Papermerge

The system provides a web‑based interface for storing, organizing, and retrieving scanned documents such as PDFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and TIFFs. Users can browse files in a dual‑panel layout similar to popular cloud storage services, apply colored tags, arrange items in hierarchical folders, and define custom metadata fields per document category. Versioning preserves each change, allowing multiple iterations of the same file to be kept.

Optical character recognition runs on uploaded scans using the Tesseract engine, generating selectable text overlays and populating a searchable index. Full‑text search across OCR‑generated content, tags, and custom fields enables rapid retrieval of relevant information. Page‑level tools let users reorder, rotate, cut, or extract pages without re‑scanning.

The platform is self‑hostable, open source under the Apache‑2.0 license, and supports multi‑user environments with group ownership, sharing, and a multilingual UI. It offers a REST API compliant with OpenAPI, making integration with other tools straightforward.