[Ryan]

My parents have asked me to find a solution to their ever-growing piles of paperwork and documents. I think some others here have found their own, so I’m asking for suggestions from past experience.

Ideally, I’d like a one-button solution that allowed them to place a stack of documents on scanner auto-feeder, do some OCR and stick them all into some sort of app. I don’t know if that’s possible or not so I’m not expecting too much here. Really if they can just hit a button and have them all in a central repository of some sort, that’d be fine. Anything more is gravy.

We’ve got an Epson GT1500 but we can return that if we need to. My dad decided he wanted this for Christmas on Thursday so I didn’t have time to do a lot of research and order the perfect scanner. The software on this thing sucks bad. Looks like a poorly written Classic app (probably is).

As for organization, I’ve been looking at Bento and Yep. Bento seems like it could work but it’d take a lot more configuration and setup on my part (that’s okay). Yep seems like it’s built for this purpose but doesn’t feel mature enough, plus it refuses to scan from the auto-feeder on our scanner and there doesn’t appear to be any way to change that.

I’m thinking the best solution might be something involving Automator? Image Capture is able to work with the scanner so I can use that. I’m going to keep playing around with Automator + Bento + Image Capture but I can’t figure out how to get any OCR into that picture.

Any ideas?

[Maciej]

I'm eager to hear more about this, as well. Good thread, I thought I remembered something similar in the past but I can't find it either.

It seems to me that once you slog through the initial stack/backlog things should get progressively easier to just stay up to date.

[Ryan]

Originally Posted by Maciej I'm eager to hear more about this, as well. Good thread, I thought I remembered something similar in the past but I can't find it either. It seems to me that once you slog through the initial stack/backlog things should get progressively easier to just stay up to date.

That’s what we’re thinking. Image Capture lets me change what the buttons on the scanner do, and I’d love to be able to configure one of them to an Automator action that does all this for them.

[Kickaha]

Fujitsu ScanSnap is more or less made for this.

[Ryan]

Originally Posted by Kickaha Fujitsu ScanSnap is more or less made for this.

Wow, how did I miss that when I was searching for scanners?

I recall you have a good setup along these lines at home, right? What do you use on the software side for organizing the documents? Any special app or do you just let Spotlight do its thing?

[Maciej]

Wow those Fujitsu scanners are expensive, or is that pretty much the ballpark for scanners now?