, it might be telling you porkies and you just assume that they're right. So you've got to always be very careful with information that it's given, you know, from AI. But I have actually found the Notion AI pretty solid. I've seen very few instances while I've used it of, you know, it giving me bad information and stuff. And quite often, you know, if I'm structuring a talk up or whatever, I'll come in, I'll have some ideas myself that I want to include in the talk, So rather than just saying, give me a beginner's guide, like I just said, I might say, give me a beginner's guide. Yeah, I want to include the following topics, but you add in any other stuff as well. And then I'll give it kind of like half a dozen bullet points of things I want to cover. But it will then structure me up a 2-hour session, you know, and give me a flow to go through and all the rest of it. And as you can see, you know, it's kind of breaking things up into headings and stuff. It's laid out quite well and stuff like that. Yeah, it's giving you shortcuts and stuff like that. There we are. So yeah, it's quite clever at doing this stuff. Yeah, David, what's your— I'm going to go to the bottom of the page. You see on the right-hand side, there's these little horizontal lines. Though any, any line in the document that you've set to be a heading style. So one of the options behind those 6 dots is you can click on those 6 dots and you can make a line into, for instance, a Heading 1 or a Heading 2 or a Heading 3. So let's make that a Heading 1. You see, and it gets a bit bigger. Okay, and that bottom line now is a Heading 1. If I scroll over here And we scroll down somewhere is bottom line. Yeah, day seven learning log. So where are we? There's learning log. Da da da da da da da. Bottom line. There we are. Okay. So that would clicking on that would take us down. So if I scroll down here to the bottom of the screen, that's that's taking me all the way to the bottom. Yeah. So Peter, what's the name of your area that you do your nature work in?

Banstead Commons.

Banstead Commons, right. Tell me all about Banstead Commons and the nature found there. Okay, so what I quite often do is I'll type that out on the line, because if I'm trying to create a prompt before I put it into the AI, once you put it in the AI, you lose it. you lose the prompt. It doesn't remember.

Okay.

So type it out on a line first, and then just, just copy it. Yeah. And then start a new line, hit the spacebar, and paste your prompt.

Okay.

Yeah.

Let's say include URL links to any relevant Resources. Let's see. Okay, let's see. Let's see what that gives us. Right, here we go. There we go. So we've got woodpeckers and kestrels and skylarks and deer and foxes and insects and all the rest of it. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Yeah, it's telling us about photographers because Because we're on a page about photography and Notion, yeah, it knows that as a context as well. So it's kind of aware of the context of what you're asking for. So you don't always have to kind of tell it that. There we are. And there's a load of, there's a load of links. Okay. So, and then if you click on one of these links, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, we'll keep the, keep the AI. Yep, there we are. So if we want to go off to the Friends of Banstead Commons, now you see that one, it's not a real link. So this is where sometimes this isn't right. So I don't know whether that is not a real link, but let's see whether Surrey Bird is a real link. Yeah, it's made some of these up. Okay.

Right.

So this is why you've got to be careful. Yeah, and you've always got to go and check. Yeah, it's trying to give you stuff, but it's not making a good job of it. Right, so plant life works. Okay, so some of them work, but some of them don't. So you always have to check the stuff that these AI tools give you to make sure that it does. But, you know, you could go in and you could edit that.

Yeah.

That Friends of Banstead Commons and put in the right URL. If you knew what it was.

Yeah.

Joe, can I just ask you on that? Is it— is it because it's made those up completely and they never ever existed, or is it perhaps an old link that it's found somewhere? Could be both. That it's suggesting to you? Could be either of those.

Yeah.

So maybe there was a Friends of Banstead Commons and they just didn't renew their web account or whatever, you know, and it's found it as an old link somewhere. Um, or maybe it's just a hallucination. Yeah, it could be either, Roy.

Yeah.

Is it worth trying it as singular common rather than commons? Well, there are 4, you see.

Misspelled, so—

Oh, there's 4, there's 4 commons in Banstead. It hasn't actually got them right, but, um, that's, uh, interesting. Really? So, yeah, so it's Banstead Heath, Park Downs, then it's not Chipstead Bottom or Banstead Woods. Those are wrong. Right, so that's really interesting, isn't it? You see, and this is, this is a great example then, you know, because like, you know, that most of us would have read that and kind of assumed that that was telling us kind of everything was right. But Peter, as the expert on Banstead Commons, kind of immediately reads this and says, well, that's wrong and that's wrong and stuff. So, but— But it's very impressive what it's put together. And as you said, It is about, if you know about something, let it do the donkey work and then check it. And you can dump it. And then you kind of, you read down this, but it's structured this out beautifully by birds and mammals and insects and stuff. And I mean, you might say, well, actually, I've never seen a badger on Banstead Commons. We don't have any or whatever. So we'll take that line out. Or, you know, there's actually, there's loads of iguana in Banstead Commons. They're overrun.

Yeah.

So, you know, we need to put iguanas in. Or whatever it is. I don't probably think that's true, but I hope that, you know, the idea today is just to give you some ideas, but also to flag up that this kind of tool is not a panacea. Yeah, you know, you've still got to actually do that critical analysis of kind of checking the material and all the rest of it as well.

Yeah.

Any other thoughts on what I've shown you today so far?

Yeah.

Good morning, Stephen. I hope you're well.

Good morning, Joe. Yes, I'm very well.

Thank you.

Sorry to be so late.

No problem.

David.

Yeah, I'm quite a few people have asked in chat a question I was going to ask about transferring from OneNote, Microsoft OneNote into Notion. I use OneNote extensively as a how to do things. So it's very hierarchical. It starts with Lightroom and it goes Develop and da-dee-da-dee-da downwards. Can I replicate that? Well, 2 questions. One, can I import with the hierarchy from OneNote? Or 2, how do I set up the hierarchy to mirror and use that information? Because I think this is a far better tool than OneNote is.

Okay.

I don't know the answer to the first question, whether there's an automated way of importing some hierarchical information straight into Notion, you know, just, just in one click. But I do know that Notion, and we'll, we'll cover this after the break, does support hierarchies of pages. So basically you have pages and then you can have subpages off main pages. and stuff. So it's linked. So it's basically page links. So you could have Lightroom and then you could have, you know, library module, develop module, print module or whatever. And then within each of those, you could have subpages again and subpages again so that you can have hierarchical paging.

So looking at, say, Photoshop and filters, there are different categories of filters like other, you can then go into high-pass filter and then you want to make about how to use the high-pass filter.

