# Clew: Highlights and Notes — Books, Web, Film, TV, Podcasts > Digital commonplace book for saving and connecting highlights from media. (iPhone/iPad app by Thomas Twardzik.) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/clew-highlights-and-notes/id6477902274 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [Thomas Twardzik](https://appshunter.io/developer/1731056279) - Category: Productivity, Lifestyle - Price: Free with in-app purchases - Rating: 5.00/5 from 3 App Store ratings - Age rating: 4+ - Requires: iOS 18.0 · 32 MB - Languages: American English - Released: 2025-04-06 - Data updated: 2026-08-30 - Monetization: free with in-app purchases - User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/clew-highlights-and-notes/id6477902274/reviews.md ## What is Clew? Clew is the fastest, easiest way to save passages, quotes, and notes from the things you read, watch, and listen to, so you can start discovering connections between everything you save. Remember the last time you wrote in the margin of a novel, only to finish the book and never see that thought again? How many times have you clipped parts of articles, songs, and podcasts and saved them to a note somewhere, hidden and forgotten? Clew is a single place for all your highlights, clips, and favorite lines—stored, organized, and searchable in one place. It's a commonplace book that you'll always have with you, easily searchable and synced between all your devices. Clew helps you connect thoughts across sources, centuries, and media types through powerful tagging and intelligent recommendations. Start discovering connections between everything you've saved from: - Books and poems you read - Movies and TV shows you watch - Podcasts and audiobooks you listen to - Songs you love - Articles you read online or on paper Simply copy-and-paste text into the app, use the Share extension, or scan book pages and documents with your device's camera to save a new highlight. Clew makes it easy to sort and search your highlights by source (author, website, etc.), date saved, publication year, genre, keywords, and more. Build your collection, and watch as you start finding connections and patterns across books, artists, decades, genres, languages, and more. This is your new favorite place to store, sort, and share clippings from all your favorite media, whether it's a mind-blowing plot twist in a novel, a hilarious quote in a movie or play, a devastating song lyric, a grand discovery in an article, or simply a quirky adjective you can't wait to use in your own writing. This is Clew. ## Key features - Save highlights from books, web, film, TV, and podcasts - Organize and search saved content - Discover connections between saved items - Tagging and intelligent recommendations - Syncs across all devices - Camera scanning for book pages ## Pricing and in-app purchases Base price: Free. **One-time purchases** | Purchase | Price | Type | | --- | --- | --- | | Small Tip - $0.99 | $0.99 | one-time | | Super Tip - $9.99 | $9.99 | one-time | | Generous Tip - $2.99 | $2.99 | one-time | ## Frequently asked questions about Clew ### What is Clew used for? Clew is used to save, organize, and discover connections between highlights, quotes, and notes from books, articles, films, TV shows, podcasts, and music. It functions as a digital commonplace book. ### How do I add content to Clew? You can add content by copying and pasting text, using the Share extension, or scanning book pages and documents with your device's camera. ### Can I use Clew on multiple devices? Yes, Clew is designed to sync across all your devices, ensuring your saved highlights and notes are always accessible wherever you are. ### Does Clew have ads? No, Clew does not contain advertisements. It is an ad-free application. ### What devices does Clew support? Clew is available for iPhone and iPad devices. ### How often is Clew updated? The latest version of Clew is 1.4.6, and it was last updated on June 2, 2026. This indicates a recent update and ongoing development. ### What is the age rating for Clew? Clew has an age rating of 4+, making it suitable for a wide range of users. ### Does Clew offer any in-app purchases? Yes, Clew offers in-app purchases, though the specific features or content unlocked are not detailed in the provided information. ## Version history (last 5 releases) ### 1.5.2 — 2026-08-25 Backups - Your backup list now shows whether each backup is automatic or manual, and whether it can actually be restored - An interrupted backup can no longer leave behind a partial file that looks complete - Automatic daily backups are incremental, so they save storage on your device - A damaged backup no longer takes a slot that a working older backup could have kept - Backup and restore progress now says what it's working on in plain language Songs and Albums - Duplicate cleanup (in Settings -> Advanced Data Management) now finds duplicate songs and albums - Merging keeps every artist credit, and fills in artwork, album, release date, and link from whichever copy has them - Songs and albums now appear in library statistics, missing ID repair, and the data integrity check Navigation - Reopening Clew keeps your place even when one item along the way was deleted - On iPad and Mac, jumping to a list from a detail view no longer opens a second list beside the first - On iPad, resizing Clew in Split View or Stage Manager—or rotating your device—keeps you where you were Other Fixes - Fixed a rare problem setting up Clew on a new device while iCloud was still importing - Repairing missing IDs for a single kind of item now saves the repair ### 1.5.1 — 2026-08-20 Pinned Highlights - Pin highlights and filter the list by pinned/unpinned. Pinned highlights now appear on the dashboard, and they're at the top of the list when configuring a widget to show a specific highlight. Widgets - New Typewriter theme: paper and ink with monospaced type Photo Scanner - Your queue now survives a crash or a force quit — reopen the scanner and Clew offers to restore it - A spinner now shows while photos transfer from your library - Fixed tag suggestions not refreshing after selecting text Sharper Artwork - Book covers, album artwork, and webpage icons are fetched at higher