More up to date tips and tricks?

Talk, speculate, discuss, pontificate. As long as it pertains to Hazel.

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More up to date tips and tricks? Wed May 06, 2020 4:51 am • by Ben Curry
Hi,
I first set up Hazel quite a few years ago (maybe 5+) and never went back to it. (truly set-up and forget!)

I recently changed to a new iMac and had to re-download hazel so it has go the looking again at what else I can add. It seems most of the guides on these forums were written for a time that is very far removed from the tech we have now.

Most of my rules are based around processing invoices or statements that do not get emailed to me. Anything via email gets sorted with gmail forwarding.

1. Snail mail - Are there any apps that have OCR included? I want to photo a document and have it auto upload to a file. Then have hazel take over.

2. Downloads file - When I download a file I want to set up the same process. What the best way of doing this currently?

3. Email attachments - What the best way to pull email attachments from gmail and download?

Thanks in advance.
Ben Curry
 
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Re: More up to date tips and tricks? Wed May 06, 2020 9:24 am • by Mr_Noodle
1. There are plenty of OCR packages out there. PDFPen and ABBYYY FineReader are two of the more popular ones here.

2. Not sure if you need to do anything special here. If a file appears in a folder, then Hazel can process it.

3. Depends on the client you are using. Usually there's some option to save an attachment somewhere.
Mr_Noodle
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Re: More up to date tips and tricks? Mon Nov 16, 2020 7:56 pm • by pyrrh0
I use the Google Drive app on a Pixel smartphone. It has a scan option that will auto crop/rotate/straighten/contrast any documents I take a picture of with the camera, convert it to B&W, and save it to my G Drive. I have the Google Backup & Sync app running that keeps my G Drive synced to a local folder. Hazel watches this folder, and when new scans arrive they're moved out of G Drive to a scans folder on my local drive, OCRs them if they have text, displays a notification w/sound to confirm its processing what I just scanned, and then other Hazel rules work on processing based on OCR'd content. I deal with a lot of receipts as part of my job and it winds up saving me a lot of time.

I use the tag command-line utility 'tag' (https://github.com/jdberry/tag/) as part of my Hazel workflow to manage some of this, as I keep track of things like whether a file has been OCR'd or not with them. tag can not only display and edit tags, but generate file lists based on what tags you're looking for.
pyrrh0
 
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Re: More up to date tips and tricks? Wed Nov 18, 2020 4:20 pm • by jbrwilkinson
We scan all our paperwork via Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i, OCR it with the bundled Abbyy FineReader and then a suite of Hazel rules names and moves it to a shared iCloud folder structure like:

Paperwork/
<year>/
Bills/
Invoices/
Letters/
Statements/
Receipts/

etc, all with subfolders for who sent the paper, or with which method did we pay, etc.

There was a really good Book on how to set this type of thing all up: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/paperless/id520393162
jbrwilkinson
 
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