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.
Just explain me how simple folders by date or/and whoever send the letters in PDF format aren’t enough for a regular person?
Good luck finding stuff when you have 1000+ files and you only search in the file name
The three letters OCR, tagging, fuzzy search and ease of use are the ones for me.
I never needed the date for a letter but quite often its context for example.
Your suggestion just digitalizes physical folders. If that’s enough for you ok - but you’re missing out.