It’s perfect! Do you guys already do this?
I open a letter, I take it’s picture with FairScan. The FairScan-folder on my android device gets syncthinged to the ingest folder for Paperless-ngx on my “server”. Paperless imports it, deletes the file and sets the new documents tag to inbox. I decide if the document goes to the binder for important stuff, or if I just toss it in a binder with all the paper I most likely will never touch again. Next time I look at Paperless, I edit all documents with the inbox tag and remove the tag.
Honestly, phone scanning is a total trap for anything you actually care about. I tried this exact setup for months and the OCR quality was absolute trash because of bad lighting or a slight tilt. If a document is important enough to keep, it is worth getting a dedicated scanner with an auto-feeder. Taking photos of letters feels like a massive chore that you will eventually just stop doing after the novelty wears off.
And let’s be real about that inbox tag. That is just a digital pile of shame. I have hundreds of documents in my own Paperless instance tagged for review that I havent touched in two years. You think you are staying organized, but you are really just moving the clutter from your desk to a database. Syncthing is the only part of this workflow that I actually trust to work every single time without failing.