[Feature Request] Merge multipe images into a single document.

[kevincox]

Description

Right now paperless has a lot of similar features:

1. Images are OCRed.
2. PDFs can be merged.

However it isn't possible to merge multiple images into a single document. The reason I would like to do this is pretty simple. Compared to the image formats (commonly) supported by PDFs there are way better image formats today (AVIF, WEBP, JXL) so I can get better quality at far smaller file sizes. I would like to use this for the source files (that I back up) and then have paperless do OCR, tagging, ... that can always be redone as software improves without causing my source file archive to balloon.

Other

No response

[Binchen72]

The only image format which can act as a conrainer is tiff,. This is the only format which can contain two images. Png, jpg, gif and webp are not a containerformat so each file in this format is representing one and only picture. So either the resulting document is a tiff or a pdf.

[kevincox]

I'm not really sure how this is relevant. A sequence of images can be considered a document whether or not they are bundled into a single file.

[Binchen72]

They are just single files. Single Files without a container format cant be joined into one file without converdion. But you can link single files via a customfield type document link.

[JanKleine]

I'm not really sure how this is relevant. A sequence of images can be considered a document whether or not they are bundled into a single file.

The way paperless is implemented, a document is backed by a single file. This would constitute a significant change.

On the bright side, apparently the PDF association is adding JXL support :)

[kevincox]

I see. If it would requiring major reworking of the implementation I can see how it would be not worth the effort.

I wonder if maybe this can be worked around by either keeping the source multi-file and generating a PDF as usual (either larger or lower quality but either way regeneratable from source), or if the source also needs to be single-file wrapping it in a simple file archive like zip or tar.

Yes, if JXL was supported in PDF it would mostly mitigate these concerns.

[ce603]

I think it would be nice to be able to have multiple attachments as part of a single document. I would like to see this specifically for versioning documents. One use case I can think of is: I scan an image of a receipt using my phone, i process image automatically to have it cropped and rotated and deskewed, but it does it wrong and I need to revert. I can see a feature like versioning used for this feature request as well.

[JanKleine]

Proper versioning has recently been implemented and will be available in v3.

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