Hacker News Reader

Comment by ydant | Hacker News Reader

There was a pretty big discussion about paperless-ngx a couple of months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37800951 (183 comments)

I tested it out then and am considering migrating from my current system (Google Drive) to using a self-hosted approach. Paperless seems to have a good approach for minimizing the mental overhead of ingesting and categorizing new documents - which is what ultimately leads me to stacking documents up for months before processing them. My initial pilot run was promising, but I haven't gotten around to switching yet.

From the changelog, it's not really clear to me what's notable about this release, especially as a new/potential user.

This page is a better introduction to the product, although it doesn't mention the v2 release yet:

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

View on HN

I've been using Paperless for several years now very happily and can recommend it over my previous system, also Google Drive. During the transition I found it helpful to set up a cron which (A) made an export of Paperless and (B) uploaded that export to a Google Drive folder.

One feature which seems to be quite a nice improvement (speculating as I haven't upgraded yet) is consumption templates [0]. My workflow involves an ADF scanner with an Android application, sharing the scanned PDF with Paperless Share [1] and then it's uploaded to the server via API. It seems that consumption templates will enable adjusting tags/sharing settings/permissions of a document at ingestion time based on where it's ingested from.

[0] https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/pull/4196

[1] https://github.com/qcasey/paperless_share

I use syncthing to sync from paperless data folder which runs on Kubernetes (k3s).

It's a one-way sync. Paperless is the authoritative location. The only reason I back up to Google drive is so that my phone has easy access to the documents I may need on the go.

There are two dedicated mobile apps for Paperless: - https://github.com/paulgessinger/swift-paperless (iOS only, nicer interface) - https://github.com/bauerj/paperless_app (iOS and Android, built in scanner)

I use them in combination with Tailscale, both can be used to rename documents and edit tags.

Could you specify how it improves over using Google Drive or similar? Is that "just" because you control the hosting, or is the experience better?

Personally, I think it isn't really an improvement over Google Drive. Drive offers so many more features, an office suite, integration with many other Google services, etc.

That said, I don't think Paperless is supposed to fill all those gaps. For me, its sole job is to make scanned documents searchable (from anywhere with Tailscale) and durable (with encrypted off-site backups). Having this isolated from a Google account with already too-far-reaching access is a benefit in my opinion.

Edit: rereading the context, I think you were referring to how I used Google Drive before Paperless. In that case I just stored scans in Google Drive. I struggled to organize consistently and search was lackluster. Paperless improves on these, but also is much more hackable. It's easy to set up post ingestion scripts, backups, email ingestion, etc.

One feature that isn't mentioned on this release that I was looking for before actually got added in the RC1 for 2.0.0:

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

    * Feature: Implement custom fields for documents @stumpylog (#4502)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com