Yes.

So you could use it as a proper workflow for each of those. You could, yes.

You could almost replicate the kind of Photoshop menu system and then have subpages for each of the menus or whatever and then put your notes in about each one.

Yeah.

The problem I have with OneNote is that I've got so much in it now, I can't remember how I described it always. So is there a good search for certain things?

There is. So I mean, you can see how many pages I've got many, many, many pages in there. Let's search for something. I don't know. Let's search for landscape. That's searching now across all the different pages that I've got. These are all mentioning landscape, landscape masking there, generate landscapes from blobs.

Yeah.

One that Steve will be very happy to see is I've taken his idea for a new talk on the Photographer's Ephemeris and PhotoPills. So there's a talk started on that. So Stephen, that will be coming soon. Yeah. So yeah, the search searches across all your Notion pages and is really, really good and really, really quick.

I see it says search all sources with AI. Does that mean if you haven't got a paid version?

No, no, the search works across the whole of your Notion, even if you've not got the paid version.

Okay, I'll shut up now.

No, no, these are all good questions, David. So that's fine. Yeah. Anything else before we break for a scone? Any other questions from what I've just covered so far? Or is it, is it Is it scary? Is it useful? What are you thinking?

Yeah, very useful. It's playtime, isn't it?

Yeah.

Fiona, you're a Notion user, aren't you? So, or you were saying you're kind of, you want to use Notion. Fiona, tell us what you're thinking.

Yeah, exactly. It is scary, but you are making me feel at home.

Oh, good.

Right.

So I will be staying after I've drank the coffee. Yes, we'll see how many people come back after the break. If we've just got 3 of us, I'll know I screwed up.

Yeah.

So, Joe.

Yeah.

I have started using Notion and I started using it to gather information that my partner would need to know. Should I die suddenly?

Yes, having that document. Yes. Of where everything is. Yeah.

Yes, absolutely. And obviously, I, well, the way I approached that was by using TeamSpace. And I did share with somebody else.

Yeah.

But are you going to cover potentially about TeamSpace and what the advantages are of In relation to sharing versus team space, etc.

Well, I don't know after the break. I don't know what team space is. That's new to me. Is that part of the notion sharing environment team space, or is it?

I thought it. I thought I saw it on the left-hand side. You have to scroll down.

All right, let's have a look. Calendar marketplace. Da da da da da.

No, you might have to—

I'm not sure about team space.

Collapse down your favorites because that tends to take over everything else, doesn't it?

Oh yeah, team spaces, right. Well, all a team space is, is a header for a set of pages. Okay, so I've got a team space for my RPS talks.

Yeah.

And that, so you see that I can open that up or I can close it. Yeah. And then all the different pages for different RPS tools are under that. Yeah. And then I've got a team space here for, you know, the Institute of Bankers because I do various sessions for them. Yeah. So team spaces generally are, it's just a header, if you like, where you can put a set of pages. So you might— David might set a team space up for Photoshop, yeah, and put all the different pages for Photoshop notes and things under the Photoshop team space, and another team space for Lightroom, and another team space for, you know, whatever else he's doing. So that's what a team space is.

So that looks to me though as if that's how you've chosen to use it, as a bit of a sort of You know, gathering things together.

Yeah.

As opposed to anything that's got in effect to do with team, which, as I say, I think from team space is how I shared that document with my partner, and we can both update it. You can both look back sharing it.

Yeah, because if I come into, you know, so let's say I wanted to share all my talks with Mel. Yeah, I could actually, rather than just sharing a single page with Mel, Yeah, I could add Mel as a member and I could put her in, you know, as a, as a team space member. So I could, I could, you know, Mel, she's not coming up in my immediate list here. Okay. But so, but if I put her email address in there, yeah, then I would get a link and I could send it to her and then she would have access to everything in that team space. So yeah.

Because the other thing I was thinking about was— sorry, excuse me— like, we have small e-circles.

Yes.

You know, and our e-circle for the books and zines communicates through WhatsApp. But what we'll finish up doing in the WhatsApp is, say, asking a question, then you get a whole load of a bit of an answer from one person, and then you go off on a bit of a tangent to something or other else. And actually, You know, we finish up with an awful lot of information that's actually in WhatsApp.

Yes.

And a bit jumbled about.

Yeah.

And so I was, I was thinking Notion and a team space would be a place where, you know, as part of the RPSE Circle, we could put that information and then we all just go to that page when— because, because it's, you know, it starts out, oh, I'm doing my photo book and what do I do about I don't know, headings and fonts and things like that. And then you get a whole load of information about that.

And then what do I do? Yeah.

What do I, what do I do about sending it and preparing it for, you know, sending it off? But you, you need that information now and then you need a whole load of it later on. So it's having somewhere to come back to later on.

You can share a single page or you can share a set of kind of, you know, pages around a topic, which would be a team space. Okay, so if you're going to have more than one page on a topic, yeah, then you might set up a team space for e-circles, and then you might have the Surrey e-circle and the Lancashire e-circle and whatever as separate pages under that team space. Yeah, and you could, you could just share the, the page with the Lancashire group and another page with the Surrey group or whatever, or you could share, you know, the whole team space with maybe the administrators of the, of the e-circles, you know, group as a whole. So you've got hierarchies that you can set up, but, but you can share a single page or you can share a whole team space.

Thank you.

Yeah, no problem at all. Right, it is 5 to 11. I can see lots more questions coming up in the chat, but we've got another hour, so that's grand, but it is scone time. Okay, so I will see you all in ten minutes. Okay, well, I hope I will see you all in ten minutes.

Fiona, will you turn the recording off, Joe?

Right, let me pause the recording. Do do do do do recording paused. Record button again. There we go. I am fortified with my hot scone. So that's that's wonderful. Let me share my screen again. I'm not sharing, am I?

Boom.

