Picked up an ix500 scansnap and wondering about suggested workflows for going paperless. My intention is to scan a bunch of documents, but haven’t delved deeply into how this will actually flow on the software level. I know I’ll need to OCR the scanned documents, and my base setup is:
- Pi with SSD storage running compose version of Paperless-ngx to filesystem mounted folders.
- Folders can also be accessed over Samba
- ix500 statically assigned over wifi as network scanner.
- A literal filing cabinet, for things I should keep physically.
- Ubuntu computer for browsing
I feel a bit overwhelmed, but am excited to get started. Will be scanning personal document, work docs, whatever else I need to digitize and recycle. All suggestions appreciated!
So, I’ve had a certain scanner earmarked for years if I wanted to go down this route. But honestly, I’ve been fine using the app to take photos. Google had pretty good functionality for scanning docs built into either docs or android, not sure. Maybe you have a huge pile of docs to churn thru, but I’ve opted to just use paperless going forward, and take photos of the things I really want digitized.
I wouldn’t buy dedicated hardware to run it personally. But to each their own. I’m running a lot of docker Swarm services across 10 VMs in proxmox
With paperless it’s pretty easy. I’ve set up a scan profile that directly sends the documents to the consume folder via SMB. Paperless then ingests it, runs OCR, does some AI shenanigans and files the documents. Only thing I still do by hand is a check for errors and editing the file title to something useable.
Of course the AI takes a bit of manual training till it learns your document types and tags and files them accordingly.
One Thing I wish I had used earlier are ASNs (Archive Serial Numbers). At least for documents you want to keep the original of.
- they make retrieval of your documents easier
- paperless ngx has built-in support AND separates Documents you scan if it finds a new ASN QR-code on a page.
The “separation” part would have helped me a lot during initial scanning. Just chuck everything in the ADF Scanner and let paperless handle the rest.
Of course you might still want to batch by topic, so the tagging is easier.
After scanning just put them into a Box labeled with start and end ASN and you can retrieve any document you want easily.
