I was just about to write up my experiences with my new ScanSnap S500M when I found this review via 43folders. I’m very happy with this product and would highly recommend it for folks who want to scan lots of documents, but I was a bit jealous of this reviewer’s claim to have zipped right through large piles of documents.

When I first started using it, my scanner had a bit of a tendency to jam on multiple pages, so I broke up some larger documents into smaller chunks. It seems to handle multiple pages much better now, but it’s easy to stitch them back together using Automator and the Combine PDFs workflow if you need to.

The software tries to automatically rotate the documents properly, but it’s not 100% accurate, so when I stitch together the pieces of a long document I’m sometimes left with different orientations. Again, it’s an easy to fix with Acrobat’s built in rotate you can rotate “all portrait pages” so it’s one simple step there as well. (The full version of Acrobat comes with the scanner.)

Then I just hit “Start OCR” in Acrobat and my documents are searchable and out of the way.

The thing that’s holding up my scanning project is not about the scanner, it’s about organizing stuff.

On the paper side of things I sorted the printouts from the photocopies. I want to check that I still actually have the electronic version of the printouts so that’s sitting in a big stack. I’m making good progress scanning the photocopies, but then there’s the issue of matching PDF to citation.

I’m in the process of switching from EndNote to Zotero and I’m still learning the tool. I’m thinking about buying DevonThink but it doesn’t have built in citation management from what I understand, and I’m not sure it’s worth the price.