Open-Source Mobile-First Receipt and Document Capture Companion for Paperless-ngx That Handles Multi-Page Auto-Crop and Direct Upload

mobile app real project •• multiple requests

Paperless-ngx is the gold-standard self-hosted document brain but its biggest weakness in 2026 is still the on-ramp: you can't actually scan a receipt from your phone with a polished app. Users keep wiring up Docutain (closed source, German vendor), Genius Scan (closed source, subscription), or scripts piped through a folder. The opening is a FOSS mobile app that does proper edge detection, multi-page scans, and direct upload over a long-lived QR-pairing token.

builder note

On-device edge detection via VisionKit (iOS) or ML Kit (Android) does 95% of the work for free. The trap is trying to bring your own model and inventing the wheel. The real engineering is the upload pipeline — wifi-resume, background queueing, and a long-lived QR-pairing token that doesn't require the user to type their Paperless URL or API key on a phone keyboard.

landscape (4 existing solutions)

The Paperless-ngx ecosystem has finally polished the server, the web UI, and even browsing, but capture is still where every install hits a wall. Existing FOSS attempts are good at browsing, not scanning.

Paperless Mobile (community Android app) Excellent for browsing existing documents but the in-app camera capture is basic and edge detection is weak — most users still go through Genius Scan or stock camera

Docutain Closed-source German app, no FOSS license, deep paid features, doesn't integrate natively with Paperless-ngx

Genius Scan Subscription, closed source, requires manual upload routing to Paperless

Stock iOS Notes / Files scan Decent scan quality but the export-and-upload-to-Paperless dance is multi-step, breaks on multi-page

sources (4)

other https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/5... "alternative OCR engines and capture-side improvements requested" 2025-09-12

other https://veluvanto.com/alternatives/paperless-ngx-alternative... "Paperless-ngx fails at capturing documents directly from your phone" 2026-03-08

reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/ "still using Genius Scan and a Synology folder, would pay for FOSS" 2026-04-29

other https://github.com/astubenbord/paperless-mobile "in-app camera capture is basic, edge detection is weak" 2026-02-18

paperless-ngxself-hostedocrmobile-capturedocuments