I’ve got a newish HP multifunction printer and scanner. I also have a big pile of paperwork I’d like to scan. The HP hardware is great, but the software sucks; it’s slow, clunky, and it forces me to login to my HP account every time I use it. It’s been known to hang until I force quit and reload it.
In short, there’s room for improvement.
I’m in the market for scanning software. Requirements are:
Let me easily capture a scan of paper documents with minimal fuss. The file format should be cross platform and as portable as possible. Vanilla PDF would be ideal.
Work with documents scanned from the flatbed or sheet feeder.
Let me stitch together multi page scans and save them as single document.
At the moment, I give my scans a semantically meaningful name and store in one big folder. I’d be interested in any document management features beyond this, but I’d be happy to continue with my current approach as well, so document management isn’t a dealbreaker.
Many of the documents I scan are multi-page and double sided. If there was a way to tell the scanner to expect, say, a five page double sided doc, and then have it automatically collate the scans together, that would be nice.
It shouldn’t add watermarks to the scanned image.
I don’t think I have a need for OCR - I’m happy enough with a scanned image of my documents. If OCR comes included, then I’m open to that though.
I don’t mind paying for software that makes my life easier, although lower cost is obviously better (as long as it hits the requirements above).
ETA: this will be run on a 2014 model Mac Mini running MacOS Monterey.
How big a job is this and do you plan to do other jobs of this magnitude? If it’s one-time thing, I’d go to Fed Ex/Kinko’s, or any office supply place that has a printing department. Their copiers have multi-page scanners that can scan both sides, and they’d have multiple options for you to receive files, such as stored on a thumb drive, made available as a link in email, etc. They also have bindery services for printed PDFs. Let somebody else do the work.
You’d have to do the organizing and renaming of files yourself, but you’re no stranger to that, right?
Here’s a list of free scanning software apps for the Mac you can consider.
That’s an interesting thought. We don’t have FedEx or Kinko’s here, but I’m sure we have something similar - there’s a chain called Staples that have done printing work for me in the past. I’ll look into that. The pile of paperwork is maybe 12-18” tall (not a common metric, I guess). Not all of that will need to be scanned though. First job is to triage it into “scan and keep original”, “scan and destroy original” and “just get rid” piles. Once I’ve done that I’ll have a better idea of the scale of the task.
Thanks. I’ve tried that approach before, but for large-scale scanning jobs I find it to be quite tedious. It works well for quick and dirty one-offs though.
The office-type copier/scanners, and presumably the ones at your local copy shop, will e-mail you a PDF (or whatever format you tell it) file or save it somewhere on the network, so you do not need any special software of your own.