Okay, so Mel's just put into the chat a little question that she had asked Perplexity about team spaces, which is in the bottom of the chat there. So I clicked on it and it's brought me to this, this page here. Okay, so one of the things that you can do in Perplexity as well as you know, ChatGPT and all the other stuff, you can share a link to, you know, that, that question. So if I copy that link and then I come back into, um, the current page that we're playing in, which is this Notion for the Amateur Photographer, okay, so let me just scroll, let me go down to the bottom and we'll just put this in as, as here, okay. So this is Team Spaces In Notion. Okay, so I make that a heading. So I just type type that in and just click on the six dots and turn that into a heading. And then it's you know it just kind of shows where it is, and it now appears in the table of contents as well. So it's you know you can click to it. So now if I just paste in that link, that URL, and I normally just make that a bookmark because I mean the bookmarks just look a little. A little bit better, don't they? But now when I click on that bookmark, that will take me into Perplexity and it will take me into, you know, the stuff about managing team spaces. And this is one of the reasons Perplexity is so good because it doesn't just give you text, it gives you links off to articles, it gives you links off to videos and stuff like that. So that is just immediately now available. And then if you go up a little bit further in the chat, to 10:57, Liz was multitasking. So she typed into Copilot about team spaces.

Oh, I didn't see that.

Yeah, so there we go. So I can now just highlight that text and copy that text from the chat. And if I come back into my page, and I can just put that in, just paste that in as text. You see, so there we go, paste that in as text. And now that's, that's in our, in our thing as well. So we're co-creating this.

Perhaps a few of us could try one of these trial team spaces to see that it works and then pass it on to our groups, couldn't we?

Absolutely, absolutely. But you know, this is, this is an example of, so you know, this is the page that I shared with you earlier on. And if you refresh the page again and go down to the bottom, you will now have this link into the, you know, the team spaces and the stuff from Liz and whatever. It's such a good way of kind of, you know, linking and co-creating information and stuff like this. It really is, really is super. So let me go back up to the top. Oh yeah, and I mean, another thing that I like. So now you see we've got all these different, we've got all these different headings and we've got quite a long document and stuff. Going on.

Yeah.

So right at the top now, what we could do is we could add in a table of contents. Okay. So this is one of the things that you can, you can do automatically in Notion. So you see it says press space for AI and slash for commands. So if I press the forward slash key, yeah, that gets me into being able to access and create all these different things. Okay, and you know, you get to know what all these different things are. So if I just type in /im, it'll, you know, it'll give me the ability to just, you know, import an image or a video or an audio file or put some code in or whatever. Yeah, so one of the things is table. Yeah, so I could add in a table, but I can also add in a table of contents. And there it is. Click on that and I get straight away a full table of contents of all the Heading 1s, Heading 2s, Heading 3s, yeah, that we've got in the document. And, and I can click straight down into, you know, these different places, um, from that table of contents. So, so this is— I, I love, I love that feature of contents. Okay, and I could make that a heading. Yeah, and not only that, one other, one other thing that's rather nice is you can create headings like that, but you can also create what, what they call, yeah, toggle headings. And a toggle heading puts that block— okay, it's, it— we see it's put, it's put the whole thing actually at the moment, so I'm going to undo that. Okay, but if you create a toggle block Let me just create a new toggle block here. Table of contents. And I'm going to make that a toggle heading 1. Okay. Now you see it's got a little bar, a little arrow next to it. Okay. So what I can do now is I can take my— I'm going to delete that line. I can take that and I can just drag it up into underneath the table of contents. And now I can just toggle that open or closed. on the web page. How cool is that? So if you just want, you know, people to see the main headings, you can just put— make them all toggle headings, and then you can put material under each heading like that and just have it toggled on and off. Yeah, so that's rather nice. But if you export this as a PDF, everything's export— everything is expanded automatically. So you, you know, you don't lose material. And stuff like that.

So Pat's asking, what is an— what was the undo action that you just did?

The same one that works on any application, Command+Z or Control+Z. Yeah, so, so, you know, in Word, in PowerPoint, in anything across Windows and Mac, the common undo shortcut is on a Windows keyboard, it's Control+Z. Yeah, and Command+Z just undoes the last action on a Mac as well. So there's your bonus tip for today. Okay, nothing to do with Notion. Was that one new for you, Kandia? Yeah, you looked like you were new.

No, no, I was laughing because I actually discovered it by accident, but quite a long time ago.

I love shortcuts.

I made a mistake in Word or something like that.

Command+Z works.

Sure enough.

Sure enough it did. Yeah, that's right. Command+Z works on just about anything. Right now there are a few other things I do want to show you in Notion. So let's just scroll down and see, see what we came up with in here. Okay. So we've got pages and basic information. Okay. So what we can do is create a nest pages. So let's create a couple of pages. All right. So I'm going to just create a new page. So over here on the right there under Joe Hounsler. So you need to kind of open up the left bar and then that's the create new page. Okay. And that just now creates you a blank new page. So let's call this, I don't know, Lightroom, Lightroom stuff. Okay, this is going to be my notes on library. Okay, now what I'm also going to do is create another couple of pages. So I'm going to create a new page and I'm going to call this the library module. Yeah, and it didn't Yeah, so there's, there's a page on the library module, and I'm going to create a 3rd page, and I'm going to call this the, the develop module. Okay, so now I've got various pages that I've just created. Okay, and I can go back to each of those pages using these forward and back arrows as well. Okay, there we are. And if I want more than one of these pages visible at a time so I can switch between them, I can just add a link to— yeah, so there's a link to the Lightroom Stuff page, a tab, and there's a link to Develop Module. Okay, so maybe now I'm going to put that tab first and then the Library Module and then the Develop Module so that they're just, you know, in order. Now this is going to be my top-level page. Okay, so David, this is kind of aimed at you and kind of, you know, your linked organization of pages and stuff. Okay, so what I want to do now is I want to link to another page. Okay, so I can link to a page, and now I can search for that page. So let me search for Library Module. Okay, so that's now a link to the Library Module page from my Lightroom Stuff page. Yeah. And then I can put another one in here. Yeah. Slash page, linked page. Okay. And I'm going to search for Develop. Okay. And there's the Develop module page.

Okay.

So there's, there's a really, really quick way now of doing it. And in the Library module page, I need to— I probably need to jump back to Lightroom Stuff. So if I put that in there, yeah, and I just put page. Oh, undo that. Go back to my library module page. Yep, I don't want a new page. Delete that. So slash page, link to page, and I'm looking for slash. Slash page, linked page, search for Lightroom. And there's my Lightroom stuff page. Okay. Now if I copy that page, can I copy a link to that block? Yeah. And I go to the develop module, I should just be able to paste that in. No, it's not letting me. It's not letting me paste it in. I've got to, I've got to do it again. Okay, so here, /page, linked page, Lightroom. Right. So now I can jump from my top page Lightroom stuff to the Library module and back, and to the Develop module and back. So in 2 or 3 minutes, we've just set up you know, a structure where you can navigate now between those pages very, very quickly and very, very easily. Now I'm going to put each of those pages, the library module, the Lightroom stuff, and the develop module was the other one, wasn't it? So let's just find that develop module. Yeah. All right. I'm going to create a new team space. Okay, so let's create a, let's create a new team space.

