As much as I adore paperless-ngx for its UX, I hate it for its tech-stack. Idling it already uses 300 MB RAM, when changing a few metadata fields on a document it easily spikes to 700 oder 800 MB. That's insane for the work it actually does. Is there anything more lightweight? All I need is metadata management and a gallery with filters and previews.
So glad you mentioned Docspell! Just started getting into self-hosting and was looking into paperless-ngx though Docspell looks more geared toward what I want.
I’m happy it helped.
I tried many systems (paperless and it’s derivatives as well) and I found docspell is a lot easier to use and has all the features I need.
I can archive emails by moving them to a category and docspell converts it to pdf and saves it to the database.
I can choose a file system storage or a database storage. I chose database storage (Postgres, which is also the default) because is a lot easier to backup)
I love the way I can categorize the files by adding recipient and sender. That way I can filter all the files related to a specific person.
I can export all the files in a filter to a zip file.
I can batch edit.
That as a summary :)
My only recommendations are
to deploy it using a tag in docker and not using automatically the latest version. That way you are in control of the updates.
And always do database backups :) (using a tag in docker means you can always redeploy a specific version.
It looks like docspell might even be heavier than paperless-ngx, given that I need to spin up at least 3 JVMs.
Thanks for mentioning it anyway; don't get me wrong. But my current quest is for a lightweight solution.
Current contender might be SeedDMS, but it's a more generic DMS, not so much focused as paperless-ngx. I miss the gallery view, for example.