quality and no longer saved at thumbnail size - Fixed a bug where song artwork got stuck as the old image after you changed it Keyboard and Sheets - ⌘S now saves on Create and Edit sheets - Keyboard shortcuts no longer act on the view behind an open sheet - Fixed a freeze when creating a book, tag, song, or website from inside the Create Highlight sheet or a picker Other Fixes - Fixed a crash and a partial save when acting on many highlights at once - Dashboard cards no longer cut highlights to a single line on iPhone - Quick Search opens cleanly, keeps up as you retype, and shows covers at the right size - On iPad, a new highlight now opens in place instead of stacking a screen on top - Minor design refinements throughout ### 1.5 — 2026-07-31 Check out the redesigned look for highlights and sources! Now, it's more fun—and intuitive—to browse through your collection, add new items, and customize your home screen with widgets. - NEW: A colorful look for highlights and sources uses an item's cover image or artwork to paint the UI, buttons, and accents. It adapts to light and dark modes, too. - NEW: 3-column view on iPad gives you more information on screen. Plus, rich keyboard commands and navigation with the arrow keys make using Clew faster. - NEW: A better onboarding experience means you don't have to start from scratch. New users can start off with a few example highlights. Existing users can also add (and remove) these examples at any time from Settings → Advanced Data Management. New ways to import highlights in bulk into Clew: - Bring in highlights from CSV and XLSX spreadsheets. Clew automatically detects the format of the data to create highlights and add their sources. - Select multiple photos of physical book pages and documents, and Clew will help you create rich new highlights for them quickly. More new features and improvements: - Change the text size across the whole app and customize the font for highlight quote text - Improved support for Siri, Shortcuts, and Spotlight - Better multi-window support on iPad - Drag & drop highlights between tags and sources - Convenient tag suggestions appear right in a highlight's detail view - More stats, including "Standouts"—discover your longest, most-tagged, and most-revisited highlights - A new artwork-split layout for medium and large single-highlight widgets, which pairs the cover art with the quote. There are also refreshed built-in themes - Better undo/redo descriptions when you shake your device or use three-finger gestures - By default, book search now uses a source with better-quality book cover images Bug Fixes - Fixed a bug where a failed backup restore could damage existing data. Older backups that previously failed to import now restore correctly - Fixed crashes opening results from Quick Search and Spotlight - Fixed editing a book adding a "finished reading" date it never had, and preserved the original date when toggling a book's read status - Fixed restored books losing their read status when a backup recorded a finished date but no read/unread flag - Fixed More From Tags showing the wrong number of highlights on a tag - Fixed cover images being lost or attached to the wrong item - Fixed tag colors not updating in list rows - Fixed landscape photo orientation causing incorrect text recognition - Fixed the keyboard dismissing while editing scanned text chunks during bulk import from photos ### 1.4.6 — 2026-06-02 Improved Scanner and Photo Import - Use the camera button to take a photo of a book’s page or import images from your camera roll. The button is on the main highlights list and above the highlight text box when creating/editing highlights. - Better bulk photos import: tap on a page’s thumbnail when reviewing it to open a full-size Live Text view of the photo, where you can highlight right on the photo to select text. New Related Clusters and Connections - Find Connections between highlights that share 2+ tags with each other. - See Clusters of highlights that share exactly the same sets of tags. And more… - Improved source creation via web API search when creating a highlight. - Fixed a bug where the camera view’s close (X) button didn’t work. - Fixed a widget-related crash. ### 1.4.5 — 2026-05-06 Scan Multiple Book Pages at a Time - Quickly capture new highlights from multiple book pages or documents using the camera or photos you've already taken. Now, you can finish a chapter—or even a whole book—and then add all your annotations to Clew at once, right from your camera. - Clew will try to detect page numbers and book titles/authors to make it even faster to create highlights from images. So, go ahead and start saving all those photos of book pages cluttering your camera roll. New Stats View - See your most-used tags, track highlight counts over time, and discover more insights about your collection. Other Improvements - Better quality images for book covers and album covers - Improved Dynamic Type support for large text - Better backup management - A smoother experience on the Mac - Fixed disappearing paste and hide keyboard buttons - Fixed book web search - Fixed author name matching when creating books - Lots of other lil bug fixes ## Apps similar to Clew | App | Rating | Price | Category | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | [Griffee](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/griffee/id6738710888) | — | Free | Productivity | | [stashy: save anything](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/stashy-save-anything/id6743415568) | 4.9 (14) | Free | Productivity | | [Qubiql - AI Goals, Time & Task](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/qubiql-ai-goals-time-and-task/id6447155931) | 5.0 (1) | Free | Productivity | | [Ink Thoughts: Easy AI Brain](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/ink-thoughts-easy-ai-brain/id6741190616) | 4.0 (4) | Free | Productivity | | [Floe – Nature Sound Mixer](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/floe-nature-sound-mixer/id6743803345) | — | Free | Productivity | | [Anchor - Task Manager](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/anchor-task-manager/id6744028228) | 4.5 (13) | Free | Productivity | --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-08-30.*