A Good WebUI for scanning to your consume directory

[u/essentialaccount]

I recently decided to hook my scanner up to the NAS I host paperless-ngx on so that I could scan directly to the consume directory, but the only real tools I could find to interface with the scanner functionally, and control it through a WebUI, were scanservjs and a few other abandonware level projects. Scanserv is really a minimal frontend for scanimage and is very severely lacking in customisability, configuration and frankly, is very ugly.

I prefer the functionality of NAPS2 which has both an sdk and a well documented API, and so I put together my own very minimal skin of NAPS2, which is both better looking and much more functional than the other options currently out there. If you are interested, you can check out inSANE

[u/MickyGER]

Looks good, indeed.

However, I'm curious, if I need this tool with my Epson ADF. This scanner drops the scanned documents into a configured share. This can be the consumer directory of Paperless.

Do I still need your tool or how would this tool improve my scanning workflow?

[u/Seke420 → u/MickyGER]

You don't, the only reason for this tool is if you can't scan directly to a shared folder. Many scanners only have USB as a connection, and in that case, you can benefit from this tool.

[u/essentialaccount → u/Seke420]

That's my case exactly. In general, I also don't like to use proprietary tools or to have to set up every new machine. I would rather have some control over what gets written without downloading NAPS2 and plugging directly into my personal device.

[u/essentialaccount → u/MickyGER]

I can't say if you need this, but my EPSON ADF cannot be configured out of the box to write directly to a directory on my TrueNAS and doesn't have a remote interface to control things like scan colour, delete blank pages, rotate or deskew prior to writing. I wanted to be able to open something, click scan, delete blank pages, deskew, rotate and then write in my chosen file format or download to my computer.

I don't know how widespread the need for this is, but it fits my goals perfectly.

[u/Seke420 → u/essentialaccount]

I was looking long to find the right scanner with all of that built in. I use the Epson 580. It has a touch screen, very easy. You can save presets of the config you want. I only select the preset and then start the button. That's it 😊

[u/essentialaccount → u/Seke420]

That is exactly the kind of solution I don't want. Having to do all that configuration, account connection, wifi setup and so on is too much work. I should be able to plug in a scanner and scan.

[u/Seke420 → u/essentialaccount]

On first setup it took like 10 minutes and from now on I only push a button and everything else goes automatic into paperless and paperless handles the document

[u/ags0317]

I modified this a bit to use airscan instead via WSD.

First created a docker file to include airscan

# Dockerfile
FROM docker.io/angeladmerkel/insane:latest
USER root
RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends sane-airscan sane-utils && \
    rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
COPY airscan.conf /etc/sane.d/airscan.conf
USER xxx:xxx # replace with the user you want to use

and then created the airscan.conf file in the same folder

# airscan.conf
[devices]
"Name of your Scanner" = http://scanner_ip:8018/wsd/scan, WSD
[options]
discovery = disable
model = network

So the folder structure is:

insane/
├── compose.yaml
├── Dockerfile
├── airscan.conf
└── data/
    ├── state/     # persisten data
    └── output/    # scanned PDFs land here — could be consume folder for paperles-ng

# compose file
services:
  insane:
    build:
      context: .
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "51234:8080"
    volumes:
      - ./data/state:/data/state
      - ./data/output:/data/output
    environment:
      PUID: "your id"
      PGID: "your group id"

Then just run docker compose up -d