Paperless-ngx is an extensive document management system. 3.0.0 has just been released.
It seems from a user/admin perspective that a lot of obsolete stuff under the hood got removed and they did some performance stuff, but it’s also full of AI features. There’s too many changes to read them all though, I wonder if there’s a blogpost or something somewhere summarizing the main changes.
Personally I’ll stay with 2.X for some days at least to see what people say about the new version. I’m not interested to have AI parse my documents, the alrogirthmic auto tagging etc works quite well.
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[!NOTE] Upgrading to Paperless-ngx v3 can only be performed from version 2.20.15. If you are running an older version, please upgrade to v2.20.15 before proceeding with the v3 upgrade.
I may be mistaken, but I had looked into Paperless before and saw they had AI features before this. Is it just more, or more in your face? I was under the impression they were optional, at least when I looked into it.
Honestly, this is one of those things where you need to define what AI means. Paperless 2.x used a machine learning-backed OCR library called Tesseract that has been in development since 1985.
The current version of Tesseract does use a LSTM neural network, since 2018. Is that an AI? Fuck if I know because AI is a basically meaningless term.
It’s not an LLM or a diffusion model, which is what backs a lot of the things people are calling AI nowadays.
Paperless always had some sort of primitive AI for document classification and auto tagging. I haven’t yet read the changes on 3.x but I’ve been using it for years and it’s like a dumb AI that needs a lot of guidance and manual tagging at first, but as time goes on, it “figures out” every document you throw in the ingest. I’ve been sending it emails, or uploading straight from the mobile app and its amazing, can’t go back to a folder filled with “Download(739).pdf” or “IMG_4926.jpg” files of random recipts and invoices
I agree. The AI features were very lightweight before. Just for auto tagging etc.
Hope this isn’t a shitshow.
Goddamnit. I hope someone forks 2.20.
FUCK IT THEY GOT PAPERLESS-NGX TOOO???
Fedis, what’s the best alternative?
I wonder if there’s a blogpost or something somewhere summarizing the main changes.
I bet you could use AI summarize all the changes. LOL
spoiler
Breaking changes
The biggest upgrade risks are removal of API v1 compatibility, dropping support for API version 9, dropping Python 3.10, removing support for document and thumbnail encryption, removing pybzar as a barcode reader, and changing the pre/post consume scripts so they no longer accept positional arguments.
There’s also a change that decouples OCR control from archive file control, plus a refactor of advanced database settings to allow more user configuration. Search and indexing
A major headline item is replacing the Whoosh search backend with Tantivy, along with unifying text search around Tantivy.
The release also adds a number of search-related improvements, including better fuzzy matching, highlighting in title/content searches, better handling of special characters and CJK text, and fixes for date/query compatibility during the migration. AI and document intelligence
Paperless-ngx v3 adds a larger AI feature set: Paperless AI, remote OCR with Azure AI, support for Ollama embeddings, direct LLM language selection, LLM timeout and context settings, and a revamped AI vector store approach.
It also includes fixes and safety improvements around AI indexing, chat, embeddings, and permissions, suggesting this area was a big focus of the release. Documents and workflow
The release introduces document file versions, sharelink bundles, a document parser plugin framework, and several workflow enhancements like more actions and trigger filters.
There are also new or improved document-management behaviors such as moving to trash, password removal actions, better merge dialogs, live document updates, saved view sharing, and more detailed document attributes. UI and tasks
The task system was redesigned, with a new Tasks UI, task summaries in system status, and better monitoring access.
On the frontend side, the release updates Angular to v22, moves toward zoneless reactive behavior, improves mobile search behavior, refines thumbnails and image loading, and generally modernizes the UI. Performance and storage
Performance work is a major theme: there are database indexes for common query patterns, SQLite tuning, faster imports/exports, memory reductions in document importing, and indexing optimizations.
The release also standardizes checksums on SHA256, improves bulk operations, and adds a variety of backend and file-response fixes that should help reliability and speed. Practical impact
For a fresh install, v3.0.0 mainly means newer architecture, better search, and more AI/document features. For an existing install, the main things to watch are the breaking changes around API compatibility, Python version, encryption support, and the search/index migration from Whoosh to Tantivy.
Just installed via Ansible and it’s running without any issues so far. As far as I could tell visually, it’s running much faster.
