Using paperless-ngx to manage your paper documents digitally.

Paperless is a document management system that helps you manage digital scans of your documents. I’ve been using it for a while, but as with many projects the developer(s) lost motivation/time to keep the project up-to-date, a fork was made (paperless-ng) which after time also died off. Now a few developers got together, worked through the backlog of issues and forked the next generation as “paperless-ngx”.

There is a Changelog for the specific changes.

Short version: I have my scanner set up to be able to store scans on a network share as PDFs, and paperless monitors the same share for new documents. If it finds a new file, it performs OCR on it (saves the PDF as well as the text) and runs user defined rules against it (e.g. detecting the date of the document, or correspondents, or what kind of document it is, …). It actually makes it very easy to manage physical documents. I just pop them in the scanner, select the destination share, and that’s it, everything else happens automatically. So if I need to search for documents needed to do my taxes. I can do it digitally and not have to go through folders with physical paper.

It can also ingest images or office documents, just toss them in the directory the application monitors for ingesting documents (or use the “Upload” button in the application).

I’m not a big fan of the default dark theme, but a normal light theme is still available.

All in all, it’s pretty nifty, so have a look if this is something that you might find useful.