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Comment by klausjensen | Hacker News Reader

I still use Evernote for scanned documents (invoices, receipts, insurance papers etc etc), and have done so for ~10 years - because I can free-text search in scanned documents.

During those years, Evernote has kept getting worse and worse, becomeing slower and more unreliable at doing cores things, while they slap features on it, that I do not want (collaboration, chat and other garbage).

I want to migrate off at some point, but 10 years of scanned documents are tricky to migrate, and frankly I do not know of any good alternatives at this point.

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I've switched to SwiftScan with automatic upload to Dropbox. It does decent-ish OCR on documents so that you more or less can select text in scanned PDFs. I rarely search inside scanned docs, most of the search is by filename which I manually set a couple of times a week. For file search VoidTools Everything is great.

Any other recommendation for an iOS scanner app that doesn't want me to subscribe to a mailing list and doesn't ask for monthly payment?

Free or one time payment only.

Apples built in Notes app does pretty well these days.

I'm on Android, sorry.

SwiftScan has a one time payment option AFAIK, that's the one I used.

No, I installed it and saw they offer a subscription. There is no one off payment, they offer a yearly VIP package for £35.99.

Huh. I've checked by purchase history on the Play Store and there's a 2016 May charge for SwiftScan Plus, no active subscriptions. I've got the iOS version on the iPad, fully unlocked, also no subscriptions.

I guess they eliminated the one-time purchase option. Bastards. No way I'd pay £36 for this yearly. Netflix doesn't cost that much more!

I’ve used and liked Genius Scan for a long time. Roughly six or seven years.

iOS notes!! hit the camera button from a note, scan multiple pages, turns it into a PDF

If you’re looking for discovery scope out Memos. Been using it for years, happy customer. It indexes all images, I snap menus and receipts and search is instant plus everything is on device.

Has this changed your mind about hosted third party services? I have seen a number of people bitten by this kind of vendor behaviour, but they swiftly go back to making the same mistake.

How safe is my data if I use Notes on Mac and then upload it to iCloud?

The reasoning is that Apple is a trillion dollar company and they've no interest in screwing me over. I know it's naive but a consolation I guess. If not, what would be an alternative?

They do have an interest in making sure you can’t take your data with you if you leave which I would argue is a type of screwing you over.

For a long while, notes backend used IMAP.

I lost a bunch of notes that I didn't realize were stored on an email account that went away.

It’s certainly changed my mind.

Now, part of my vetting process for new services is “can I not just get my data out, but also the metadata I care about?”. That’s done with the first few projects/documents/whatever, and then because of being bitten in the past, I know I must do the same export at least twice a year in order to know that the company has not silently restricted it.

I just take photos of documents and tag them in the Photos app, which OCR’s documents out of the box now.

> I still use Evernote for scanned documents

In my opinion, that is Evernote's one and only killer feature.

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