I spun up an instance of paperless-ngx on my Docker host a couple days ago, and just yesterday got my document scanner configured to send things to its Consume folder. So far I'm beyond impressed and I wish I'd learned about it much sooner! I run a FreeNAS server which has collected a lot of important documents in its 10 years of life... all of them arranged in folders as best as I could. Fuck folders, tags are the way.

It was easier than I expected to get the container running and tell it to watch a folder on the FreeNAS share. So I have a decade of pseudo-organized archives to import? Click and drag the folder, and it's done. Amazing.

The automatic tagging seems OK so far. If I'm working on several documents of a similar provenance it starts suggesting appropriate tags after I manually tag about 10 or so. I'll be interested to see how it does as I train it more.

I was never going to pay for a service like this, even though I really needed it. Finding out about paperless has been a revelation for me, haha. And on top of that it's the most "just works" of anything I've tried self-hosting so far. Easy to set up, and it seems feature-rich with a good UI. What's not to love? penguin-love

Anyone else out there using paperless-ngx and have any tips or tricks to share? Things you wish you knew before?

https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx

  • Inui [comrade/them]
    ·
    20 days ago

    Thanks for sharing! That sounds perfect since it keeps the original file or else lets me manually upload and delete myself.

    • btfod [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      19 days ago

      You're welcome, happy to help.

      One other thing I should note, default behavior is to rename your original files to match the ID number assigned by paperless. I'm not sure if this can be changed... I had a few reservations about this but I accepted it too - I can let it do its thing and all it'll cost me is being super careful about db backups.