Management of scanned paper documents

Plugins ideas
1

I have a ton of old paper documents I’d like to digitise and keep on my computer, and Obsidian sounds like a great way to manage, categorise, OCR and search.

Some of the things I’d find useful:

  • Import and categorisation of scanned documents
    • I’d like to take photos of the documents and just drop into Obsidian and have it auto-sort for me
    • Metadata extraction
    • Auto-tagging
  • OCR
    • Handwriting support
    • Multiple language support
    • Extensive PDF support
      • current OCR plugins I tried don’t handle my PDFs at all
  • Semantic search
    • I’d like to ask Obsidian “get me invoices between 2010 and 2018” and have it return all the PDFs as a data view or a table
  • Maybe a possibility of encryption of more sensitive files

There are some plugins that provide bits and pieces but I haven’t found a comprehensive solution that works good.

What do you think, do you need something like this?

2

I know, Obsidian is great an we all love it, but I think it is still a markdown editor (on steroids).

There are good existing document management tools already. I use paperless-ngx and it ticks most of your boxes.

3

Can confirm. I was using Nextcloud for all my scanned documents, but I just set up paperless-ngx and uploaded all my docs there. Seems to be working great. I cannot really imagine shoehorning Obsidian into that use case - I would have megabytes of pdf files in my Vault, it would slow things down, and then separate .md notes to add all the notes and metadata.

(I would caution that there’s a lot of AI options with paperless-ngx and I got a little lost in the weeds. I don’t think they are required above the base paperless-ngx software.)