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Question

Scanned Image Compression in Laserfiche

Laserfiche Capture Scanning Version 9
Updated June 3, 2014
asked on January 29, 2014

My Client is using Laserfiche 9 and has scanned thousands of document without noticing the size of the scanned documents. Each document size has been scanned with 5MB/per page. All the documents are scanned with Gray scale scanning with TIFF format. Is there any way I can resize these documents and compress the size?

 

I have checked PhotoDocs, but couldn't find out the way to resize the document with lower resolution or compress the image. 

 

Please help! 

 

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Answers

APPROVED ANSWER
replied on January 31, 2014

Hi Ali,

 

To compress your files using PhotoDocs, go to Options and then check the "Use JPEG compression" box, under the General tab. See the image below:

 

 

From this menu you can play around with how much you want to compress your images in order to produce smaller documents but not lose all of the quality of the image.

 

Additionally, Quick Fields would be a great tool for this task. If you have Quick Fields, you can use the Laserfiche Capture Engine to pull contents from your repository, use the processing functionality to resize the images, and then automatically save them back into the documents they came from while retaining any metadata, tags, etc. Quick Fields is designed to process large numbers of documents at once, and should have any trouble completing this job for you.

 

Then going forward, Tony's suggestion of changing users' attributes to use image compressing would help ensure that you don't run into this situation again.

 

Finally, the image converter utility Tony referenced is specific to Laserfiche 8.1.

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View 1 previous reply
replied on February 21, 2014

Dear Kelsey,

 

The option which you have shown in the screenshot is for JPEG compression.

Please note that all the documents of my client is TIFF format.

 

I tried opening the Photodocs option as shown in the screenshot but it is not reprocessing it and neither it is reducing the image size. 

 

As far as Quick Fields is concerned my client has not purchased the license of Quick Fields. So that option cannot be used. 

 

It's so disappointing that  such a basic option is unavailable out of the box. A document needs to be re-sized with lower resolution. But there is no way to do it!!!

1 1
replied on February 21, 2014

You can't keep color and grayscale documents as TIFF LZW if you want a lower size. They would have to be saved as TIFF JPG, which is what the option Kelsey indicated does.

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replied on March 1, 2014

Its not a question about I can or I cannot keep documents in color or gray-scale. The question is how can I compress the size of existing documents in Laserfiche repository which are already saved in TIFF format. 

1 2
replied on May 29, 2014 • Show version history

The files are still going to be TIFF files if you use the option Kelsey referred to. TIFF JPEG and TIFF LZW are both TIFF files, but they are compressed differently.

 

It sounds like you are confused about what JPEG is. JPEG is a compression algorithm, and images compressed using the JPEG algorithm frequently are stored using the .jpg extension. However, images compressed using the JPEG algorithm can also be stored in other formats, like TIFF.

 

An image stored as TIFF LZW will be bigger than when it is stored as TIFF JPEG because LZW compression is lossless, and JPEG conversion is lossy. Thus, as Miruna said, you cannot keep the TIFF LZW format for your images if you want to reduce the size; you must change the way the TIFF images are compressed.

 

The option shown above tells Laserfiche to use JPEG compression for the TIFF files instead of LZW compression. If you lower the quality of the compressed image using the slider, it will compress to a smaller size.

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SELECTED ANSWER
replied on March 7, 2014

Development has noticed that the KB article has not been updated with the relevant information for users of Laserfiche 9 and later. The article will be updated in the near future.

 

Thank you for bringing up this issue to our attention.

 

The primary use case of PhotoDocs is to bring images from digital cameras and mobile devices into Laserfiche, and also to clean up images so that they can be thresholded and OCRed despite the lower image quality from cameras and mobile devices. It is not intended as a tool to enhance the compression ratio of a large number of images already in Laserfiche.

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Replies

replied on January 29, 2014

The below post references a similar situation with a couple options. The Laserfiche Image converter util referenced in the KB article allows you to adjust the compression of existing color/gray-scale images by converting them to TIFF-JPG from TIFF-LZW. Alternativley, Photodocs will allow you to convert the images to Black/White assuming they don't need the image quality Gray-scale provides. In both cases you'd want to be sure to run small scale tests and have good backups.

 

http://answers.laserfiche.com/questions/46649/Convert-a-large-number-of-documents-scanned-in-color-to-monochrome

 

2 0
replied on January 29, 2014

I guess in the cases where we needed to do this they were primarily converted PDF files and they were in the tens to hundreds of thousands.

 

As many know generating pages from PDF's result in very large tiff file sizes. (I don't know if this has changed in 9.1). We did quite a few conversions from Kwiktag where they were usually stored as PDFs that were not OCR'd to Laserfiche and ran into this issue a few different times and that's why we used his script. If you are not in the 10's of thousands yet the solutions referenced above might be easier.  

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replied on January 30, 2014

I'm not sure if the KB article (image converter) as referred in the link works with version 9. It was suggested with version 8. 

 

Secondly, with photodocs, I'm not getting any option to compress or change the image quality. Specially with the gray-scale scanned documents, I don't see any options enabled in Photodocs. 

1 0
SELECTED ANSWER
replied on March 7, 2014

Development has noticed that the KB article has not been updated with the relevant information for users of Laserfiche 9 and later. The article will be updated in the near future.

 

Thank you for bringing up this issue to our attention.

 

The primary use case of PhotoDocs is to bring images from digital cameras and mobile devices into Laserfiche, and also to clean up images so that they can be thresholded and OCRed despite the lower image quality from cameras and mobile devices. It is not intended as a tool to enhance the compression ratio of a large number of images already in Laserfiche.

1 0
replied on January 29, 2014
1 0
replied on January 30, 2014

Dear Tony, 

Its not only about the what user needs to scan, its about converting the existing documents in the repository. 

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replied on January 29, 2014

I know our company has used a custom workflow developed by Cliff Primmer to do just this (http://www.qfiche.com)

 

If you feel adventurous you could write one yourself. I know it involves exporting the document, compressing it, then comparing the size in the repository with the compressed one and keeping/replacing whichever one is smaller.  

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replied on January 31, 2014

Hi Ali,

 

To compress your files using PhotoDocs, go to Options and then check the "Use JPEG compression" box, under the General tab. See the image below:

 

 

From this menu you can play around with how much you want to compress your images in order to produce smaller documents but not lose all of the quality of the image.

 

Additionally, Quick Fields would be a great tool for this task. If you have Quick Fields, you can use the Laserfiche Capture Engine to pull contents from your repository, use the processing functionality to resize the images, and then automatically save them back into the documents they came from while retaining any metadata, tags, etc. Quick Fields is designed to process large numbers of documents at once, and should have any trouble completing this job for you.

 

Then going forward, Tony's suggestion of changing users' attributes to use image compressing would help ensure that you don't run into this situation again.

 

Finally, the image converter utility Tony referenced is specific to Laserfiche 8.1.

replied on May 29, 2014 • Show version history

I have a couple of customers that need to compress large color and grayscale images (TIFF-LZW). One customer is still on 8.3 and the other is on 9.1. Neither customer has Quick Fields.

Is it possible to use PhotoDocs to reprocess the files and to only compress the files (convert using JPG compression)? Meaning no other action within PhotoDocs would take place, such as converting to b&w or changing the contrast.

Is it possible to use the 8.1 image converter utility when the server is 9.1? I realize the LF client on the workstation running the utility would have to be 8.1. Is there any other issues in using this utility?

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replied on June 3, 2014

Please see this post.

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