I am thinking of getting a scansnap scanner (exact motel to be decided). The main function of this will be to scan physical mail for my wife to process. She is disabled and spends a lot of time in bed/upstairs. What I want to know is … can I put the paper in the scanner - press the scan button on the device it’s self then forget about it - have the documents scan to a computer downstairs and not have to do anything with the worlstation it’s self - just have them scan into a folder while I get on with other things?
Is it possible to Scan and forget in this manner or will I always have to go to the workstation and do something to make them available of a shared folder?
You can of course do so, with a little Restriction.
You can not place 10 different letters, each of multiple pages, at once into the scanner. If all letters have the same amount of pages, it will work with a setting, but you could not mix a letter with 3 pages, and one with only one page, with the standard settings within Scansnap.
However, the scan itself is very quick, and you have to remove the paper in most cases after the scan anyway, so it is not a hugh time consumption to do the scans, and the system is doing the remaining handling itself.
I normally need, for every 10 letters 2-3 minutes to run them thru my iX500.
There was once a way to scan different documents at once, by adding special divider pages, that could be recognized by the OCR, and then be able to divide the PDF into separate ones after each divider.
I found a tool that seems to be able to do something in that direction, but I have no own knowledge if that works.
I would also imagine, that someone with some knowledge into a scripting language could build a tool that could do so too, by using special devider pages, but I also do not have this knowledge.
Maybe @MacSparky could come up with an idea for this, or could use this as a “advanced lesson” within his Labs?
EDIT: I just learned, that the Auto-Split Software I mentioned above, seems to be only working on Windoofs Systems…
I use a Canon Multifunction and I can almost do what you ask, the one caveat, that others have mentioned, is that you have to scan each document, (not each page), separately otherwise you end up with one giant document. If your wife is OK with breaking up a giant document into smaller ones then you can 100% do what you want.
On the Canon, I have it set up to “scan to destination” and the destination it scans to is a shared folder on an always-on Mac. From there Hazel puts it into DevonThink, and there’s a DevonThink rule that auto-files one particular type of receipt. My machine has a document feeder that can scan 1 or 2-sided documents, so I drop the document onto the feeder, press the “Scan 1-Sided to John” or “Scan 2-Sided to John” button, and walk away.
A Scansnap scanner can be configured so that each sheet becomes a separate PDF. So you could drop a stack of 1 sheet documents, press the button, and end up with a bunch of PDFs. I’ve saved a Profile that does this, and I would post a picture here if it weren’t for my iMac being out for repair. I’ll post an image of the configuration when I get the computer back if nobody else confirms this.
The Scansnap can tell when it gets to the last page, so as long as you load one item at a time (even if multiple pages), this will work. You need to set it to scan to file (I think that is the term), and tell it where to go. Once the last page is scanned, it will create a PDF (if that is the output you choose) and put it in the desired location. As someone else noted, I don’t think it will auto-collate multiple pieces of mail if you feed them through as one, so you need to feed one piece of mail through at a time.
OK, got my iMac back from repair so can now see the Scansnap configuration.
Create a new scan profile (I named mine Separate PDFs). The trick is in File Format PDF Option… you need to check Create a PDF file per number of specified sheets, 1 sheets:
