It’s perfect! Do you guys already do this?
I open a letter, I take it’s picture with FairScan. The FairScan-folder on my android device gets syncthinged to the ingest folder for Paperless-ngx on my “server”. Paperless imports it, deletes the file and sets the new documents tag to inbox. I decide if the document goes to the binder for important stuff, or if I just toss it in a binder with all the paper I most likely will never touch again. Next time I look at Paperless, I edit all documents with the inbox tag and remove the tag.
Mmm. I use paperless mobile but I will try FairScan. Thank you.
Wait, this is genius. When paperless has processed it and moves the original, it’s also removed from your phone, right?
Yes, paperless deletes it from the import folder which is synced with syncthing, so on android the folder is also empty
No, I use a printer/scanner combo for scanning my files. I trigger a shell script via HomeAssistant which starts the scanner, cleans and fixes the order of the pages for two sided documents, and then puts them into the paperless folder.
But your idea is great!
would you mind to elaborate more on the script? Also, what output format do you use from the scanner?
Its a hacked together shell script. I wanted to learn shell scripting, but I should’ve probably programmed it in python.
But it basically does this:
- scan pages as png via scanimage in gray scale
- convert the image into a high contrast b/w one with image magick
- sort pages if I have to combine two scans (front and back side)
- create a single pdf of all the document pages via image magick
- move pdf to the paperless folder
I won’t share it because it’s really ugly and some of the functionality can be done with paperless native, like combining the pages of two scans. Which would’ve been easier.
Thanks! And that’s ok, I’m more interested in the steps than the code itself. Do you apply any optimizations with image magik in step 2?
Yeah, I do this:
magick "$file" -limit memory 1GiB -limit map 2GiB -threshold 60% -define connected-components:area-threshold=5 -define connected-components:mean-color=true -connected-components 8 output.pngIt makes the scan 1-bit black and white. It mostly removes bright background images, if there are any on the pages. I think it works quite well for basic black and white documents, but color graphics and graphs aren’t preserved.

