Document management

    Living in Germany you tend to collect a lot of paper. I mean physical, dead-tree, paper. And a lot of it. Receipts! Invoices! Appointment confirmation! Prescription! Many many important things.

    To an untrained ear, this might not sound like a big problem. I used to think the same way. And I never thought I'd face a problem like this ever in my life. Even after moving to Germany, it never really bothered me. That was until I had to scour through stacks scattered around my apartment to find a certain document.

    To combat this, I decided to digitize all my documents. So I bought a scanner. It also came with a printer. That was no accident. Thing is, here you need both. I'd been asking my friends to print my documents until then.

    I spent a weekend scanning almost all of my documents. I moved them all into an external SSD. Named and grouped them as best as I could. All my important documents, scanned, and labeled, right there on the table. I felt a huge weight was off of my shoulder. Never again will I search in despair.

    Fast forward a year later, I'm facing the same problem. I have a growing backlog of documents that I've yet to digitize. And searching for documents seems to take longer than before.

    What happened? Turns out I did a half-ass job of building it. There were a few things that I didn't take into account.

    Friction

    Friction to add new documents resulted in a large backlog. I wanted to scan the document and not use the mobile camera for that because scanning on mobile is a hassle. Things started piling up.

    No full text search

    Lack of full text search becomes very noticable whenever you need to find a document. It's not a big deal if you're good at categorizing your files and building a hierarchy. But I found myself scour through directories to find the right one time and again.

    Physical counterparts

    I also negelected to find a system to store the physical copies. Having just a digital version is enough for certain types of documents but there are some that I need to keep the paper version as well. Currently they're scattered across different boxes in the apartment. I need an efficient system to store and index those for easy retrieval.

    This is not a new problem so I'm confident that I'll find a lot of inspirations on the internet.

    Next

    I've decided to give this another go. I'm also looking into leveraging some tools. Currently I'm testing paperless-ngx. It's a fantastic piece of software. It's also built using Django which is a plus for me because I have experience with it.

    What I like about paperless-ngx is that it doesn't have a lot of friction when it comes to adding new documents. It does a really good OCR. It has a good full text search.

    There are also other web based tools similar to this. I briefly installed papermerge and gave it a spin. The papermerge UI didn't click it for me.

    I haven't stopped looking though. While paperless-ngx is very capable, I'm trying to avoid having a server. I could run them on my laptop but that's not ideal. A local-first solution would be great. OpenPaperwork seems like something I want. It promises OCR and quick search. But it doesn't seem to run on MacOS.

    I'm also tempted to write a bare-bones solution myself. I could use tesseract for OCR and build a full-text search index with SQLite. For extra portability, maintain a metadata file next to the original file that stores the extracted text, tags, and other things. But I'm holding off for now and see if there's anything else.