Question

Replacement for PhotoDocs?

Laserfiche Scanning Version 11

Updated May 25, 2023

asked on June 7, 2022

Hi all,

Now that PhotoDocs is no longer available in LF vers11+, I am wondering what software people have found to replace that functionality? I have a workflow where I will scan in auto-detect colour, since I have end users who at one time thought orange, red, pink, and blue were lovely colours to print on... If I use the scanner in greyscale or B&W, those pages turn black. My work around was to scan in auto-detect colour, and then run PhotoDocs to convert the colour pages to greyscale. Worked great and gave me very readable content, with a much reduced file size.

So I am hoping that perhaps some of you had a similar workflow to address paper items printed on coloured paper. If so, what program or programs have you replaced PhotoDocs with?

Thanks!

Sue

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Replies

replied on June 7, 2022

I'm curious about this as well. The loss of PhotoDocs puts me in a bit of a tough spot because although I didn't use it often, it did solve certain problems that can't be addressed any other way.

For example, we sometimes get documents that are far too large because they were scanned in all color and PhotoDocs was the only way to effectively address the issue.

The reason PhotoDocs was so important is that we could choose which pages to convert to monochrome or grayscale case-by-case, and select multiple pages at a time, and that's critical because these documents can have over 1,000 pages and some things have to remain in color.

We can't convert entire documents to monochrome or grayscale so we don't really have any viable alternatives with the existing modules.

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replied on June 7, 2022

Despite all the business acumen, some of us are still using Laserfiche to maintain a document repository with the need to produce readable digital documents from scans. PhotoDocs was an invaluable tool in producing such material, and enhancing the scans of often not so good original copies. It even had a straightening function that did not dictate the percent of movement. There is always that one piece of paper that will not feed properly, or the one copy that itself was crooked. I find it odd that they removed a tool but did not produce something to replace that functionality.

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replied on June 7, 2022

Hi Sue,

I definitely agree that PhotoDocs is a tough thing to lose, but I must admit that some things are always better handled at the image source.

Realistically, higher quality scanners and scanning software can do a lot more than PhotoDocs to improve image quality, especially since they are working with the raw image data rather than an already-rendered image file.

As an example, we use Fujitsu scanners which do a really great job of keeping pages straight when they are well-maintained, and their software has some exceptional tools for auto-color detection, image cleanup, and other things that makes PhotoDocs fairly unnecessary for scanned images.

To present an analogy, cleanup/enhancement at the scan source is like choosing options on a new build home whereas PhotoDocs is like a remodel/renovation; it can get the job done, but it will never be as efficient or yield the same quality results as if it had been handled from the start.

That being said, I still think PhotoDocs was an invaluable tool because not all documents are coming from a scanner and without PhotoDocs we don't have an out-of-the-box option for cleaning up the documents imported from other sources; this is becoming a bigger concern as more of our content is coming in via electronic submission rather than on paper.

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replied on June 7, 2022

We have a number of clients who now will not upgrade clients to Laserfiche 11 because of this loss. Hope they maintain this backwards compatible link for some time.

I am just hoping Snapshot will not be next as they do not seem to want to implement it into Cloud or Web after all these users.

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replied on May 23, 2023

I'm not upgrading to Windows Client 11, for this reason. I use PhotoDocs frequently, because color scans take up exponentially more disk space than black & white, and many of my users don't know & can't see the difference, even though I preach scanning in B&W is better. I upgraded our repository server, but won't update the clients.

Although I'm disappointed, I understand the strategy. When a company sees a need to cut corners, they'll remove a product from a product suite and charge the same amount, instead of raising the price of the product suite. I don't know if this was the reason (reducing the need to staff dev/test), but I can't imagine any other. This reminds me of when Microsoft removed PhotoDraw from their Office Suite. Many people were upset about it. They had customers who continued to contact the core dev/test team for support, who were then working on other products, even though they officially stopped supporting it.

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replied on May 23, 2023 • Show version history

@████████ Are you using PhotoDocs to selectively change specific pages to B&W or are you converting the entire document?

The reason I ask is that if you don't have to be selective about it, you can also convert documents to monochrome using Quick Fields, or even using SDK scripts in Workflow if absolutely necessary.

The biggest benefit of PhotoDocs was the ability to selectively convert specific pages (easily) since sometimes you have a mix of color and monochrome, but there are still options for full conversions.

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replied on May 24, 2023

Jason Yes, I need to be selective, as sometimes a document might have a watermark or highlighted text or color images that need to remain visible and legible. I have to manually look at the pages before I can decide to convert to black and white.

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replied on May 23, 2023

Sue, would you mind sharing a screenshot of the Workflow? I didn't even know it was possible to detect color vs. B&W or grayscale. Even if you could give me a hint, it would be much appreciated.

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replied on May 23, 2023

As far as I'm aware, there's no auto-detection in Laserfiche itself. We use automatic color detection settings, but they're part of our (Fujitsu) scanning software, and I would suspect that this is similar in Sue's environment.

Automated color detection is extremely tricky business and it's exponentially more effective at the scan source where it still has the raw image data.

I've experimented with both custom code and paid third-party libraries, but never found anything that came close to what Fujitsu's software can do which is why I'm not surprised the functionality isn't available within Laserfiche.

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replied on May 24, 2023

Jason, I'm not doing the scanning. I'm just trying to clean up the repository of wasted disk space taken up by documents that were imported as color but look like black and white to the naked eye. I even have users who scan blank pages, because the Scanning utility is set to duplex and they don't have the Page Removal set up or it's not set up properly based on their settings (color vs BW).

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replied on May 25, 2023

@████████

Based on your last couple of replies it would seem that PhotoDocs would be the only option. I have some scenarios like that too, so I kept a version 10 client installed on a couple of machines for now, but I'm not sure what I will do when that is no longer an option.

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Replacement for PhotoDocs?

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