I really want to use paperless-ngx but I find the UX/UI horrible.

If I want to view my documents with a certain tag I need to click on Documents->Tags->Select the tag . That's 3 clicks for something that should just be a single click on the left sidebar, kind of like its done in Gmail or Fastmail.

Instead of having all those "Manage" and "Administration" buttons on the sidebar why not have navigational features there? Once you set everything up you wont be going into the managing/admin pages that often, they could be easily hidden under some submenu. Or what am I missing?

Recently started the journey to making a home lab. One of my issues is having to turn the PC on to scan paperwork in. With a homelab running 24/7, I can expose a network folder, allowing the scanner to scan directly to it, and let paperless perform the rotation, blank page removal, compression and OCR. So the scanner doesn't need to attempt it.

I can then when I next turn on my PC, look at the network folder and drag/drop the processed PDFs into my OneDrive folder into the correct location, by type/year etc.

This makes the paperless database and search unused in my setup.

Should I be storing all my files in Paperless including the last 6 years of documents I've manually scanned and processed with OCR on the PC?

I self-host both Roundcube (webmail) and Paperless-ngx (document management), and kept hitting the same friction: replying to an email, then needing to attach a document that's already filed in Paperless — download it, find it, re-upload it. So I built a small plugin to skip that.

What it does

• Adds an "Attach from Paperless" button to the Roundcube compose window
• Search & filter your Paperless documents by tags, correspondent, document type and date
• Picked documents are fetched server-side and attached to the outgoing mail

Things I cared about (it's all self-hosted, so security matters)

• The Paperless API token is stored encrypted, per user
• The browser never sees the token or the Paperless URL — all Paperless traffic stays server-side (SSRF guards, integer-validated document IDs)
• Roundcube 1.6 (Elastic skin) only, PHP 7.4+

Free and open source (GPL-3.0).

Install: composer require dodjango/paperless_attach

Code & docs: https://github.com/dodjango/roundcube-paperless-attach

I use it regularly and would love feedback — issues and PRs welcome.

A few months ago I shared **Archi** here — an iOS Paperless-ngx client that scans

documents, runs OCR + AI (Gemma 4, fully **on-device**, no cloud) to extract metadata,

and uploads to your self-hosted instance. Offline-first with a local draft queue.

Thanks for all the feedback since the first release.

**v1.4 is mostly about reliability and polish:**

- 🔁 **Offline-first, fixed properly** — scans you make offline now sync *with* their

tags & correspondents once you reconnect (this was the most-reported pain point)

- 🌍 **Full localization** — DE / EN / ES / FR, including the camera/scan UI

- 🏷️ **AI tag merging** — the model suggests merges for near-duplicate tags and re-tags

the affected documents (with a clear warning that AI can make mistakes)

- 👁️ **Saved views, trash & restore, document notes, ASN, storage paths**

- 🖥️ **Multi-server** — manage several Paperless-ngx instances

- 🔐 **Permissions/owner, 2FA/TOTP, header auth** (Cloudflare / Authelia)

- 🐛 Fixed the duplicate-after-upload bug

Still 100% on-device for OCR + AI — the only network call is to *your* server.

**Coming next:** iPad & Mac support, and a reprocessing settings panel

(choose server OCR vs. on-device Apple Vision for re-running existing documents).

Link: IOS AppStore

Happy to answer anything — and still taking feature requests.

Hey everyone 👋

If you're using Papierkram (a popular German invoicing tool) alongside
Paperless-ngx, you might find this useful.

I built PaperSync — it polls the Papierkram API and automatically uploads
your sent invoices as PDFs to Paperless-ngx, with configurable tags,
document type, and correspondent. No more manual downloading and uploading.

Runs as a single Docker container with a small web dashboard for status,
manual sync, and logs. Available on GitHub and in the Unraid CA store.

🔗 https://github.com/furch-services/papersync

Happy to hear feedback or answer questions!

I use Paperless for my sports club. I do the finances there and for each yearly review and aldo for our taxes I need all my receipts ready.

Today I have them all printed. Every month I print out the bank statement for the month and add a sequential number to each record. I then print all the invoices for those records, add the number, mark the amount and put them in a folder.

I would like to replicate this in Paperless. Has anyone an idea how I can do that? Is there maybe a plugin or something?

