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Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

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Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#61

Post by ekianjo »

tombrossman wrote: post #57
jopsen wrote: post #44

Question: why bother organizing papers? I just throw everything in a box, if I ever need it again later it'll take a long time to find.. but I rarely need to find a document again. Complexity of archiving a document is O(1) with a very small constant. Complexity of retrieval is O(N) for a large N. But I have few retrievals in my system, so why pay a higher per document cost?

> Question: why bother organizing papers? Because being organised makes you more effective. With your 'throw it all in a box' system, you have a high barrier to finding documents in the future and this discourages you from doing so. However, with a more organised approach you are more likely to retrieve specific documents. One example: Some mid-priced electronic device breaks a few months after you buy it. You might…

> Because being organised makes you more effective

I agree with the sentiment, but I tend to agree with the previous poster. The value of paper documents tends to be really low in the long run. I think you can keep it maybe for a few years when it comes to bills, but anything longer than that and there's not really a lot of value to go back to what you purchased/did or even where you traveled. I am also fairly organized but I tend to see as kind of futile, since I don't really need to go back and search for stuff that often.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#62

Post by ValentineC »

mattlondon wrote: post #60
jopsen wrote: post #44

Question: why bother organizing papers? I just throw everything in a box, if I ever need it again later it'll take a long time to find.. but I rarely need to find a document again. Complexity of archiving a document is O(1) with a very small constant. Complexity of retrieval is O(N) for a large N. But I have few retrievals in my system, so why pay a higher per document cost?

You'd be surprised how useful having all of your documents digitally available can be. I've been doing this for years already (albeit using Google Drive - yes, some people dont trust Google - I understand that, but doesn't bother me) and these are some of the common use-cases where I find it really useful: * Tax returns. This alone makes it worthwhile. * Call-centers. You'll often have the reference/account number/et…

> Now I top-up with a home scanner attached to my LAN - if you're looking to buy a scanner for home, make sure you get one with an automatic document feeder that can do both sides at once so you can just chuck the papers in and hit go, then collect the PDFs from your network drive.

Any suggestions for one? I have a Canon P-208, but it's close to useless for batch scanning.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#63

Post by theomega »

I want to show an alternative approach to managing your documents:

Store them in your IMAP/Mails. Either on an own account or in a dedicated sub-folder.

I wrote some small python scripts [1] which allow you to: - Add an email with the PDF attached to your document collection. The script supports adding a subject and adding tags to it - Go over all the emails and run an OCR (tesseract) on them: Attach the OCR result together with the pdf to the email.

Big advantage: - Search on IMAP is a solved problem - Clients for every operating system in the world, including web, mobile - Super simple backup and restore

Over course, very geeky, nothing for your parents, but maybe something for you?

[1]: https://github.com/theomega/IMAP_DMS

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#64

Post by JohnStrange »

theomega wrote: post #63

I want to show an alternative approach to managing your documents: Store them in your IMAP/Mails. Either on an own account or in a dedicated sub-folder. I wrote some small python scripts [1] which allow you to: - Add an email with the PDF attached to your document collection. The script supports adding a subject and adding tags to it - Go over all the emails and run an OCR (tesseract) on them: Attach the OCR result t…

Don't you have to run your own IMAP server for that to work?

Although my mail provider is fairly generous about storage space, it's not unlimited.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#65

Post by mattlondon »

ValentineC wrote: post #62
mattlondon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised how useful having all of your documents digitally available can be. I've been doing this for years already (albeit using Google Drive - yes, some people dont trust Google - I understand that, but doesn't bother me) and these are some of the common use-cases where I find it really useful: * Tax returns. This alone makes it worthwhile. * Call-centers. You'll often have the reference/account number/et…

> Now I top-up with a home scanner attached to my LAN - if you're looking to buy a scanner for home, make sure you get one with an automatic document feeder that can do both sides at once so you can just chuck the papers in and hit go, then collect the PDFs from your network drive. Any suggestions for one? I have a Canon P-208, but it's close to useless for batch scanning.