Yeah.

And we're gonna call this Lightroom. Okay. And this is, you know, my, my notes on Lightroom. Okay. Open or closed or private. Okay.

Yeah.

So, you know, I'll leave it as open for now. I'm gonna create that team space. So that creates a new team space. Okay, which I can invite people to, to share stuff. Okay, and there it is. So where's my team spaces? There it is, Lightroom. Okay, now I want this page to be in the Lightroom team space. So now I come up to the 3 dots on this page. Okay, and I move it to the Lightroom stuff Team Space. Okay, so that now appears as a page. So if I go to Team Spaces, yeah, that should appear if I did it right.

No, you made it Lightroom Stuff.

I did Lightroom Stuff. So let's Lightroom Team Space, move to Team Spaces. There, the Lightroom Team Space, right? So you see now it's just appeared down there. Okay, and then let's find the Develop module, and I'll add that. Move to, yeah, the Lightroom team space. So you see I've got these different stuff, and the Lightroom stuff is the top page, isn't it? So I want that in. Move to Lightroom team space. Okay, so now my team spaces There's my Lightroom team space. Yeah. And as I open it up, I've got Lightroom stuff development. And if I want these in a different order, I can just drag them up and put them in a different order. Yeah. So now I've got these subpages within the team space. Yeah. That's just— it's really quick and easy to start organizing yourself like this. And now to get to one of those pages, I just open the team space and click on the library module. So, you know, if I close all these down, okay, there we go. So, so let's— if you close the last one down, it closes Notion down. There we are. Okay, but now I can open up my Lightroom stuff page. Yeah, and if I want another tab open here, I can, you know, open up the Develop module page or whatever, and then I can open up the Library module page. So you've got really quick, quick and easy access to this stuff. Does that, does that get you started, David, in terms of organization? John, you've got your hand up.

Yeah.

Is there any limit as to who you invite to your team space? How do you invite people? Just by email address, or? I think it's email address, isn't it, Mel? I haven't, I haven't done any sharing of team spaces yet, but I think you add members. There we go. So who was that?

You have to be a little bit careful with this, that sometimes it starts to cost. Yeah. Or whether that's just in the paid version. Guests are free, but I don't know about members. But I think we'd have to look a bit more into this team spacing.

Yeah. And double-check kind of the options on that. So I've made a note of that. So team spacing, You know, costs and process to share.

But you can just go up and send that link to any number of people. Like I share my team space Notion pages with hundreds of people.

So you push out rather than— So team space settings.

It's that link you're sharing.

The team space settings. We're in this Lightroom team space now. My notes alone. Anyone can see or join this team space. Members.

You have to be a bit careful, Joe, because you are in the pro version as to what people are seeing in the unpaid version.

In the unpaid version. Yeah. So, so what we'll do is we'll do a little bit of research and we'll find out what the, what the process is and what you can and can't do. And I'll add it, I'll add it to the bottom of that Notion page so that Some more ideas.

Yeah.

Joe, you were going to say about organizing the things they get from me, weren't you? In the emails and how they might save stuff.

Yes, let me go back to my emails then, because I brought email. There's Peter's. So this is the email that you got about the talk, isn't it? Yes, this is the one to Peter. Yeah, so you're booked on the the the haven't got a notion with Joe Houghton.

Da da da da da da.

Now, Mel, talk to talk us through what you want want them to get out of this bit because I will.

You you all receive this two days before and on the morning of a talk, and this is where you find your Zoom link. So where it says click, that's where you would have gone in and joined the talk. But you also have this for further information about this workshop. you've got this, haven't got a Notion, and if you press that, then it's opening Notion, the web page, up.

Now I've got it to default, you know, to default to open the Notion app when I click on a Notion link. Okay, so you might, it might try and open the page in the Notion app, or it may try and just open it as a web page. All right, so I'll cancel that one to open it in the And the page. Okay, continue in the browser. All right.

Ooh.

Why is it—

Well, that's not good, John.

Why is it not working? Yeah, let's have a look. Go back to here. Yeah, that's right. There we are. Boom, boom, boom.

It also, for some reason, had the time wrong. It says 9 o'clock, not 10 o'clock.

Yes, that was my—

It took me a little earlier. I wonder whether that particular link is dead or is wrong. Because it's not even waking it up in my, in my Notion app. Mel, if you weren't redirected, click here. Yeah, but I just continue in the browser. Yeah, I think that that's a broken link.

But they must have got their Zoom link from the— the Zoom link might work.

You would have thought that. Yeah, the Zoom link.

Works, but I've just posted my email from this morning into the chat and that link works.

Okay, so let's have a look. Maybe it's just—

I just put one in there as well.

So let's have a click on— yeah, there we are. Okay, so that's what—

it's you, Joe.

Yeah, that's what should happen. It should have brought this page up. So this is Mel's Notion page for this talk. Yeah.

So Olivia, Olivia at the start said she didn't know where to find the recordings for these things. And then it was my idea to ask Joe to sort of show us how we might save things for the future. So there isn't a recording here at the moment because we haven't added it.

But if you could just go to that 7 more properties Okay, so you see, so you see on that page, you've got when, series, event type presented, and there's 7 more properties. If you click on that, okay, it opens up a few more, and one of those options is recording. Okay, so maybe what, Mel, what we should do in the future is just pull the recording up to be high enough in that list so that it shows without having to click on—

It does once you've added Once you've added the recording, it stays open. It's just, it's minimizing it.

At the moment, that recording is empty.

Shall I send you one that's got a recording?

Well, no, no. What I'll do is I'll just— so if I go to YouTube, yeah, and I find a link to another. So if I come into my Let's have a look. My videos. Here we are. Okay, so we've got different videos from. Am I not logged in? Oh, I'm no, I'm logged in as the wrong person here. Switch account.

Let me send you yesterday's.

Yeah, well, here we are. Here's yeah, here we are. Here we are.

Okay, you got it.

So I've got I've got. Different videos here. Dashboard. My channel. There we are. So there's there's a let's edit composition depth and perspective from from a month ago. JPEG in as well.

Right.