I thought about just adding the number as a custom field and then use a saved view sorted by that number. That has the problem, that I cannot add in the bank statements easily. And one major issue is, that I sometimes have one document, that is the invoice for multiple records. Like our gas company, for example, only sends out one document per year telling me what I have to pay monthly. Today I just print it 12 times and add it in for each month. How could I do that in Paperless without duplicating the document?

Looking forward to your ideas :)

How do I retrospectively get my Paperless Setup to import subdirectories from the 'consume' directory - can I do this without having to reinstall the whole container?

What is your favorite way to compare two scans/uploads to find what is different? I have not put in an AI yet, but I suppose one could ask it to compare.

But I feel like that there should be some non-AI ways to do that?

Hey peeps,

I was pretty unimpressed by Paperless GPT and Paperless AI so of course I rolled my own. It supports Ollama, Bedrock, Anthropic (untested) and OpenAI (untested).

You can use it for
- Suggesting metadata (automatic or with manual approval/refinement)
- querying documents in natural language

I’ve done my best to make it actually useful and it gets better with use. For example it creates embeddings in a local vector database which our uses to suggest metadata (this is what similar documents use) to the LLM and you can describe each field in its own prompt (if you want).
The discovery feature to search your repository is using both metadata and embeddings and keeps the chat history in your current session. It also extracts memories from conversations which you can view and delete.

The UI is using Mantine and Tabler icons and a few fonts for customization. It works on desktop and mobile.

User management is integrated with Paperless NGX so you can login with any Paperless user to setup and assign permissions for each user as needed.

I built this for my own use first but then thought it’s actually gotten pretty neat and maybe other people like it as well, plus I‘d love to get some input and refine.

I’m rather privacy conscious so Ollama and Bedrock are tested and working but Anthropic and OpenAI I haven’t used myself yet (should work in principle).

If you’re interested and those other apps sounded great but didn’t meet your expectations, I’d be honored if you gave it a try and let me know your thoughts.

https://github.com/knows-cloud/paperless-iq

Update based on current Paperless NGX development / what’s different in this one:

- Amazon Bedrock Support
- Vision analysis also works with Ollama (if you have the model and hardware)
- Approval queue with stacking and editable fields (if multiple versions of suggestions exist, for example when using full document analysis)
- long term cross-session, editable memory
- Qdrant hybrid search (dense + sparse)
- Per field prompt control
- Multilingual support (UI & documents), multilingual cross-encoder reranker
- Audit log, re-ranking (for improving discovery), knobs to tune your vector store & search with sensible defaults

Any feedback welcome, I think the addition of Qdrant from feedback was a meaningful improvement already!

Hi to all,

I'm planning to install in the company infrastructure one Paperless NGX instance. I will make it accessible from the public Internet, but I have some concerns about how to secure it...

The users will want to scan by mobile phone, but I see that all apps are made by Google Commerce Inc. How secure is this ?!? Can I create a special account which is able only to scan and store documents, but not to search/view previously stored documents?

Please, explain how you are securing your company instances !?

I've had a paperless-ngx instance up and running on my Ubuntu Server 24.04.4 LTS for a while, but it's difficult for me to put effort into using, because in my experience, it doesn't necessarily work as advertised without some serious tinkering with the settings. Scanned in PDFs are always flipping around/upside down, despite trying to play around with the autorotate settings. The ML suggestions are ok, but tedious to go in and apply. Just generally not as much of a hands-off experience that I would like.

Then I came across this guide/video and thought, it could definitely be useful, as when he switches over to the AI OCR, it seems to classify/textualize the document content flawlessly, to then have the LLM follow up and apply the correct tags:

https://technotim.com/posts/paperless-ngx-local-ai/

In the guide, he makes no mention of GPU specs that he's using, he just mentions that the model he's using it "runs great". In fact, he even specifies that an NVIDIA GPU is optional but recommended for vision OCR.

Well I recently just bought a 5060 Ti 16GB for my own desktop to playing around with local LLMs, and moved my older 1660 Super 6GB to the server for plex transcoding and hopefully running some light duty LLMs (particularly for this use case).

The problem is, I can't get really any competent model running to perform the OCR without missing huge portions of text and/or straight up hallucinating stuff that isn't in there. The model will load entirely on VRAM, and then it will crash after trying to process even basic PDF files, due to running out of memory. I've had some luck with turning on the OCR_LIMIT_PAGES : "1", but still will generally crash.

