Going Paperless With Evernote and Any Scanner On Your Mac

Going paperless

Tired of drowning in stacks of papers? Want to go paperless? Here’s how I moved all my documents to the cloud and cleared up a lot of the clutter at home. I used my old trusty photo scanner, because when all the old papers are scanned and achieved, I only have to scan the new inflowing papers, not the insane stacks of paper I had previously.

Scanning Workflow

The easiest route is to buy an advanced duplexed document scanner like the highly regarded and award winning Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 duplex document scanner. It comes with all the software you need and you just put in a stack of papers, receipts or business cards and away it goes.

There’s also a small portable scanner called Doxie Go that looks interesting, with rechargeable batteries and a SD card slot.

But I don’t have the money to buy one now so my old flatbed scanner, the Canon CanoScan 8800f, now discontinued and replaced with the better Canon CanoScan 9000F have to do at least for now. It’s not really made for scanning large amount of papers, but it does the job. I’ve made what I think is a pretty good workflow so I’ll try to describe it. Maybe you can find some nuggets here.

Scanning software

The Folder Action described below makes it possible for any program that can scan and save a file to a folder to upload automatically to Evernote. So you could use whatever application you want.

ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac

I first tried to use ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac. It is fast, easy to use and generally nice. But the file size of the finished PDF files was much larger than when compared to my final workflow. I don’t want to take up to much space on both my local disk and on Evernote. Downloading PDF files from Evernote is also much faster on my iOS devices.

A good thing about ABBYY is that this software is often included with document scanners. If you don’t have Adobe Acrobat, this will do fine and you can skip the rest of this article. But if you need a smaller file size for your scanned documents, read on.

Adobe Acrobat

After testing different solutions, I found the setting that makes the smallest, most compact PDF files that still is very readable in Evernote. And it’s searchable because of Acrobats built-in OCR. Evernote uses OCR on uploaded images and documents but if I decide to leave a copy on my computer, I want the PDF to be searchable.

The Workflow

I want the scanned document to be automatically added in Evernote, something that Acrobat cannot do automatically. So I created a Folder Action in Automator with an Applescript that takes the saved files and sends it to Evernote automatically. It then deletes the local file.

So first I opened Automator and created a new Folder Action that will automatically send everything dropped or saved in the folder to Evernote and then delete the item.

Add a “Run AppleScript” action to the Automator script and add the code below.

[cc lang=”applescript”]
on run {input, parameters}

repeat with i in input
tell application “Evernote” to create note from file i
tell application “Finder” to delete file i
end repeat

return input
end run
[/cc]

Settings in Adobe Acrobat

Now that we have a folder that will send our scanned documents to Evernote, we need to create an Action in the Action Wizard in Adobe Acrobat to automate the scanning and saving as much as possible.

Create a new action called “Scan to Evernote” and add the following actions:

• Add a “Start with scanner” action
• Reduce file size action
• “Save to” action, selecting the folder we created a Folder Action on earlier

Click the settings for the scanner and select your scanner and enable the checkmark “Make searchable (run OCR)”

Select “Options” for the OCR and select your primary language and set the PDF output style to ClearScan. This makes the finished document easy to read, but still very small in file size.

Start scanning your documents

Now all you have to do is to select “Scan to Evernote” from the Action Wizard menu in Adobe Acrobat. When the action is finished, the document should automatically be sent to Evernote and then deleted from the folder. You now have access to all your papers, documents, receipts etc from both your Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad or Android phone. Very handy!

If you have any suggestions of making this better, please feel free to write in the comments.