Hey there everyone.
I hope this life is treating you well, wherever in the world you may be.
I just found a new free app called Riffo (https://riffo.ai) that has saved me hours and hours of frustration when it comes to renaming files that I’ve scanned. Yes there are loads and loads of posts in this forum, as well as DevonThink and Hazel forums, where users have shared ways to automatically rename files as part of a scan, import and rename workflows that are semi-automated.
After years of trying this myself, I’ve given up and came up with a manual method that works fast, and eliminates a lot of complexity with scripting, etc.
Backstory: My wife is a foodie. And she’s old school in that she likes to print out recipes and refer to them during the cooking/baking process. For years, this has driven me up a wall because of all the wasted paper/ink, and the drawers and drawers full of papers, and file folders full of recipes. Anytime she wants to refer to something, she spends hours looking for the recipe through thousands of printed out pages.
In the past, I’ve tried a lot of different workflows, apps and solutions to convert paper back to a digital format but it’s been hit and miss. Largely miss.
But thanks to the scanner, Riffo, and DevonThink, I was able to scan 300+ recipes (approximately 500 individual pages) in just under two hours into searchable PDFs (OCR), rename all of them in bulk with Riffo so that the file was renamed to the recipe title, and then import them into a dedicated DTP3 database for her recipes. I was then able to create a sync between DevonThink Pro 3 on my MacBook to DT3 Mobile on her iPad.
The result is a fully searchable database of any recipe, by any ingredient, or other search term.
The workflow is outlined below, and is manual. While I could attempt to automate various aspects to speed things along, I found that manually scanning each recipe, and having the Epson SmartScan app save them to a desktop folder was perfect as it allowed me to separate and scan recipes to individual files. The ES-865 is so fast that it made short work of the scanning process.
I configured the app to OCR the document during the scan process, and then use a date time stamp with the word “recipe” in the filename when it saved it to a dedicated folder on my desktop.
After all the scanning was done, I installed Riffo (Free to download and install, no ads, etc .) and was able to use its AI features to rename all 300 plus files in bulk. The crazy part is that it got 98% of the renaming correct with out me having to lift a finger.
Once the renaming was complete, I imported the PDFs to a dedicated DTP3 database and the project is now complete.
If you haven’t heard of or tried Riffo, you may want to check it out to see if it will work for your particular workflow and requirements. The app supports a number of filetypes and while it does have a few interface quirks, I found it to be fast and accurate enough for my needs.
I get that this might not be viewed as a power user kind of post, but I figured it was worth mentioning because the app helped me make progress and complete the project without the headache and hassle of having to stitch together multiple different apps with AppleScript or JavaScript for Automation.
So glad this is done. Now all I need to do is convince my wife that printing to PDF and adding the file to the devonthink database is the best way forward. We get to save costs by not printing, which is far more environmentally friendly, and we get to save a bit of space in the kitchen by not having drawer-fulls of printed out recipes.
Cheers,
//Shawn
