I wanted to weigh in here from a non-coding lay(woman) who only has a basic understanding of how DEVONthink works, knows no coding outside of basic html, is coming from Paperless (and prior to that Neat) and just wants all paperless documents in one program. For a variety of reasons I do not use the full power of these tools, and rely 100% on the search feature provided by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities to find what I’m looking for. The coding above and conversations being held are WAY over my head so I had to find another way to simply get my files into my system as easy as possible and I wanted to share incase this may help someone else.
Disclaimer…
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I have found where the Paperless PDFs live in my computer (I’ll post it down below incase this helps you as well) and will imported those files/folders into DEVONthink to solve my issue.
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I do have some files that I had added meta data/details too but I’m not at all worried about that being retained because OCR works so well for me. I’ve already tested importing a folder into DEVONthink and searching for the document and it locates it without any issue.
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My files are in folders by year/month. I’m unsure if they came over that way from my initial “Neat” program or if this is something Paperless did. I’m being extra lazy right now and just importing the folders with all the files in that same structure. Again, if it bothers me later I’ll deal with it then. Your files may be organized different but it should be located within the same master folder which I’ll explain below.
WHERE ARE YOU FILES WITHIN PAPERLESS?
1 - Locate your paperless file, which is held in your main “Documents” folder, you can see what mine is named above. Right click this file and select “Show Package Contents”.
2 - Select the new “Documents” folder that now appears and this is where your files are located. Poke around in there and you will find your PDFs…
3 - See my disclaimer above for how my files read to understand if yours look different.
4 - This images shows my PDF nested within the folders.
NOW WHAT?
1 - I’m copying all my folders sitting directly inside that 2nd Documents folder to a new folder on my desktop, it’s my temporary dumping ground as we can’t import directly through the paperless file.
2 - Then go into DEVONthink and select File/Import and navigate to folder on your desktop, select the files/folders you want to import and follow the import prompts.
3 - Now wait and watch all your files populate. Once it’s done, try searching some of your files to ensure they are there and then delete the temporary folder you put on your desktop. You don’t need to retain those files because the originals are still sitting in the Paperless folder and now you have a new copy within DEVONthink.
Hope this helps someone, I’m off to finish this process. Fingers crossed.