a nextcloud based document management

a list of bash scripts to stop wasting my life time with manual document management

Why?

• You are searching for an efficient way to manage the wave of documents flooding Your mailbox and email inbox?
• You don't want to strip all Your privacy and handover these documents to companies who provide payed document management services?
• You are sick of wasting time searching for a bill, contract or document Your postbox was annoyed with in 2009?

That's why I am here.

I am a developer who wants to solve exactly this problem.

How?

I believe in private cloud services (like Nextcloud). Creating a virtual webspace, registering a cheap private domain and starting the cloud software docker container has never been easier easier easier.

What private cloud software (currently) still misses, are all these document management functionalities:

• optimize a documents photo and make it being used like a "scan"
  => taking a photo should be effort enough
• read the photos content (OCR) to make the document searchable
  => file tagging, meaningful file names and folder structure
• archive these documents in a way that's easy to handle
  => replace closed document management systems with nothing but a clear and searchable file and folder structure
• make all this shit run automatically to stop wasting my lifetime

How far did this project come?

The existing bunch of scripts can run on a Linux based PC (I run Ubuntu) using

• tesseract OCR software and
• imagemagick image manipulation software.

The state so far:

• does not (and is not planned to) interact with a scanner or scanning software, but wants the user to just take a photo with a modern mobile device and sync it to the folder structure of this system (by using a private cloud service like Nextcloud).
• does still not optimize images clever, but requires a good taken photo of a mobile device. Until this feature is ready I recommend modern mobile devices having a "scan" function in devices camera app.
• automatically runs image resizing with imagemagick to minimize size of the result PDF file.
• automatically runs OCR software tesseract to create PDF files with overlay text areas to make the PDF content searchable.
• does still not identify key words to optimize PDF file searchability with tags and optimized file names.
• does still not interact with any cloud service (but runs in my local installation inside the folder structure synchronized by Nextcloud).