As part of my storyline project, I want to be able to gather notes, images, PDFs etc and categorise them so I can then get at them in related "stories".  

Here's an example of some user stories:

>> I find a copy of a school report. I scan it to PDF. I then want to categorise it against

  • date (in this case, either a year or a decade)
  • name (of student)
  • location (of school)
  • chapter (school)

>> I receive a letter from a family friend who reminds me about a family holiday which I may later be able to track down some photos of.  I want to categorise it as

  • date (probably a year, at least a decade)
  • name (of people who were there - my family, the family friend, their family)
  • location (of where we took the holiday)
  • chapter (holiday)

As an aside, I can't think of a good word for the areas/categories/chapters/whatever which cover things like school, work, holiday, music, netball, church etc - these are the things that will probably become the central points of the stories I will write, and I already have items on my to write about list such as "Write about Mum and netball".  Any suggestions welcomed.

 

>> I know that I want to write about Mum and netball, so I look through my collected information based on chapter (netball) and then order by date to get the information in one place. I then use it to write my story - which may include some of the photos, like the photo of her and her team, or a photo of the (tarnished) silver trophy I have sitting upstairs in our spare room.

>> I know that I want to use what I've gathered to put together a timeline of her life - where she was (roughly) and what she was doing when, so I want to get at all the data, ordered by date.

I'd wondered about using evernote, but it doesn't seem to give me an easy way to get my data back out of it in a very usable/transferrable method (happy to be proved wrong). I've experimented with Scrivener, but I couldn't work out a way of tagging chunks of information in different ways. So, what other tools are there? What would be worth me spending an hour or so playing with to see if I can coerce it into doing what I need?