Old Pictures and Going Paperless

How many of us have shoe boxes of old photos laying around the house that you want digitized? The photos are also scattered in drawers, in a closets and who else knows. Well, that is our situation. There are a couple solutions. Do nothing and don't think about it, send them to a company and they can scan them or scan them yourself. So you buy a flatbed scanner and put them in one by one. Yea, no thanks. Here is the solution a Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500. It does two sided scans at 25 pages a minute. It will do stacks and stacks of photos, as they are scanned you just put more on top of the feeder. Yesterday I scanned in around 1,400 photos.  You can save your scans as a pdf or a jpg file. I wanted to get rid of all of the paper clutter from monthly bills. In the past years I have kept my bills in a filing cabinet and then having to purge the old bills by sitting in front of a shredder for hours. Not any more I scan my bills in as a pdf to a folder. It names it with the current time and date. So great now I have to rename the file and move it to a folder. Again, no thanks. I have a program for the mac it is called Hazel and it will do this and so many more things. It will ocr the pdf file and then figure out what bill it is and rename the file accordingly.  It will then move the file to a folder called Statements and make a sub folder for that day. Hazel is amazing because not only will it do all of the built in options but it will also run any Automator script that you write. Below are some examples of the photos I scanned.