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Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?

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Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?

#1

Post by sidarok »

My SO uses iPhone and I use Android, I think we'll both soon go mad with all the pictures of the documents sent to post that we have to take a digital action for.

Contracts, Appliance Invoices, insurance, Kids' documents, Receipts, Fines, government documents, bills, tickets, passes etc. Are basically taking ages to find, even if we were wise to take a picture would take ages to refind.

I have both OneDrive and Dropbox, the UX is horrible for these simple searches. I know that Shoebox exists, but paying at least 18$ a month for wanting to store my documents on my phone in a neat way looks to much of a demand for me. (and that has a limitation). I'm not even asking for a fancy OCR.

Is there an app out there for this? What do you use?

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?

#4

Post by tacostakohashi »

I use (two levels of) directories, and filenames:

appliances/fridge/2018-01-03-purchase-receipt.pdf

appliances/oven/2019-11-18-repair-invoice.pdf

medical/insurance/2022-02-03-insurance-card.pdf

automotive/registration/2022-09-10-registration.pdf

automotive/tickets/2019-09-10-parking.pdf

phone/t-mobile/2020-01-14.pdf

phone/pixel5a/2021-03-14.pdf

With two directory levels, you should be able to organize it so that all the top level directories fit on one screen of ls output / file explorer or whatever you want to use, as well as each second level.

I always prefix the filenames with YYYY-MM-DD, and I add a suffix with any extra keywords that might be helpful or to disambiguate several things from the same day, but in many cases it's obvious if the directory is just full of one bill per month or whatever, in which case I just do the YYYY-MM-DD.ext filename.

The system is largely optimized for having a place/filename to store things without too much thought, rather than retrieval since 90+% of things you store never actually need to look at again, and I don't mind clicking around for a few minutes for the rare occurrence when I do need something.

If you put this structure in google drive or similar you'll get OCR + keyword searches on the filenames for free, but you can also just sync it to any local filesystem to use "manually", or upgrade to the next latest and greatest cloud storage or whatever.

Re: Ask HN: What do you use for your personal document hell?

#6

Post by dataflow »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #4

I use (two levels of) directories, and filenames: appliances/fridge/2018-01-03-purchase-receipt.pdf appliances/oven/2019-11-18-repair-invoice.pdf medical/insurance/2022-02-03-insurance-card.pdf automotive/registration/2022-09-10-registration.pdf automotive/tickets/2019-09-10-parking.pdf phone/t-mobile/2020-01-14.pdf phone/pixel5a/2021-03-14.pdf With two directory levels, you should be able to organize it so that all…

Kind of similar for me, main difference being that I have a 4th level with the year, like medical/insurance/2022/2022-02-03-insurance-card.pdf. That makes it easier to navigate for me.
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