I recently mentioned Paperless in a forum thread and thought that it ought to be mentioned here in the Library, too, so here it is!
The general idea is that you could scan all your paperwork, and then throw most of it away! Only a small fraction of your paper storage is the kind that you really need to keep in its original form. The rest just takes up space in your home for no other reason than you might need it someday. If you go Paperless, you get to declutter and keep your now digital paperwork. It’s easier, too, because of full-text search, tags, and sorting.
Paperless-ngx is a community-supported open-source document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper.
Organize and index your scanned documents with tags, correspondents, types, and more.
Your data is stored locally on your server and is never transmitted or shared in any way.
Performs OCR on your documents, adding searchable and selectable text, even to documents scanned with only images.
Documents are saved as PDF/A format which is designed for long term storage, alongside the unaltered originals.
Uses machine-learning to automatically add tags, correspondents and document types to your documents.
Supports PDF documents, images, plain text files, Office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and LibreOffice equivalents)1 and more.
Paperless stores your documents plain on disk. Filenames and folders are managed by paperless and their format can be configured freely with different configurations assigned to different documents.
(Disclaimer: I am not involved with the provider in any way other than being an enthusiastic veteran user, happy to help others.)
I have just recently set this up again using Docker on my QNAP NAS. (Not for the faint of heart, using Docker, but once it’s up and running, it’s generally golden)
After reading through the docs a bit more this time, and figuring out where everything is actually stored when using Docker, I was able to setup an SMB share to the Paperless-NGX “consume” folder, which then allowed me to set up my scanner to scan directly to that SMB share, thus triggering Paperless-NGX to automatically process the scanned files.
I also squeaked through hooking it up to my GMail account (via Google Workspace, so this might not work for basic GMail) and can read my email directly. I’ve currently setup up two rules to process invoices and bills that are emailed to me. Now Paperless-NGX will scan my inbox for those specific emails and process the attached PDFs and store them for me.
Next trick: Figuring out how to automatically allocate them in a JD system. Oh, wait, I still haven’t setup my JD system. Ok, Step Zero: Setup my JD.
Great recommendations, if someone could give me an easy way to install or use PaperlessNGX on Windows (or on Linux Mint, I<m starting using it) it would me very much appreciated. Essentially, I’m looking for the "noob way’ of doing it.
Paperless is server software. It is not meant to be installed on a Windows desktop computer. The best way to go about it is via Docker - and you can run that on your Windows or Linux PC if you want!
If you are dabbling with Linux Mint, then I suggest that you focus on Linux rather than Windows. Paperless might not be the best choice for the first Docker adventure though. You could get started with some smaller things like picoshare or freshRSS, but that’s leading us off the present topic.