So I would when I've uploaded the video from today this afternoon. Yeah, after a little while YouTube has done its stuff and then I get that little share option. And so I'm going to go and copy that. Yeah, and then I'll come over to Notion and Mel's page here and I will in that recording option there, I'm just going to pop that link in like that. Okay, and once that link is in there, now when you open up the link to the Notion page, You will see the recording, and clicking on it will take you to YouTube. And losing the echo a little bit, just, just to give a little bit. That's, that's how you access those YouTube recordings.

So after that, what we need to do then is, say tomorrow, is click on that link and then save that link, bookmark it, something like that, so that we can So that's again in the future.

Well, I mean, I wondered whether Joe could make us a database or a table that we could make on our Notion. We all have a Notion account and we make a page.

Oh, I see, right.

Right, let's have a little bit of an organization.

Oh, you said we all have a Notion account. How did that happen? When did we? I don't know.

No, no, if after today's talk you think, I'll just go and Have a play with this. It's all free, and this might be a way of me organizing my DI workshop talks by just creating a page. That's all you would have to do, right?

So let's do that now. Okay, so let's create a new Notion page. Come along, wake up. Yeah, right. I'm going to create a new page. Okay, and let's call this DI. Videos from workshops. Now, the simplest way to do this is when you find, when you get one of those links to a video and you go off to YouTube, okay, switch account again. Okay, and you find, you find, you know, that, that link that Mel sent you to The latest, latest video, whichever one it was.

Okay.

So welcome everyone to the first.

Okay. And you grab that. So you, the share button under any YouTube video that you've got. And I mean, you don't have to just use this for DI stuff. You could use this for any, any, you know, videos that you want to collect, right? So you go to the share button and you copy the URL. Okay. So you've got the URL. Now you come back into Notion. Okay, that's Command and Tab is this switcher on the Mac. You can see I can switch between the different apps. So I'm switching into Notion, Command and Tab. Now, the video I've just copied the URL of, I can just paste that, Command V now, and embed that.

I think though, Joe, it would be handy to have rather than just the videos will be the link to the actual Notion pages, wouldn't it? Because then you've got all the supplementary information for each workshop, including the links to the videos. I mean, obviously, you know, different people would want different things.

Well, that's right. So I mean, if you just wanted to keep the link to the Notion page, yeah, then you take that URL, you know, that link from Mel's emails, you know. So if you open up The email. So if it's in the chat, isn't it there? That, that's the link. I haven't, I haven't got a Notion with Joe. Yeah, the one that, that says copy.

The one that Liz sent you.

Yeah. Okay.

So if you right-click on that and just, just copy the link. Okay. So that copies the URL. So now I can paste that URL straight in there. Yeah, just like a URL there. And now you've got, now you've got the link to The Notion page. Yeah.

Yeah.

So if we set up our own, download the Notion, the free version, set up our own page, and then we can go back through all our bookmarked videos, say from Celia and from Paul Gallagher. Yeah.

And pop them all into one page.

And put them all into one page where we've got them all and we can look back at them.

And it's funny because I do this. I mean, I do a lot of talks. So one of the things, one Notion page that I have is I have a talk of all my online talks and podcasts. Okay, so these are all the kind of public talks and podcasts rather than the ones that are, you know, just for a particular group like the RPS stuff and whatever. So any public talks that I've done that are generally available to anybody, I just put a link to each one of those in a Notion page like this. Yeah. So if, if, if I, you know, if somebody kind of contacts me and says, you know, I'd love, have you done a talk on AI that I could watch? You know, I can, I can just come in here and I can either share this whole list with them or I can say, oh yeah, you know, I can, I can kind of, you know, click on, click on a link here or whatever and, and just send them that link. And, and these, all these are available and accessible straight away in, in this webpage. So it just becomes a really useful resource. Of all the different talks and things I've done that I can share with people, or I can just get back to myself. And this is just the table of contents at the top, because each one I've got a heading for, and I've just embedded each of those videos in the, in the Notion page.

Yeah.

So, and I just add to that over time as I do more talks and things. So, you know, you can see it. I started doing it in 2019. So that's obviously how long I've been using Notion for. Yeah, but—

But you could also create a table. That's very easy if you wanted to get a little bit more organized and label it and such like.

Right. So if you want, yeah. So again, let's scroll back down to the bottom and let's try then some more stuff in here. So Table, /table. Okay, create a table, and that just creates a table. And now you've got, you know, like an ex— a little Excel table there. Okay, so that's one way of organizing things. And now you can copy and paste stuff into the table, and it's nicely formatted, you know, in a, in a table structure. Okay.

I see that working quite well. You can put the title of the talk.

Yeah.

And then you can put the link to the whole page and you can put the link to the Zoom.

You could. So you could put talk separately. Yeah, you could talk about link, link to, you know, video on YouTube.

Yeah.

And then, you know, I don't know, presenter.

So there might be resources like you put the resources.

Yeah.

So they want to go back to that page to find the resources as well.

So that's another way of doing it. And then to expand—

Celia does that because she sends you—

A handout.

She sends you a handout and they're pages and pages and pages long. And I've been printing them out because I'm sorry, I'm still a pen and paper girl. But if I had them somewhere like that, then yes, that would be useful. She also sends JPEGs that she uses in her demonstrations and so on. So you could have all of that information.

That would be brilliant.

Now, if you can import a PDF to that—

So if let's say that you've got a PDF that Celia sent or, you know, I've sent or whatever, /pdf. Okay, so now you can embed that PDF. All right, so you're on your Notion page, you, you just /pdf, and now look, I can choose a file. So I can now choose a file from my computer. So I did a PDF the other day, yesterday I think it was, for a com— the company project that I'm just starting off. So here's a, here's a PDF that I created last night. Okay, so that's uploading that PDF now into my Notion page. Okay, and there's the top of the PDF, and I can actually make it, you know, I can make it deeper so I can see the whole page if I want to. All right, and now there's that PDF, and I can, I can actually see it within the Notion page. Scroll down and see it was a PDF of a, of a, you know, a slideshow that I generated, but that's now embedded in the Notion page.

And if you're just hovering over it, if you just hover, you get that little download button if you wanted to then download it again.

Yeah, and there's—

this was the only place it was. If you'd taken it off your main computer and this was the only place, you could download it again.

Yeah, so I've, you know, this is in the bottom of that page that you've already got the link for. So if you refresh the page and go to the bottom, that PDF is now embedded in your page and you can view it in the page. Yeah, or if you hover over it and click on that down arrow, You get the option now of pulling that PDF out of the Notion page and saving it as a PDF onto your computer.

