[Paperless (click me)](https://github.com/the-paperless-project/paperless) is an application by Daniel Quinn and contributors that indexes your scanned documents and allows you to easily search for documents and store metadata alongside your documents.
Paperless-ng is a fork of the original project, adding a new interface and many other changes under the hood. These key points should help you decide whether Paperless-ng is something you would prefer over Paperless:
* Interface: The new front end is the main interface for paperless-ng, the old interface still exists but most customizations (such as thumbnails for the document list) have been removed.
* Encryption: Paperless-ng does not support GnuPG anymore, since storing your data on encrypted file systems (that you optionally mount on demand) achieves about the same result.
* Resource usage: Paperless-ng does use a bit more resources than Paperless. Running the web server requires about 300MB of RAM or more, depending on the configuration. While adding documents, it requires about 300MB additional RAM, depending on the document. It still runs on Pi (many users do that), but it has been generally geared to better use the resources of more powerful systems.
1. Buy a document scanner that can write to a place on your network. If you need some inspiration, have a look at the [scanner recommendations](https://paperless-ng.readthedocs.io/en/latest/scanners.html) page. Set it up to "scan to FTP" or something similar. It should be able to push scanned images to a server without you having to do anything. Of course if your scanner doesn't know how to automatically upload the file somewhere, you can always do that manually. Paperless doesn't care how the documents get into its local consumption directory.
- Alternatively, you can use any of the mobile scanning apps out there. We have an app that allows you to share documents with paperless, if you're on Android. See the section on affiliated projects.
2. Wait for paperless to process your files. OCR is expensive, and depending on the power of your machine, this might take a bit of time.
3. Use the web frontend to sift through the database and find what you want.
4. Download the PDF you need/want via the web interface and do whatever you like with it. You can even print it and send it as if it's the original. In most cases, no one will care or notice.
* Supports PDF documents, images, plain text files, and Office documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and LibreOffice equivalents).
* Office document support is optional and provided by Apache Tika (see [configuration](https://paperless-ng.readthedocs.io/en/latest/configuration.html#tika-settings))
* Paperless learns from your documents and will be able to automatically assign tags, correspondents and types to documents once you've stored a few documents in paperless.
If you want to see some screenshots of paperless-ng in action, [some are available in the documentation](https://paperless-ng.readthedocs.io/en/latest/screenshots.html).
Alternatively, you can install the dependencies and setup apache and a database server yourself. The documenation has a step by step guide on how to do it.
Read the section about [migration](https://paperless-ng.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setup.html#migration-to-paperless-ng) in the documentation. Its also entirely possible to go back to paperless by reverting the database migrations.
Paperless is currently available in English, German, Dutch and French. Translation is coordinated at transifex: https://www.transifex.com/paperless/paperless-ng
If you want to see paperless in your own language, request that language at transifex and you can start translating after I approve the language.
Feature requests can be submitted via [GitHub Discussions](https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng/discussions/categories/feature-requests), you can search for existing ideas, add your own and vote for the ones you care about! Note that some older feature requests can also be found under [issues](https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng/issues).
For bugs please [open an issue](https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng/issues) or [start a discussion](https://github.com/jonaswinkler/paperless-ng/discussions) if you have questions.
There's still lots of things to be done, just have a look at open issues & discussions. If you feel like contributing to the project, please do! Bug fixes and improvements to the front end (I just can't seem to get some of these CSS things right) are always welcome. The documentation has some basic information on how to get started.
If you want to implement something big: Please start a discussion about that in the issues! Maybe I've already had something similar in mind and we can make it happen together. However, keep in mind that the general roadmap is to make the existing features stable and get them tested. See the roadmap above.
Paperless has been around a while now, and people are starting to build stuff on top of it. If you're one of those people, we can add your project to this list:
* [Paperless App](https://github.com/bauerj/paperless_app): An Android/iOS app for Paperless. Updated to work with paperless-ng.
* [Paperless Share](https://github.com/qcasey/paperless_share). Share any files from your Android application with paperless. Very simple, but works with all of the mobile scanning apps out there that allow you to share scanned documents.
* [Paperless Desktop](https://github.com/thomasbrueggemann/paperless-desktop): A desktop UI for your Paperless installation. Runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows.
Document scanners are typically used to scan sensitive documents. Things like your social insurance number, tax records, invoices, etc. Everything is stored in the clear without encryption. This means that Paperless should never be run on an untrusted host. Instead, I recommend that if you do want to use it, run it locally on a server in your own home.