I have an HP OfficeJet one which I guess is kinda "prosumer" (cant remember the number - 8600 or something). The ADF works, but is single-sided so that is why I am urging others to learn from my mistake :-)

I know that the cheapish Canon Maxify printers do duplex ADF (the Canon Maxify MB5150 is what I plan to buy next time my current HP one runs out of ink since the ink costs almost as much as the printer!), but I cant recommend it since I've not used it yet.

HTH.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#66

Post by mark_l_watson »

prashnts wrote: post #6

I've been using iOS and Mac's native notes app to do that. In my opinion what these solutions lack is an integration between both note-taking (I sometimes like to write a few sentences relevant to a document, and I'd like to have it shown right next to it) while also letting you have the individual documents available in PDF or whatever if you need. Notes app does it perfectly now after iOS 11.1 and High Sierra. An e…

I used to use Notes but stopped after trying to back up my notes. For me, exporting one note at a time to pdf is not good enough, and finding the opaque binary file in ~/Library does not help because it is not a standard file format.

I switched to using Notes in Fastmail.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#67

Post by bvrlt »

gravypod wrote: post #3

Will this automatically center and apply perspective transforms to pictures taken with phone cameras?

You should check Genius Scan (for iOS and Android) that does that for you automatically, and much more: https://www.thegrizzlylabs.com/genius-scan/

It also doesn't tie you to a specific ecosystem.

Disclaimer: I'm on of the authors of Genius Scan :)

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#68

Post by coaxial »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #37
curioussavage wrote: post #23

Any good open source desktop software with linux support to do this? I don't see why I would personally want a web app for this.

It's a little clunky but here's the one I found best that just worked on Ubuntu: http://gscan2pdf.sourceforge.net/ . It can combine some of the best tools for OCR/cleanup/etc. My main gripe is that I have a document feeder and manually selecting pages with shift to combine in to a single document and clicking "Save as" is far too much of a hassle. There needs to be a better flow for that.

I wrote a collection of bash scripts for that. https://github.com/coaxial/insaned-config

It was initially to use with insaned, but I later came up with a script to tie it all together (scan.sh) because it's faster than jamming the scan button waiting for insaned to register. And with the script, I can queue commands provided I'm fast enough to swap the physical pages in the flatbed scanner.

It also uses the excellent textcleaner imagemagick script to clean up the scans and make them more ocr friendly.

The readme isn't totally up to date, parallel isn't required anymore, and there is no mention of the scan.sh script. But when you run it, it prompts for commands. You might need to edit the scripts to set your own output directories and textcleaner location.

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#69

Post by paulie_a »

sschueller wrote: post #55
jopsen wrote: post #44

Question: why bother organizing papers? I just throw everything in a box, if I ever need it again later it'll take a long time to find.. but I rarely need to find a document again. Complexity of archiving a document is O(1) with a very small constant. Complexity of retrieval is O(N) for a large N. But I have few retrievals in my system, so why pay a higher per document cost?

I like this idea. I only need to keep 10 years and almost never need to retrieve anything. So if I use 10 boxes I can just throw away the oldest.

Would it cause any real issues if you were unable to retrieve something? If the answer is no, toss the other 9 boxes

Re: Show HN: Open Paperless – Scan, index, and archive paper documents

#70

Post by theomega »

JohnStrange wrote: post #64
theomega wrote: post #63

I want to show an alternative approach to managing your documents: Store them in your IMAP/Mails. Either on an own account or in a dedicated sub-folder. I wrote some small python scripts [1] which allow you to: - Add an email with the PDF attached to your document collection. The script supports adding a subject and adding tags to it - Go over all the emails and run an OCR (tesseract) on them: Attach the OCR result t…

Don't you have to run your own IMAP server for that to work? Although my mail provider is fairly generous about storage space, it's not unlimited.

Depends on two things: Your space and your privacy requirements. Google Mail works for example if you are willing to trust Google. A lot of email providers offer you a lot of space.
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