(Archived) Importing troubles: duplicates or none at all (solved)

[Hitman 1]

Hi, I'm a fairly new user of Evernote and managed to go almost completely paperless with a Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 in two months. I've been having some issues in setting up a workflow which works for me because I had problems with documents being imported multiple times or not at all. With a bit of testing and the help of Evernote support I now have a workflow which uses minimal amounts of input or time from me and I'd like to share it. Mainly because in my quest to find answers to my problems, I saw numerous postings of people having the same problems.

 

My workflow looks like this:

1. - Scan Document.
2. - OCR document with external (not ScanSnap's built-in) ABBYY FineReader  software.
3. - Move OCR'ed document to a folder structure per month (e.g. c:\administration\2013\05).
4. - Let Evernote import the document.

The reason I use the external OCR software is that I want to have all my OCR'ed documents stored locally and the Dutch language isn't supported by the ScanSnap software. I use DropIt (http://dropit.sourceforge.net) to watch a specific folder and move my OCR'ed pdf files to the folder/subfolder structure where Evernote picks it up (folder: c:\administration\2013\, sub-folders: yes, source: keep).

 

The problem I had in the beginning was that sometimes documents where imported multiple times or not at all. It all traced back to the Archive file attribute. When checked, Evernote sees the document as ready for import and clears the attribute after it is imported. When OCR'ing documents, most of the time these programs use a temporary file. If this temp file is saved in one of the Evernote import folders, it is possible that these are imported during the OCR process which leads to two files. Another thing I saw happening was when the archive attribute couldn't be reset by Evernote, probably because the OCR process locked the file, leading to multiple imported files. The issue I had when none of the files where imported was because of the program I used cleared the Archive file attribute when moving, so Evernote didn't import it. Maybe a bit overkill, but in more detail this is what happens now:

1. Scan document to file: c:\temp\201305301.pdf (ScanSnap)
2. OCR document to file: c:\temp\201305301_OCR.pdf (ABBYY FineReader)
3. Archive attribute: checked (ABBYY FineReader)
4. Watch for files ending in '_OCR.pdf' in c:\temp\ (DropIt)
5. Move document to file: c:\administration\2013\05\201305301_OCR.pdf (DropIt)
6. Import (Evernote)
7. Archive attribute: unchecked (Evernote)

I hope this helps someone!