3 ms·

Can you explain how it is better than carefully scanning and arrangement the scanned files yourself? (Not being facetious, I'm really asking.)

vertis 5y ago
Not the parent, but I suspect it's not better in the outcome, just in the amount of effort you have to go into creating and arranging vs just throwing documents at it and searching later.
anthropodie 5y ago
You can categorise those documents, tag them, OCR them, search them. Access them on phone or any other device with browser.
- nojito 5y ago
  How is that any different from Onedrive/iCloud/etc?
- h0l0cube 5y ago
  I'm looking at this ecosystem and wish I'd seen it sooner. I've been using the Google Drive Android app to scan documents. It does auto-cropping and perspective correction, but it doesn't OCR, and I manually rename the files so that I can order them by date and cross reference with my banking transactions. With OCR I might at least be able to extract some useful data and avoid some tedious data entry.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  1. If I need a browser to access them, that's very similar to "can't access them". Do you expect my programs to start browser sessions to access files? Will my file manager have to connect to that silly web server? 2. I can't effectively OCR them for many non-English language (at least - unless it's made some advances in OCR for some languages for which it's lacking). Also, if I do OCR anything, I then need to correct the mistakes, which takes a h-u-g-e amount of time even when the OCR works relatively well.
  - ishi 5y ago
    You seem to come at this useful tool with a very negative mindset. - The scanned documents are stored in the filesystem in PDF format, so you can certainly access them without going through the web application. - OCR doesn't have to be perfect, because it's just being used to locate a specific document when you need it. So if you have 1788 documents and you want to find your apartment lease, you search for "lease" and there's a very good chance that word will be found in the correct document. That's the whole point - storing documents with a low amount of manual effort, in a way that makes it very easy to find them when you need them.
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      Yeah, that guy is being a tool. "WHY IS THIS THING I REFUSE TO SPEND EVEN A FEW MINUTES BOTHERING TO RESEARCH, SO BAD?!"
anaisbetts 5y ago
It's better because it automatically OCRs everything and puts it into a search index. It means that finding documents now consists of typing a few keywords and immediately getting what you're looking for vs having to open a ton of PDFs
- einpoklum 5y ago
  "Typing"? Typing where? What's the integration with file managers like? And what's the API for file lookup via that "index"?
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Why don't you expend some effort answering your own questions instead of expecting others to answer a combative person on the internet? https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paperless-ng https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paperless-ng

vertis 5y ago

Not the parent, but I suspect it's not better in the outcome, just in the amount of effort you have to go into creating and arranging vs just throwing documents at it and searching later.

anthropodie 5y ago

You can categorise those documents, tag them, OCR them, search them. Access them on phone or any other device with browser.

nojito 5y ago
How is that any different from Onedrive/iCloud/etc?
h0l0cube 5y ago
I'm looking at this ecosystem and wish I'd seen it sooner. I've been using the Google Drive Android app to scan documents. It does auto-cropping and perspective correction, but it doesn't OCR, and I manually rename the files so that I can order them by date and cross reference with my banking transactions. With OCR I might at least be able to extract some useful data and avoid some tedious data entry.
einpoklum 5y ago
1. If I need a browser to access them, that's very similar to "can't access them". Do you expect my programs to start browser sessions to access files? Will my file manager have to connect to that silly web server? 2. I can't effectively OCR them for many non-English language (at least - unless it's made some advances in OCR for some languages for which it's lacking). Also, if I do OCR anything, I then need to correct the mistakes, which takes a h-u-g-e amount of time even when the OCR works relatively well.
- ishi 5y ago
  You seem to come at this useful tool with a very negative mindset. - The scanned documents are stored in the filesystem in PDF format, so you can certainly access them without going through the web application. - OCR doesn't have to be perfect, because it's just being used to locate a specific document when you need it. So if you have 1788 documents and you want to find your apartment lease, you search for "lease" and there's a very good chance that word will be found in the correct document. That's the whole point - storing documents with a low amount of manual effort, in a way that makes it very easy to find them when you need them.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Yeah, that guy is being a tool. "WHY IS THIS THING I REFUSE TO SPEND EVEN A FEW MINUTES BOTHERING TO RESEARCH, SO BAD?!"

anaisbetts 5y ago

It's better because it automatically OCRs everything and puts it into a search index. It means that finding documents now consists of typing a few keywords and immediately getting what you're looking for vs having to open a ton of PDFs

einpoklum 5y ago
"Typing"? Typing where? What's the integration with file managers like? And what's the API for file lookup via that "index"?
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Why don't you expend some effort answering your own questions instead of expecting others to answer a combative person on the internet? https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paperless-ng https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=paperless-ng