And of course, you could work on your main computer, or if you're away from home, on your laptop and stuff.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, because part of my problem is I've just got— well, a few months ago, had a new computer built for me specifically for all my photography. But a lot of the stuff is still hovering around, copied from the hard drive of the old computer. So I could get everything put on. Thank you. That's brilliant.

And getting it for all the devices is so useful.

Oh yeah.

Because it doesn't matter what device you're on, you just fire Notion up on your tablet or fire Notion up on your phone and all your pages are there.

So Joe, do we, if we've only got the free version, do we have to worry about how much space we're using up with all of this?

No, no, no. I mean, it's effective.

No, not for a personal user.

Yeah, you can have as many pages as you like.

It was quite some time before I'd put enough stuff on there that I was getting told that I needed to upgrade. Yeah, but it was, it was hundreds of blocks.

Yeah, thousands of blocks, hundreds and hundreds of pages.

So just for yourself, just for personal use, I think you'd be a long time.

Not going to be, not going to be a worry.

Yeah.

There is, there is a thing, and I mean, David asked, asked about it earlier. There we are, free versus paid plan. So it is, it is in the I've put the, the comparison of what you get with the free plan. Unlimited pages and blocks, unlimited databases, up to 10 guest collaborators.

Now that's answered John's question.

There we are.

10 guests.

Yeah.

And there we are. There's the Plus plan. Yeah. I don't know where David's got £19 a month from. Maybe that's a Super Plus plan or something, because as far as I'm aware, it is about £8. quid or 8 or 10 quid. So we can double-check that again.

There was a link on my free account to upgrade and that was what it came up with. Right.

So maybe they've changed the pricing for 2026 then. And since I generated this, because I think I did this before Christmas. Business and enterprise plans designed for organizations and teams with pricing starting £12 to £15. per month. That seems to be more like what you were getting, David. So maybe there's a personal user Pro account that's kind of in the £8 to £10 region, but if you go for the business account, then it's a little bit more. So there may be different tiers of pricing that we need to look at. But bottom line—

Can you look at the question from Stephen that's just come in, Joe?

All the data is stored in the cloud. Yeah, looking at the UI, it looks like a bit of a faff to export it all to back it up locally. Is there an easy way to ensure your data security? Well, certainly from a page basis, yeah, any kind of key pages that I create, I just come up to the 3 dots and make available offline. Okay, so they're stored locally on my, on my machine. In terms of the whole account, is there a way of kind of archiving Your whole account. Don't know is the answer. You can presumably, yeah, I mean, it would be nice if you could. Let's have a look offline. So it automatically downloads your top recents and favorites for offline use, but otherwise you've got to specify on a page basis. So I don't know. So that's something. Can I Can I kind of back up my whole Notion account? That's that's fundamentally the question, isn't it? Account. Yeah, I'll I'll find out. Yeah, good question, Steve. So there we are. What does page history mean? Let's go back. 30-day page history.

Oh, is that maybe saving your previous versions?

Previous versions. Yeah, I think it's just the undos through, through day, day through day.

Yeah.

So that's fine. Now, one thing, one thing that you get in the free version is you get your Notion site domain. Okay, so when I logged, when I created my account, my account was, you know, Joe Houghton. That was my username, Joe Houghton there. Yeah, so you get to choose one domain. So it's, that's this bit, joehoughton-teaching was what I chose. Yeah, and it prefixes that onto .notion.site. So then If you want to share and publish any of your pages, yeah, they will all come under the domain. In my case, joe joehoughton-teaching.notion.site forward slash, and then you know this this one is RPS Notion for photographers blah blah blah blah blah. Okay, so it creates that unique URL. Okay, so you get one of those options, one one of those domains. So choose your prefix carefully if you like. But if you want multiple of those, then you've got to go to the paid version. But once you, if you go to the one of the paid versions, you can set up up to 5 of these. So I have 2 Notion domains set up. So I have Joe Houghton Teaching and then for my corporate consulting work where I'm publishing pages to do with my corporate Consulting. Yeah, I generally choose the houghtonconsulting.notion.site domain. Yeah, so it just, it just separates my published Notion pages into, you know, the general stuff and then the, the kind of corporate consulting stuff. So you've got that option as well. So if this is going to be a tool that you use kind of more for business and stuff, and you're going to pay for the paid version, that And I only found out that there were multiple domains available just before Christmas. It was one of those things that was under the radar and I hadn't found out about it. And I realized that that was one of the things that you got. So in fact, I think I found out about it when I asked Notion to give me the free versus paid plan. I think this— I just asked AI here about this and saw it there and thought, oh, I've got to look into that. So there we go. And I mentioned the educators and students get the Plus plan free once they've verified their educational email address. So, so that is that. Now databases, let's go back down to the bottom because one of the, one of the very powerful things in Notion is database. Okay, and I haven't used these a whole lot, but this is what Mel and and the DIGG team use to run all the workshops and things. Okay, so we can set up a database. Okay, and this will create— so describe what you want to build. Okay, I want a photo talks database where I record all the details of photo talks I'm giving to clubs online. Yeah. So include columns for talk name, Date of delivery.

Time.

Time. Yeah, that's right. Time of delivery. Organization. What else? Notes and Zoom link. Okay, now let's see what it'll do.

Boom boom boom boom boom!

Setting up the database. Da da da da da. Okay, preparing, updating. Dum dum dum dum. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. It's doing things. Okay, so it set me up with a talks database on this page. Talk title, talk name, date. Da da da da. Those things I've asked for. Okay, you can start adding, um, adding stuff in now. Okay, so there we go. So I'll just hide that chat now. So now I've got a talk, and each of these lines— so, so if I, if I've got a new talk to do, okay, so it pops me up a little data entry thing now. Okay, so date of delivery is going to be, you know, the 12th of February or the 13th of February. There we go. So you've got a little date picker and stuff. Who's this for? Notes. Okay, so I don't know, no notes at the moment. Who's it for? Let's put the RPS in there. Okay, time of delivery is 10 o'clock. The Zoom link I'd add in when I've got the Zoom link. And then if I want to add more stuff in, I can, or I can come back into the notes and say, you know, Remind Mel to ask everyone for photos 3 days before. Okay, something like that. Okay, and that's now, that's now one line in my, in my talks database. Okay, and then I can add more and stuff like that. So you can start these, these lists of databases up really, really quickly, yeah, but you can now do things like start to filter. So, you know, if I've got 30 or 40 talks in this database now, I can then filter them and say, well, just filter by the RPS talks, and then it'll only show me the lines where there's a mention of RPS, yeah, or, you know, another talk or something like that. You can, you could, and this is very, very powerful. You can group, you can do different types of layouts. So look, there's table layouts, there's timeline layouts. Okay, so this converts the, the, the, the thing into a timeline. So now I can see when I've got talks scheduled in a, in a kind of timeline view. Yeah, so this is this layout option here. You can have lists, you can have a calendar view. So now it's, it's given me a little calendar and all my talks are gonna show up in the calendar. And there's, there's that, there's that talk and you click on it and there it is. Yeah. So I should give this a name, shouldn't I? So, you know, this, this is gonna be Notion Advanced.

