[rayshan]

Genuine question: for simple needs, why use this or DevonThink over macOS' built-in features? macOS now does OCR (Live Text), has tagging, and spotlight search is fast (but sometimes presents too many results to be useful). I even stopped splitting PDFs into separate documents and organizing them into folders. I just search.

[phodo]

Does auto OCR work on iCloud files ? For example: I scansnap a huge collection of documents to a folder that is on iCloud (synced w desktop). It works great because it is so simple. However if I have, say, PDF document, will the Mac ocr functionality perform the OCR if the doc is on iCloud and will I then be able to search for the text in that doc via spotlight / finder ? I tested this a few years ago and the search on content inside scanned PDFs did not work. I had looked at Paperless but decided to stay on Mac os file system.

[rayshan]

Are you talking about iCloud Drive? As far as I can tell, files in there are just normal files, so Live Text works. You can easily put a screenshot / pdf in there and see.

[ndsipa_pomu]

This is more designed for a self hosted server, so if you want multi-device web access then it's a great solution. I can download a PDF on my android phone and upload it to my paperless-ngx instance in a couple of clicks and easily edit the tags as necessary. It's great for travelling as you're not reliant on having a locally installed application on your chosen device with you, and of course it would still be available if you lost your main device and only had your phone on you.

[rayshan]

Makes sense, but how about Dropbox / iCloud Drive as alternatives? PDFs / images are somewhat small (at least relative to videos). I just stuff all my PDFs in Dropbox. I'm almost completely paperless and I don't seem to accumulate that many scanned docs to fill up even the free tier storage space.

[LVB]

I used to be the target audience and really enjoyed having my system just right, sorting and tagging everything, etc. But over the years I realized that I wasn’t really benefiting much, and gave SwiftScan on my iPhone + dumping into and iCloud folder a try. For my needs, this has worked fine. It is rare I even need to refer to the scans, and the macOS OCR + automatic dates usually let me find the doc quickly. In the worst case I browse thumbnails.

[darkteflon]

Yeah. I had a Devonthink-based setup but after one too many database corruptions I threw in the towel. Now I just OCR scan everything into a few MacOS folders and search using Houdahspot (Spotlight, I found, was not suitable for fine-grained search). I’m very happy with the setup.

[rayshan]

HoudahSpot looks cool! What kind of query do you use it for that Spotlight can't find for you?

[acka]

Obvious answer: because, contrary to popular belief, not everyone uses macOS.