Paperless
Paperless is a simple Django application running in two parts: a Consumer (the thing that does the indexing) and the Web server (the part that lets you search & download already-indexed documents). If you want to learn more about its functions keep on reading after the installation section.
Why This Exists
Paper is a nightmare. Environmental issues aside, there’s no excuse for it in the 21st century. It takes up space, collects dust, doesn’t support any form of a search feature, indexing is tedious, it’s heavy and prone to damage & loss.
I wrote this to make “going paperless” easier. I do not have to worry about finding stuff again. I feed documents right from the post box into the scanner and then shred them. Perhaps you might find it useful too.
Paperless-ng
Paperless-ng is a fork of the original paperless project. It changes many things both on the surface and under the hood. Paperless-ng was created because I feel that these changes are too big to be pushed into the main repository right away.
NG stands for both Angular (the framework used for the Frontend) and next-gen. Publishing this project under a different name also avoids confusion between paperless and paperless-ng.
If you want to learn about what’s different in paperless-ng, check out these resources in the documentation:
Some screenshots of the new UI are available.
Read this section if you want to learn about how paperless automates all tagging using machine learning.
Paperless now comes with a proper email consumer that’s fully tested and production ready.
Paperless creates searchable PDF/A documents from whatever you you put into the consumption directory. This means that you can select text in image-only documents coming from your scanner.
See this note about GnuPG encryption in paperless-ng.
Paperless is now integrated with a task processing queue that tells you at a glance when and why something is not working.
The changelog contains a detailed list of all changes in paperless-ng.
It would be great if this project could eventually merge back into the main repository, but it needs a lot more work before that can happen.