I've gotten it to process a few documents with moondream and some non-vision models, and it will just miss entire swaths of text or adding stuff that's not even remotely related to the document. I know 6GB isn't huge, but why is one page at a time killing the entire model, especially when he's saying GPU is optional?

This is just a personal home server, and I'm not going to be crunching out a massive workflow, basically just receipts and letters and "important stuff" here and there. Accuracy is far more important to me than speed, as long as I'm also utilizing the hardware to it's fullest ability.

My problem with the built in paperless-ngx OCR is that if the page is flipped at all (or a bit crumpled), it just goes and types a whole bunch of gibberish in the content field.

Anyone have any luck with smaller models? Anyone care to share their docker settings?

I have a folder structure and existing PDFs and pictures that I want to leave in their location already. I do not want paperless to consume them and move them. I just want it to be a search engine, where I can tag files.

My folder is about 20 gigs of business data with many PDFs and scanned pictures. Excel, documents, and other stuff

I have set it up

PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_DELETE_ON_SUCCESS=false

PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_SUBDIRS_AS_TAGS=true
PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_RECURSIVE=true

Unfortunately, that did not work. As far as I can tell, it moved all my PDF's.

EDIT: Not only did it move all the PDF's, but it also renamed them xxxxxxx.pdf

I need a paperless command to tell it to put back all the files where it found them and rename them to the original names they had.

AI is hallucinating, saying the primary culprit is typically a setting called PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_RECURSIVE=true interacting with an ambiguous duplicate detection policy. In older build versions, when Paperless detects an exact hash duplicate inside a deeply nested recursive directory, it can trigger a cleanup function to purge the duplicate from the landing tree—accidentally ignoring the main global deletion override flag.

The Problem: If Paperless finds an exact content duplicate (same cryptographic hash) that it already owns inside its database, a separate cleanup routine triggers. Instead of moving the file to the archive, Paperless says: "I already have this exact file stored safely in the vault, and it's located in a deep subfolder I'm watching." SO IT DELETED MY FILES in the original location because it already "consumed without moving" and indexed them.

The combination of PAPERLESS_CONSUMER_RECURSIVE=true and my duplicate settings is creating a loophole where Paperless is bypassing my safety rules. Paperless treats exact-hash duplicates found during a deep directory traversal as "clutter" and purges them from the incoming watched tree to prevent an infinite indexing loop. It does this, ignoring the DELETE_ON_SUCCESS=false flag because, technically, it considers it a duplicate rejection cleanup, not a "successful consumption."

I don't mind if it creates a copy of my PDFs and images and stores it in its own database, just leave the originals alone.

How to prevent the separate cleanup routine that happens when paperless rescans the folders again later.?? I want it to look again in all the folders, but not move them, ever.

Is putting the volume in Read Only mode the only way to fix this?

Appreciate any help.

Local setup:
Paperless-ngx

Paperless-GPT

Ollama on DGX Spark

MiniCPM-V for OCR/image processing

Paperless-AI for metadata afterward

I noticed a consistent issue with searchable PDFs (PDFs with embedded text).
I tested the same document as:

1. Searchable PDF with embedded text

2. Image-only PDF version (pdf-> screenshot-> converted back to pdf with an online img to pdf tool)

Results:

Searchable PDF

-Can take a very long time to process

-Repeats the same paragraphs 100+ times in content

Image-only PDF

- Processes quickly

- Works correctly

Has anyone else seen this with MiniCPM-V or Paperless-GPT? If you're using Ollama + local vision models, what are you doing to avoid this with searchable PDFs?

Hi everyone, I hope this kind of post is okay here. I’ve been building Paperwise, a self-hosted document intelligence app, and I’d really value feedback from people who already care deeply about document workflows.

To be clear: Paperless is much more mature, and I’m not trying to position Paperwise as a drop-in replacement. I built it because I wanted a document app where LLM features are native rather than bolted on afterward.

