I’m looking for a service I could install to archive a huge pile of letters, preferably in PDF form, to a database. I’m living in a country where paper is still king, and digital services are either non-existent, or loathed (Germany). My current situation is that I have a mailbox with lots of PDFs all over the place, but also many folders of paper sent in 2007 etc. that I have to keep, but I also have to find them every five years or so.
So what I’d like to have is a service to my homelab, where I could scan these and copy these, that would index them, clean them, OCR them and all that good stuff. It should have really good metadata abilities, because my files are usually named in a very random way, so if I could copy these, and quickly categorize them, that would be really awesome.
There is one service called Papermerge, that kind of fits to my use-case. I spent one afternoon with it, and there were a few issues:
- crashes quite often
- when sending a large folder of PDFs, uses all the CPU and crashes again
- categorizing functions are not very good, it takes time to get everything together and clean when organizing files
This might not be very interesting if your country has digital services for everything, but for us needing to suffer this paper madness, a service to do so would be great.
Paperless-NGX
This ticks all your boxes. It’s really good.
The killer feature for me is my networked scanner scanning directly to the paperless consume samba share and the documents just popping up in the inbox fully OCRd and pre-categorised. Pretty magical.
NB, the docs make it sound like a proper DB is optional, but it’s really not. Performance was iffy for me with sqlite but is rock solid with Postgres.
This was it for me now, installed paperless-xng, set it up to scan my email folders, copied all random PDFs from my “organized” tax folder and scanned the rest.
Too bad I just happen to have that Brother printer/scanner without SMB or FTP support. So I need to go through the process of scanning on my computer first, then uploading.
If it can email you can send it to an email address and paperless can automatically grab it and archive it.
I’ve been digging into the settings of this printer and, sadly the only send it can do is as a fax… It’s the entry model, been serving us for years very nicely. It even connects to the internet, but misses features such as email, smb or ftp. For me this looks like something an open source firmware could fix. It has enough processing power to possibly run a lightweight Linux distribution, so installing one that would enable modern communication protocols doesn’t seem impossible.