Yeah.

I didn't give the talk a name. There we are. So, and as soon as you've made that, made that thing and, you know, you can add, you can add an icon and, and, and whatever. There we go. All right, so that's, that's done. So that's, that's talk is in that calendar view. Yeah, you want a different view? You want a list back to, back to the list view? Yeah, then we can put it in just as a list view and even put a map, put it on as a, as a map view. All right, so if I'm, if I'm going to be delivering talks in different places, yeah, now I can kind of put a, a you know, a link into the kind of the Google Map place, and it'll tell me whether I'm in, you know, Swansea or whether I'm in Worthing or whatever, and show these things on a map view. So it's very, very powerful. Now, one thing from an organizational point of view is using a board. Okay, so at the moment, so you can set up what these things are called Kanban boards. All right, so each column is kind of like a stage in maybe a process. Okay, so at the moment, this board, I've got 3 options here. I've got not started, in progress, or done. Okay, so Mel's asked me to do a new talk on Notion Advanced. All right, so I've made a note of it, but it's not started yet. Okay, I've, it's just sitting there in the not started. So now I kind of say, well, you know, it's coming up. I better actually do something about it. So I can just drag that over now into the in progress. Yeah, and that's now showing you know that that's got. I can see which ones I've still got to do, which ones are in progress. Oh, actually, I've talked. I finished that talk. I'll just move it into the done, the done option. Yeah, and if if I've shared this page with Mel, you know, or with you. Yeah, next time you come in, you can see. Oh yeah, just finished the talk on Notion Advanced. Yeah, we can we can. We can stop worrying about that one. Yeah. Or, you know, if it's still here, yeah, and it's 3 days before the talk, Mel's going to start getting a bit twitchy.

Yeah.

So maybe she rings me and says, Joe, yeah, you know that talk that you're giving on Friday? It's Wednesday, and at the moment it's showing as not started. And I'll say to her, don't worry, there's loads of time. So, so, you know, these boards are great, and you could, you know, you can add new, you can add new columns and, and set those, those things up as, as you want. So, so this, these are really, really powerful. The, the, the databases are really, really powerful. You can, you can do all kinds of stuff. Now, I, I, I'm not using databases a lot in Notion, but I know some people just live and die with these databases. There's, there's so many things you can do. And if you If you don't want to start these up yourself, okay, you can create new pages and new databases. There's loads of templates. Okay, so one of the options when you create a new page at the bottom, you see here, you can make a page, you know, a database of just, just a whole page. But you can also look, look on this for templates. You can do forms as well. So you can collect information. So this is great if you want to send a form out via email. And collect, you know, people's emails or people's interest about a topic. Or, you know, Banstead Common is going to do an open day on, you know, in July or whatever, where you could create a form where people register their interest or whatever. And then, you know, and that gets back-ended into a little database. And now you've got everybody's email and you can email them a week before. But templates, there are thousands and thousands of templates. So you know, I want it. I want a holiday planner template. Okay, so let's see.

Boom!

Look at all this. Yeah, dream travel planner, holiday gift planner. Yeah, travel planner light. Da da da da da. So you can click on all these different, these different. So let's try this dream travel planner. Okay, here we are. And if I add that to my— so I'll add that into my Lightroom team space now. Okay, got to share my email address. That's fine.

Yeah.

Okay, so he's done the work on putting this template in. So that template is now being added into my team space. So let's find my team spaces. There's Lightroom. And in a minute or two, we will get a new page in there. Yeah, which should be the Dream Travel Planner. Let's see.

Is that?

Dum dum dum. Submit and get template.

Yeah.

Template is being added. Oh, there it is. It's happening now. Already duplicated. Dismiss.

Too impatient.

I am. I'm too impatient. Come on. Come on, I want it. We will let you know when it's— ah, nope, not there yet. Okay, but in a minute or two this will arrive and it will be this fully featured laid out page which somebody has gone to the trouble of creating and registering as a template. Yeah, and then you can use that. You can, you know, start adding in your own information to it and whatever. And there's a massive kind of, you know, library of these different templates. Is it under my team space home? No, it's not. It's just taking, taking its time to arrive. So, so, so yeah, when you create a new page and you go off to templates, so I mean, maybe photo, let's have a look, photo organizer. Let's see what else have we got. Well, as I type in photo, then it's showing me what, what templates there are. So photo collections. Yeah. Professional photographer. What? Now you see that one's paid. Some of them free and some of them are paid. So let's have a look at my photo collection. A Notion template to add and manage your photo album. So let's add that again and let's add that to Lightroom. Template is being added. Oh yeah, right. We've heard that before. Boom, boom, boom. Oh, look, look, we've got them. Right. Okay. So there's the Dream Travel Planner. Okay. So now we've got all these different trips and stuff like that. Okay. And we can click on Iceland trip. And that's got a subpage to now an Iceland page. So there's your, there's your kind of You know, you— there's back to my travel planner. Yeah. And then here's the Europe page.

Yeah.

So you can kind of move, move forward and back on these, on these things nice and easily. There's an itinerary. Yeah. And you can put in galleries and stuff like that. The My Photo Collection tab. Okay, here we are. So Mel mentioned this earlier on, was adding galleries. Okay, so one of the options in any page—I mean, if I go back to to our regular, our regular Notion page, so go to Favorites, Around Me Notion. Da da da da da. Right, let's go down to the bottom and let me add a gallery in. Okay, so here's a gallery of Joe's images. Okay, slash.

Gallery.

Okay, so there's a gallery view. Okay, now new page. Okay, was that? Is that how I've done it? Done it right? Gallery. I've chose images. I think I've just got to drag images in, haven't I? Yeah, yeah.

