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I'm currently trying to switch from archiving and storing my documents in a physical form to a digitalized one.

I've scanned all of my documents. The scan itself is stored as a 300dpi JPG image file.

I'm looking for a tool which can process those images to recognize text on them. Additionally it should provide some kind of "search" functionality for easy document lookup.

I'd consider the following as 'nice to have':

  • Context analysis (recognizing multi-part documents)
  • automatic grouping (e.g. by Date if date is printed on document)
  • image correction (e.g. if image is upside-down)
  • able to scan more types of documents (e.g. pdf, png, ..)

I plan to run this on either a Windows 2016 Server or on a Windows 10 Pro system. For me, it isn't important if the application itself is accessible through a web interface or a client application. Being able to access the files on mobile by providing an endpoint to connect to is also a nice bonus to have.

I'm willing to pay a one-time price of up to 100$, ... free is better ofc.

Any suggestions? Any experiences?

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Alfresco can do this, actually I configured it for a similar use case a few years ago.

  1. Install Alfresco 2 Run and use it a bit to get an understanding of what it does. Basically, it allows you to upload documents and organize them using folders/categories/tags/aspects/metadata as you like (you don't have to use all of these, you can use only folders and tagging for instance).
  2. Set up OCR by following https://community.alfresco.com/blogs/alfresco-premier-services/2017/10/11/indexing-image-in-alfresco-with-tesseract-ocr
  3. You can now search documents (PNG, BMP, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PDF) by their OCRed text content.

Alfresco search popup

  • Free and open source
  • Web interface
  • Server runs on Windows/Linux/Mac
  • Unfortunately does not have the "nice to have" features you mention.
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  • Thank you! I'm for sure going to try it out and get back to you, looks promising though
    – user31918
    Mar 27, 2018 at 16:18
  • tbh, I don't have a good impression of it after trying to work with it for several hours without making progress... creating users works but displaying their details doesn't. Also, the created user cannot use the web interface (permission issue?), trying to delete the sample files which are provided also didn't work correctly and uploading files also failed - I'm not convinced. maybe something 'cleaner'/slimmer ?
    – user31918
    Mar 28, 2018 at 18:20
  • Do you mean users can not log in? Or they can not enter the "site" you created? You can set the "site"'s permissions so that everybody can see it after logging in. You can delete the samples if you log in as admin. You can post Alfresco questions to superuser.com :-)
    – Nicolas Raoul
    Mar 29, 2018 at 3:17
  • No the login itself works, but right after a screen is displayed stating "something is wrong". no further actions can be performed from there. I had to delete the local cache and re-login with the admin account. Also, deleted the sample data with the admin account didn't work
    – user31918
    Mar 29, 2018 at 6:50

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