I just spent an hour selecting a scanner for us to use for our small business and personal needs, but I did this without considering being able to input to DTProOffice. I’m wondering if I should cancel the order and get something else, so any advice would be welcome. The one I ordered is a “Brother ADS1000W Compact Color Desktop Scanner with Duplex and Wireless Networking.” Does anyone know if this will work with DTPO?
Thanks in advance,
Bob
It depends on what you mean by “works with DTPO”.
Technically any scanner that works with macOS will “work with” DTPO since you can usually scan to an indexed folder in Finder, scan to the special “Inbox” folder DTPO installs in your Finder sidebar, or use AppleScript or an app like Hazel to get your files into DTPO regardless of the hardware you use.
Almost all macOS-compatible scanners will work with the OS’s image capture app which DTPO also draws from when you use the built in Import from Scanner menu item in DTPO.
Was there a specific form of integration you were looking for?
I’ve never used a scanner of any sort with DTPO (only had DTPO for a few months and, frankly, haven’t used any of it’s capabilities beyond what DTP can do), so I’m simply not up to speed on any of it. I vaguely remember something about Snapscan scanners being directly compatible, but that’s about it. Honestly I didn’t even remember that DTPO put an “Inbox” in my finder sidebar, but you reminded me and there it is. I guess I’ll just go with this scanner, scan to that folder, and see how it goes.
Thank you very much for your response.
Here are some other (somewhat older) conversations here from other users with (different) Brother scanners.
I have a recent Epson which is similar to what you use. I use File > Import > From Scanner or Camera… on the DEVONthink menu, which opens “Image Capture”. This is also what @scottlougheed suggested. Make sure the scanner is connected to your computer first, and is on. The process is pretty simple. You might need to make a couple of scans to get the hang of it.
You should NOT scan to the Inbox folder in the Finder sidebar. The default location is usually ~/Pictures and we suggest that, unless you have another folder being processed by Hazel, Folder Actions, etc.
I appreciate the replies, but now I’m really confused. Why shouldn’t I scan PDFs into the Inbox folder? What happens if I do? I definitely don’t want them going in with my photos. I’m going to go check out this Hazel app you are talking about; never heard of it before.
OK, I checked into Hazel and it is yet another helper app that I simply don’t have time to implement, maintain, keep updating, etc. Could someone please give me a usable workflow for scanning PDFs (I’ll never scan as jpg) and getting them into a specific folder in DTPO without having to use third party apps? The scanner can scan into a folder and then I can manually drag them into DTPO, but doesn’t that sort of defeat the purpose of the “office” part of the app?
Thanks in advance for any help you can give.
I’d recommend checking out some of what David Sparks has written about going paperless:
https://www.macsparky.com/paperless/
and hazel specifically:
https://www.macsparky.com/hazel
and ESPECIALLY:
https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2015/10/automating-invoice-processing-on-my-mac
Re: Getting scans into a specific folder WITHOUT third-party software, the ease of this depends on the diversity or granularity of the control you need.
For example, if you use the “Import from Scanner or Camera” menu item in DTPO, you can drag scanned documents into any group you wish.
Alternatively, you can scan to a specific directory in Finder that is indexed by DTPO and which stores all documents of a given type. So you might have a folder for Vet bills, a folder for car repair bills, and a folder for medical documents. Each one of these folders exists somewhere in the Finder, and you can index them in DTPO (which means you have DTPO watch them for new contents and make those contents available in DTPO as well). If you have a vet bill, set the destination to the vet bills folder in Finder – they’ll also show up in the Vet Bills group in DTPO.
If you want to automate the sorting process (e.g., just scan a pile of mail into a single folder and have at least some of it sorted by the computer) and don’t want to deal with folders in Finder and indexing, there are a couple options:
The easiest that doesn’t rely on third party software would be to have them all go into the inbox of a DTPO database. If they are OCRd (as in they contains selectable and searchable text), and you have some documents already organized into relevant groups, the “Auto Classify” feature in DTPO should do a reasonably good job of identifying the Vet bill or the car repair bill. All vet bills (or car bills, or cellphone bills) will likely contain many of the same words in the same order, so once you have a few of those documents in a group in DTPO, the next time you scan one to the inbox, “Auto Classify” should put it in the right place.
Hazel allows you to be a bit more specific and explicit. Rather than hoping the AI in DTPO will figure out your taxonomy, you can tell hazel exactly what you want done with documents that have certain attributes. You can scan all your documents into a single folder in Finder. You can tell hazel to look for certain strings in the text of documents and act on them in a specific way. So you might tell hazel to perform a specific action (e.g., move to a specific location) on every document that contains the string “Happy Paws Veterinary Clinic” (you can go even further than this too), or “Top Gear Car Repair” etc. etc.
So with Hazel set up to watch a folder in finder, all you aha etc do is scan your stuff into that folder and let Hazel do the sorting. Of course, Hazel only sorts 1) what you tell it to sort; and 2) what it can identify. So if you scan something into that folder that doesn’t match any hazel rules, it will just sit there. Similarly, if it is not OCRd, or the OCR is too poor, a rule based on the file’s contents will not pick up on that file.
depending on the volume of scanning you plan to do and how consistent the jobs are, the automation may or may not save you a lot of time. There’s no point in automating a particular scanning task you only will do once.
Thank you so much! The scanner arrives tomorrow and I’ll experiment with the approaches you have detailed! I’ll try to report back asap after getting it and trying these suggestions and let you all know how it is working. Funny you should mention “vet bills,” because one of the personal databases I want to build will have all the vet reports for our cats and the feral cats we’ve trapped, neutered, etc.
We have two healthy cats, and yet vet invoices and bills and licenses and vaccination cards etc seems to just appear out of nowhere and multiply.
I can only imagine the paperwork load of managing feral/trapped/etc. cats! Hard to know what would take over first, the cats or the papers!