Software to find JPG among thousands of locally-stored scanned documents

Question

Can anyone recommend software to manage thousands of scanned documents?

Each document is scanned into a JPG file with a name of SCANNER_XXXXX.JPG, where XXXXX is an incremental counter.

The documents are typed, not handwritten.

My original plan was to open each file manually and rename it with a basic description of the contents. That would be tedious and time-consuming.

But going through that tedious process will allow me to quickly find any document I need.

Is there Windows software that will allow me to accomplish the same goal (finding any document quickly). Renaming the files is not necessary (although it is a bonus).

A few requirements:

• Work with Windows 7
• Gratis is great, but willing to pay up to $50
• No recurring fees (this disqualifies Evernote)
• Must store all data locally (no cloud services)

Answer 1

Alfresco+Tesseract can do this. On the plus side, it is free. On the minus side, it requires a good deal of configuration, it is rather memory-heavy, and it has to be running all the time. (Honestly that's quite a bit of minus points, so I hope a simpler Solr-based solution exists that only run when you need it)

Five years ago I customized Alfresco to perform this exact task.

Alfresco is a document management server, which means you can upload files (including JPGs) to it, and retrieve them when you need. Each document has metadata (author, date, keywords, etc, you can also add your own metadata fields).

You can integrate Tesseract OCR into Alfresco. Here is the technical procedure (for PDF but you can adapt for JPG): http://www.seedim.com.au/content/alfresco-search-pdf-images-using-transformations-and-tesseract-ocr

Once this is done, you have an OCR "action". The next step is to have this action executed on any JPG that gets uploaded. You can easily do that by creating an Alfresco rule. Now, after someone uploads a JPG containing the word "hello", when people search for "hello" using the Alfresco search field they will see that JPG show up in the results.

Both Alfresco and Tesseract are free and open source.