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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

#41

Post by ikurei »

zhoubear wrote: post #13
joshvm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little bit more tricky than that. What the EXIF might tell you is the camera calibration parameters like focal length, distortion, perspective center, etc. That can be used to fix systematic errors in images like pincushion/barrel distortion. To unwarp photos that were taken at odd angles you need to do some image processing. The mathematics aren't particularly difficult, it's a homography transform in most ca…

Thanks for the link. That blew my mind! I wish it could be added would, my phone would replace my scanner instantly.

Since others are commenting alternative apps, I'll chime in:

https://www.camscanner.com/

I've been using CamScanner on Android since forever. I only stopped a few months ago because I moved to iOS (and didn't realize it's also there).

It does the page detection fairly well, but also let's you correct it. Very useful, specially when the picture is bad. I then used to upload it to Dropbox.

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

#42

Post by jopsen »

pw0nka wrote: post #30

Looks great. Love the idea behind it, but... There is at least one country (mine - Switzerland) which is not able to use software like yours. The problems are the current laws that force people and organizations to store physical copies of the documents (for several years). Electronic documents have no value in front of the law, which is why we have no choice but to do all of that offline, manually. I've tried many a…

I have always archived my documents by throwing them in an unsorted black box.

If someone really need me to retrieve an old document. It'll take forever to find, but why would I want to pay sorting costs upfront?

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

#43

Post by andruby »

y4mi wrote: post #31

a nontrivial name conflict with Paperless ( https://github.com/danielquinn/paperless ) ...

They even share the exact same tagline: "Scan, index, and archive all of your paper documents".

If Open Paperless some kind of fork of Paperless?

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

#44

Post by jopsen »

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?

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

#45

Post by y4mi »

andruby wrote: post #43
y4mi wrote: post #31

a nontrivial name conflict with Paperless ( https://github.com/danielquinn/paperless ) ...

They even share the exact same tagline: "Scan, index, and archive all of your paper documents". If Open Paperless some kind of fork of Paperless?

No, this project is a fork from Mayan edms, which is another Django app that's similar to paperless. It's actually referenced in the readme of the original paperless (which is also a Django app)

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

#46

Post by kuschku »

pw0nka wrote: post #36
anotheryou wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a proprietary solution for it, sadly overpriced and cloud-based. But the principle could be implemented in any software: Shoe Box + QR, you fill linearly and always snap the QR with the scan. It than can tell you at roughly which height in the stack and in which shoe box something is. edit: here: https://box.fileee.com/

Thank you. This brings up another problem we have with our laws: Corporates are not allowed to store such documents on servers which are outside of our country. And that's usually the case with clouds services, because of obvious reasons.

That’s not a problem with your laws, but more a problem with SaaS. Data should always stay as local as possible, ideally even within of your own organization.

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

#47

Post by bob_theslob646 »

Please correct me if I am wrong, but this looks like you have to "name" each page. I would also want to see how accurate the ocr is. Historically, ocr on handwritting has been a problem unless the data is perfectly formatted. I guess the case is just to get enough accuracy so that you can look for or at the image of that page with the indexed search term you were looking for.

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

#49

Post by lucaspiller »

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…

As long as you don't mind being tied into the Apple ecosystem (and trust they won't loose your data) it's a good solution. Notes used to be backed by IMAP, but the new 'rich notes' since iOS 9/OS 10.11 is backed by iCloud.

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

#50

Post by pjc50 »

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?

If you have zero retrievals, you can just bin everything. As you've said, it depends how often you want to retrieve something and whether you ever need to retrieve a number of things in a hurry.
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