And then it gives you different layouts. Right.

So so if I go to Finder. Now, and just find some images.

Where did you put that lot you brought in earlier?

Yeah, not sure. But let's have a look. There we are. There's a few images, right? So there's an image I'm going to drag in. Okay. And that is going to go into there. And then let's find another one. Pop that in there, and then let's find another one. Put that in there, and we're building up this gallery of different images. Okay, from Grace's 21st party really, really quickly. Okay, and then you know if there's stuff that you don't want, you can delete it. That page there. Okay, so each of the images kind of taught is is kind of like a page. But now. Because this is the gallery view, yeah, and we've got the layout is gallery, yeah, but we could lay these out as a list of images, we could lay them out in a kind of table form and stuff like that, yeah. So gallery is kind of aimed at images as a layout, but it's basically a database using images as the way of presenting as the way of presenting it. And I'm pretty sure you, yeah, you can do, you can sort by name or different tags and stuff like that, when things were created, you know, you've got all these different sort capabilities and stuff. So yeah, very, very, very clever how you can, how you can kind of put stuff in. And you can move these around as well. You can reposition them. Yeah. Don't remove sorting. All right. So if I'm going to re— if I'm going to try repositioning, then I've got to remove the sorting options. All right. So if I want this, this one at the top, just grab, grab it and move it up. Yeah. So you've got the ability to move stuff around. Yeah. So.

The calendar is another good thing that you can have and you can integrate with your own calendars?

Yes. So at the bottom, at the bottom of Notion, you will see there's Notion Mail and Notion Calendar. Notion Mail is kind of their own email, but you can integrate it with kind of your Gmail, I think, or your Outlook so that, you know, it'll synchronize between the two. And the same with Notion Calendar. Okay, so if I click on Notion Calendar, I've got it linked to my Gmail, my Google Calendar. So you can see there's my normal calendar basically, but this is in Notion Calendar. And so you've got some other options within Notion Calendar of things like searching and stuff like that. I don't use the Notion Calendar. I mean, I just use the Google one, but it synchronizes between the two nice and easily. So So there we go. It was a quick and dirty kind of run-through, I think, but hopefully it's given everybody an idea. Fiona, you managed to stick out the whole 2 hours. Yeah.

Not only did I manage the 2 hours, I've learned so much.

It just isn't true.

So thank you very much. Fantastic. Fantastic. Okay. Well, that's good. That's good. Any final thoughts? Anything from anybody? that they either want me to follow up on or that was useful.

I took 2 questions. I did put a question in the chat, but very briefly, can you add alerts to things like reminders so that something will flash up and tell you to do whatever it is you reminded yourself to do?

I don't use that in Notion, but I can't imagine that that's not in there. It must be in there. I don't know, Mel, do you use reminders and stuff from Notion?

No, no, but you can create your own workspace and you can put to-do lists and that sort of thing. But I don't know whether it alerts you automatically.

Right, I've put it down.

David's got a yellow hand.

David, yeah.

Yeah, I was wrong about the Notion Plus price. It's £8.50 per month billed annually or £10 monthly.

So you've maybe picked up the business one, had you, or something?

Yeah, but you only get the option to upgrade to the business one if you click on the link in your free site. Right. So I haven't worked out how to get the Plus plan yet. Okay. All right. But brilliant talk. Thank you.

Super. Thank you very much.

So we may well create a team space and I'll get a few of you involved so we could just test it. Because it might be useful for the e-circles and—

Well, yeah, there's lots of things we could try with this, aren't there? Yeah, but I certainly, I certainly find that as a general tool, you know, for the stuff that I do, a lot of these talks and things like this, I love it for this creating a page with links and, you know, different things embedded in it. I find it really, really useful.

I think it's just so Instantaneous, isn't it? Yeah. And the fact that I can update it and you can all see it. Yeah. So if I make a mistake, you don't have to email everybody, you just change it.

No one ever knows. Everybody sees. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's good.

I can really see it being useful for me, um, outside of photography for my business, because, yeah, no, I deal with, uh, with the products which are image intensive, and then I've got invoices, and then I've sort of specifications and all that. And if I can make a page per client and share that privately with the client, yeah, and then add anything they need to do or anything I need to do, I can see that being really useful.

Yeah, yeah, that would be a really good way of using this.

Yeah. So do you know if you upgrade and then you find you're not using it very much, can you downgrade again? Well, without losing what you did when you did the upgrade, you know what I mean?

What I would suggest is if you're going to do that, upgrade to the pay by month rather than the pay on an annual basis, because normally once you've paid annually, that's it, you've paid. And, you know, if you don't use it, you just let the year run. But in that case, just go to the pay per month basis and then, you know, you're paying an extra, what, $150 a month or something. But see whether it works for you for 2 or 3 months or whatever. And if not, then you just cancel it and all you've lost is your £8.50 or £10 for the month. That's probably the best.

And you're not going to lose what you did during the time you upgraded. So if you've been doing, you know, sort of large file uploads and things, that won't disappear.

No, because all the pages, even if you went back to the free account, I mean, the pages that you've created would still be available to you. Yeah, yeah, there's, uh, it's really functionality like, um, some, some of the additional AI features and stuff like that are really the main thing that, that kind of you get as a benefit with a Pro account and you get the, the multiple domains. Now I suppose if you downgraded from Pro to free and you had multiple domains with lots of pages in each domain, they might say pick a domain to choose to keep, and then you're going to lose the stuff in the other one. So you might have to move pages from one of your domains, you know, into the—

Yeah, no, no, it's just I'm a student at the moment, so yeah, but a freebie sounds good.

I show this to all my students at college, and virtually every student I have uses it as one of their key tools. Most people find it useful. I'm starting, I'm starting a new master's program on myself as a student next week, and I will be doing all my notes in Notion. So it's fantastic. Yeah.

I encourage you all to have a play and hope that you gain something from it. And I think even if 10% of you do, it's a success, isn't it? that we've run the talk at all. So thank you all for coming. And thank you, Joe, for guiding us around.

Indeed. Okay. Yeah. Thanks very much. See you soon. Okay. Are you going to stick around, Mel? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We'll let everybody drop off. Thank you. Super. Thanks, everybody.

So the recording will be in the Notion document.

The recording will be in the Notion document.

Yeah.

In about an hour. Yeah, I'll stop the recording now, actually.