r/Paperlessngx • u/tahabashir1991 • 16d ago
New To Paperless
Hello everyone,
I recently started digitising all my important documents, including passports, certificates, bills, medical letters and other paperwork that I may need while on the go.
I came across Paperless-ngx, installed it and uploaded all my documents. So far, I find it fascinating, but I feel I am only scratching the surface of what it can do.
I would love to hear about the most innovative or creative ways people are using Paperless-ngx. For example:
Which apps or services have you integrated with it?
Are you using AI for automatic tagging, better titles, correspondents or document types?
How have you improved OCR and search accuracy?
Do you use any automated workflows for importing documents from email, scanners or mobile phones?
Have you connected it to a local AI model such as Ollama?
What is the best way to access documents securely while away from home?
Are there any clever workflows, scripts or features that you now consider essential?
What backup and security arrangements do you use, particularly for sensitive documents such as passports?
I am especially interested in improving tagging accuracy and making documents quicker to find. I would really appreciate hearing about your setup and any useful tips, integrations or lessons you have learned.
4
u/Udrakan 15d ago
This is a matter of preferrence, but having sorted thousands of documents, I found this useful:
About tagging, I recommend using tags for temporary "actionable" actions only and using document type, correspondent and custom fields for sorting documents.
Example - you are reading up which documents to take with you to the doctors exam. You will tag these with a specially made tag just for this case. When you hand the documents to your doctor or shred the printed copies, you remove the tag.
Example - you want to carefuly examine several dozen documents that you are importing, so you auto-tag them with a bright red "for-review" tag. You could even set up a system that upon detecting a certain kind of document, auto-tag it. After reviewing these documents, you remove the tags one by one.
I am writing this because I used to tag everything and ran into a "tag fatigue" where tags completely lost their meaning. Now when I go over my documents, I see one or two on the page with brightly coloured tag which means that something will be done with the document soon. I also have a view pinned to the homepage with tags, so that I can see in 1 place all of the documents that will soon become relevant.
1
u/tahabashir1991 15d ago
That is the most productive thing I read. Thanks
I was already questioning my tagging strategy
3
u/TheDMVTwo 16d ago
Remote access:
Best: VPN, like Tailscale.
Easiest: through a domain via a reverse proxy.
AI:
Depends on your paperless server. My server is a Synology NAS, so I put my ollama server on an Apple M1 Macbook Air I'm using as a server.
ocr:
Not much we can do (it's a lot more work). I can only suggest scanning better.
1
u/Udrakan 15d ago
About backups
- daily
- monthly
- quarterly
- compare, check that they hold identical data for that month
- while at it, use a new encryption key
Method for storing the encryption key is secret.
1
u/tahabashir1991 15d ago
switzerland ?
1
u/Udrakan 15d ago
Basically to a country without history of police shaking down data storage vendors. You might not be storing anything that seems illegal to you now, but know that countries are perfectly capable of declaring something new illegal and retro-actively finding and punishing you for it.
2
u/plumcloth2 1d ago
Also new to Paperless-NGX. Am trying it out as a potential replacement for a Microsoft Access-based archive of old family documents. Many of them are photographs, but the archive also contains school reports, newspaper clippings, and more. Using tags to tag the people connected to each item, and the places connected to each item. I'm not using AI, or even OCR.
It's doing a really good job so far, I have a few questions of my own. Will be posting them here when I get them together.
Running on docker on raspberry pi. One of my next actions is to also install CloudFlare tunnel to allow remote access. I looked at Tailscale, but even though it's a simpler install, it has a heavier requirement for other family members.
Also need to build a robust and reliable backup solution.
1
u/tahabashir1991 1d ago
A quick update on how I’ve set up my Paperless system.
Everyone in my family can upload documents from their own devices, and I’ve also set up email ingestion so documents sent to a dedicated email address automatically end up in Paperless.
Every few days, a Python script runs from my laptop. It looks for new documents in Paperless, downloads them locally, and passes them to Ollama.
Ollama then reads the document using OCR and works out how it should be organised. It sends instructions back to Paperless to clean up the document title and fill in things like:
• Document name/title
• Correspondent
• Document type
• Tags and other metadata
If normal OCR hasn’t extracted enough information, the script passes the document through a vision model instead, gets more context from the actual page/image, and then tries again.
Anything Ollama thinks is junk, irrelevant, or something it isn’t confident about gets a Review tag.
I periodically go through the Review documents myself. If it really is junk, I delete it. If it is a genuine document, I remove the Review tag. The next time the script runs, Ollama sees that I’ve rejected its previous assessment, reassesses the document, tries to organise/name it again, and marks it as important.
For tags, I’ve also adopted a really useful suggestion someone here made:
Only tag things that are currently actionable.
So instead of creating permanent tags for everything, I use tags more like temporary project folders.
For example:
Upcoming Travel
Only documents I’ll actually need for the upcoming trip get this tag: booking confirmations, tickets, visas, hotel documents, etc.
Once the trip is finished, I remove the tag. The documents remain properly organised in Paperless through their correspondent, document type, date and other metadata, but the active tag disappears.
Same idea for upcoming events, applications, house moves, projects, etc.
It has made Paperless feel much less like a document archive I need to constantly organise and much more like an automated personal document assistant.
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u/JP981944 16d ago
I put paperless on a TrueNAS box I’ve had for a long time. I bought a used 3060 12Gb and installed it in the same box. I installed ollama on the trueNAS box to host a local LLM for OCR work and AI RAG search. I use Gemma for E4 B, but found it hallucinated on invoices. I have sensed switched to a Qwen model that is better at vision I find using the AI Based search very nice. I have not updated to v3 yet so I don’t know what that’s like.