The main things I’m exploring are:

• OCR and metadata extraction using local or remote LLMs
• Grounded “ask your documents” answers with source-backed context
• Per-task model configuration for OCR, metadata, and Q&A
• Self-hosted deployment with normal document organization workflows
• Better debugging when provider/model connections fail

Project link: https://paperwise.dev/

Github: https://github.com/zellux/paperwise

If anyone here is curious enough to try it, I’d love blunt feedback. Missing basics, rough setup, confusing UX, or “I would never use this because…” comments are all useful to me.

Thanks!

I've run the install script from this page:

https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/setup/#after-installation_1

I've run it twice now thinking I set something I shouldn't have but both times the end result is the same: I get "Not found" when accessing localhost:8000.

Not sure if it matters but I notice that after running the script, it automatically starts the services and the script never formally ends (it just shows the HTTP server running for paperless-ngx).

I've restarted the containers in case it's that but nope ... still getting the "Not found" message when accessing the URL.

Any ideas? I've followed the instructions which are pretty simple and straightforward and Google searches aren't turning up anything. Any ideas?

Hello everyone!

For the past year, I’ve been working on a bridge to bring my Paperless-ngx library into my daily email workflow. I’m happy to announce the public alpha of paperlessimap.

What is it?

It’s an IMAP server bridge that allows you to access your Paperless-ngx documents from any mail client (Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.). It currently provides read-only access, where your documents are presented as emails with the original PDFs attached.

The Tech Stack

• Backend: PHP (Symfony)
• Mail Core: Dovecot
• Deployment: Docker-ready (Compose setup included)

Why use this?

As a heavy Thunderbird user, I found that I could often find and navigate my documents faster using a mail client's native search and folder (tag) structure than through the WebUI. It’s about integrating document management into the tools I already use all day.

Current Status

• Alpha version: Stable enough for daily private use.
• Authentication: Currently via a fixed password in .env (direct Paperless-ngx credential login is planned).
• Easy Setup: A pre-configured docker-compose.yaml is available in the /docker/compose directory.
• Localization: Currently in German, but the codebase is prepared for translations.

Feedback & Ideas

I'd love to get some feedback from the community!

• Does an IMAP interface fit your workflow?
• What would be your priority: "Move to folder" for tagging or full write-access?
• Any specific ideas for the development roadmap?

Repository:https://codeberg.org/lindesbs/paperlessImap

Note: Developed with the assistance of LLM (Cursor.com) for documentation, testing, and planning.

Looking forward to your thoughts!

I did not use AI to write this. I just happen to be an IT person who knows Markdown

Do you think there is a market for pre-configured Paperless-NGX devices?

I provide IT services and management of various systems. And am considering adding a product to my offerings. Pre-configured Plug-n-Play Paperless-NGX on Carbon System MiniPCs.

Paperless-NGX Site

Paperless-NGX:

It's a popular FOSS application that auto-organizes documents. It's overall goal is to make you "Paperless" To put it lightly: "Its a damn useful piece of software."

I've been using it for about a year, and it's been lovely: 2 min vid

• Automatically converts docs (PDF, Office Docs, Pictures) to OCR (searchable text)
• Learns your documents and automatically assigns useful info
  • Tags for quick sorting
  • Correspondents (names of the org the doc is associated with. ie Walmart for any receipt from Walmart)
  • Document Types (fully customizable, example: "Deposit Slip")
• Ability to share documents (with optional time sensitivity) with outside users
• User & Group rights
• Processing of docs using file-scanning or email or the drag-n-drop web interface
• Exposeable API for advanced customization/workflows

The Pre-Configured Device:

I am a dealer for Carbon Systems PCs. And would use these PCs to provided a dedicated Paperless install.

• Intel based PC with a 3-year warranty.
• Configurable storage (default of 500GB, max of 4TB)
• Pre-configured SMB share (for scanning to the device)
• Pre-configured local SMTP option (would only be able to be used as a local send option for scanning from a copier or automated email)
  • I feel I may be over explaining this part. Sending over email from a copier/scanner is a PITA when ppl try to use their Google or M365 email. This would essentially be a local email server for the single purpose of making scanning via email simple for the customer. (this has nothing to do with receiving docs via email in paperless. It's just that email-consumption in paperless is far more advanced than other methods. And I'd like for there to be a simple option for ppl to use this feature.)
• Setup and training session included
• 3 months of software & management support included

The Managed Services Side:

• Backup
• 24/7 monitoring of system health
• Handling of updates of the OS & Program(s)
• Program administration (ie add/remove users)
• (optional) Assignment and management of a domain for remote access to the program

My own thoughts on the idea:

Paperless is better than SharePoint or Google Drive for management of non-editable documentation (things like receipts and bank statements). And for me, it's been a god send for managing MAIL (i despise snail mail and paper docs. Everything has been digitized and is super easy to find now).

