Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

This is nifty, but seems to lack to one thing that keeps me coming back to DEVONthink: a learning classifier.

With DT, say you’ve scanned or saved 20 docs to your inbox and you want to sort them to their long-term homes. DT will suggest folders based on how closely the new file matches the contents of those folders. It has the UI equivalent of “this looks like 2023 state taxes. Is it? This looks like kid #2’s school stuff. Is it? This looks like the older dog’s veterinarian records. Is it?”

That’s so, so nice.

Lately, as an experiment, I’ve been playing with organizing my docs with Johnny Decimal, then using the Hazel app to sort known docs with fixed structures (think bank statements and the like) into the right folders. My ScanSnap scanner’s software does OCR, so by the time docs land in the inbox folder, they’re ready for automated processing. It’s working pretty well so far, and I may stick with it.

But if I were to go back to an app, it would be DEVONthink or something with most of its features. That classifier is too darn nice, plus its smart rules, plus its scriptability, plus multi-device sync, plus Markdown notes with wiki links to stored docs, plus a thousand other niceties.

Paperless uses tags and will auto tag based on previous scans. IME it works very well (as long as you have a decently sized library of tagged documents) and seldom do I have to add my own tags. It’s not perfect, though, and sometimes I have to go in and fix some of the tags.

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/advanced_usage/

Oh! Looks like I was wrong. Nice!

I’d still miss DT’s zillion other things I’ve used over the years, but that one would have been a dealbreaker.

Previous conversation also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37521492

From what I can tell, DT is only on Mac, and not open source. If the company goes under, good luck.

You can always export the files and you could also access them directly in the applications document database if needed.

Paperless has this—when I upload a new file it will attempt to categorize it automatically using my existing tags. The more items I put in each tag the better it gets at categorizing them, so it definitely seems to be learning somehow, though I'm not sure on the details of how it works.

I've never used DT, so it's possible that their system is substantially better in some way.

I have used DEVONthink in the past, and paperless more recently, and only more recently still discovered a real need for this in my life for personal reasons. Since I am at the point of picking a route, I am curious of how you find DEVONthink and its sync needs relative to something like a web app. I don't find myself with an always-on Mac these days, switching my desk between my personal and work laptop, and I would prefer have always access to the files, as well as sharing that access with my wife. I see DEVONthink has a companion portable app, but curious if you use it and what you think of it, though honestly I'm unsure the "scan anything to a SMB share" pattern is unbeatable by features elsewhere.

I don’t share the docs with my wife. I mean, I would if she wanted to, but she’d rather I play house librarian. I currently use DT’s iCloud sync and it works well across devices. Really, I have nothing but good to say about the experience. It just works.

But I’m still experimenting with just plain files in iCloud. 99% of my mobile file access is to pull up scans of vaccination cards and things like that. It’s basically read-only from my iPhone (and iPad while I was using it). My phone’s Files app is full capable of handling that use case for me.

DEVONthink supports multiple sync methods for the same databases. You could use CloudKit or Dropbox to keep all your devices in sync, and then Bonjour and/or Dropbox to sync between you and your wife's devices.

I thought I wanted this originally when I first started going paperless but I quickly realized that as long as I OCR everything and throw it in a pile I can easily grep for "state taxes" and 2023.

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