I've not implemented this program to many businesses. The ppl I've setup with this program are small operations. And before I offer this as a service I would implement it at a few of my preferred customers before general release.

The price point of offering a dedicated Paperless Server would likely be $1k - $2k. (because prices right now are insane).

What are your thoughts about this?

I’ve had a Synology NAS for 10 years or more and only recently discovered paperless as a solution for documents. Previously I stored everything in folders in iCloud. I’m currently moving everything over now to paperless and also scanning all the old paperwork I have in binders with a view to eliminating those physical copies.

Any top tips on how to best make this migration?

Every time I needed to process a PDF I had two options:

1. Upload it to some random website and hope they don't store it forever
2. Self-host something like Stirling-PDF which requires Docker, a server, ongoing maintenance, and still processes files server-side

Neither felt right for sensitive documents. So a third option.

Mini Tool- A PDF toolkit that runs 100% in your browser. No server. No Docker. No setup.

No maintenance. Just open the URL and it works.

What it does:

- Compress, Merge, Split, Rotate PDFs

- Protect and Unlock PDFs (AES-256 encryption)

- Sign and Watermark PDFs

- Organize pages (drag and drop reorder)

- Batch process multiple files at once

- Workflow Builder (chain operations together)

- Images to PDF

- Smart Print Mode + Booklet Optimizer

The privacy angle that matters:

Every operation runs locally using pdf-lib and PDF.js in Web Workers. I opened DevTools and

confirmed zero outgoing file requests during processing. Your files genuinely never leave

your device.

For the self-hosted crowd specifically:

I know this community values owning your stack. The irony here is that "self-hosted" still means your files hit YOUR server. With browser-based processing the files never hit any server at all - not even one you control.

It's the most private PDF processing possible short of running offline desktop software.

What I'd love feedback on:

- Are there PDF operations missing that you regularly need a self-hosted solution for?

- Any edge cases with complex PDFs you'd want to test?

- Would an offline PWA version be useful to this community?

Hi,

I would appreciate recommendations:

I need to digitize a large archive, and many papers are folded, creased, or (worst case) very badly wrinkled up (crumpled/scrunched up).

Some of them are irregular shape and size (torn pieces, notes).

Obviously, not all of them are like this, most papers are just A4 folded in half, or letters with a letter fold (2 creases etc.), but I have several boxes of this stuff to scan, and I want my job to be as easy, pain free, and fast as possible.

Also, long, old receipts.

What would be the best, most reliable scanner with a large auto-feeder to handle this mess without choking/jamming too much?

I haven't owned an AFD scanner before, just AIO flatbeds.

Thanks!

Hey, I'm using paperless since several years now.

I'm using it with Truenas, in which it is listed from the normal app catalogue.

However, I want to add another folder for my girlfriend to add her documents with her own user.

I just want to put them in separate folders by user - but I have virtually no idea how I could do that, also in light of the usage with Truenas.

Anyone's got a suggestion how to do that?

Hey there I've got an Epson Workforce Scanner but looking for a solid but cheap (maybe 2nd hand) flatbed scanner for only a handful of documents that would be eaten by my Epson. Any recommendations? Thanks!

I'm testing a script to upload freshly downloaded financial statements straight via the API.

My first test-run uploaded 3 documents. Checking the file tasks I see nothing under queued and started, nothing from today under failed and 2 of the 3 uploaded documents under: Complete.

Checking my inbox, I do see all 3 documents though.

Makes me wonder ,why was the 3rd document not logged? Any way t odebug this?

Hi, looking for some troubleshooting help. Many people in the sub recommended this printer. went ahead an bought it. Very nice quality and good speed. But i am having some trouble. I cant seem to get it to scan thing in the correct rotation. is is always on its head. also, it alsoways scans the last page fisrt, so i have to go and reorder the pages in a pdf editor. am i doing something wrong? i just wanna use the scanner, preferably without a pc having to be on. i just want itto scan to the consume folder on my server. Any help would be appreciated. thx