this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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Paperless-ngx is an extensive document management system. 3.0.0 has just been released.

It seems from a user/admin perspective that a lot of obsolete stuff under the hood got removed and they did some performance stuff, but it's also full of AI features. There's too many changes to read them all though, I wonder if there's a blogpost or something somewhere summarizing the main changes.

Personally I'll stay with 2.X for some days at least to see what people say about the new version. I'm not interested to have AI parse my documents, the alrogirthmic auto tagging etc works quite well.

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[–] shamoon@lemmy.world 79 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

At the risk of getting internet-assaulted I am one of the primary devs, feel free to ask me about it. To address some of the issues already raised:

  • All the new "AI" (LLM) features are opt-in, meaning if you dont enable them you wont see them, literally. At all.
  • All of them can also be run local-only, of course.
  • There are a ton of other features as well.
  • One of our devs has made use of Claude especially around database schema improvements, which is a particularly tricky thing to work on. I dont like AI, I wish I could go back to the world before it, but I cant. So at this point it is almost absurd to not use LLM tools to some degree in programming. AI slop or vibe-coding is to do so indiscriminately, and I hate that too. Believe me we get tons of PRs from people with basically no dev experience or abilities slinging up a Claude PR they dont understand... and we dont accept them. We expect the same from ourselves. We use it sparingly and very specifically, interrogate it aggressively and stand behind it after it's merged. To somehow object to any / all use of it at this point either implies a) you dont do programming or b) you dont understand the nuances of how tools can be used in programming. Used properly, it's no more offensive than using an IDE instead of a bare text editor, is that something you care about?
    • Also, leaving Claude as a co-author I would argue seems more transparent, not doing so or not disclosing it in the PR seems like the shadier choice.
  • The ethical concerns about LLMs, compute use etc are real, but I dont think one OSS project somehow needs to bear the entire weight of this societal problem.

Again, Im happy to discuss more, as long is its not the guy who opened the raving "issue" in our project.

[–] Devconsole@sh.itjust.works 2 points 20 hours ago

I run paperless at my house and it's given me back some sanity and some privacy. That's a rare combo in 2026. From one techie to another: thank you very much. My actual family thanks you haha.

[–] Knossos@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago

Thank you for the amazing work. This is, along side immich, my most used self hosted project. I'll definitely give this a look over this weekend!

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 17 points 1 day ago

Thanks for chiming in! I don't fully agree with your reasoning re the usage of AI but I can accept your stance and am glad that you implemented it opt in with no intention of annoying me into using it. I also know many people have been asking for those features for a while though.

The person creating the issue has been downvoted here as well, even though this is a largely anti-ai place in my perception.

By now I also found the upgrade guide which lists the main features - I usually read the release notes, but this time it was a whole lot and hard to take it all in.

[–] Mister_Hangman@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Respect for the nuance of the argument. Congrats on the major version.

[–] shamoon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] Mister_Hangman@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No I’m saying I respect the fact you have more nuance than most towards the argument and didn’t leave it in such a reductive form that doesn’t help anyone.

[–] Willdrick@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

WHAT IS THIS?!?!1? NUANCE IN A DISCUSSION?!? NOT ALLOWED IN 2026

/s

flinging upvotes to y'all, really makes my day seeing civil discourse and not "Discourse" on here. Keep it up, really this is what makes Lemmy such a great place

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 44 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

v3 Migration Guide

[!NOTE] Upgrading to Paperless-ngx v3 can only be performed from version 2.20.15. If you are running an older version, please upgrade to v2.20.15 before proceeding with the v3 upgrade.

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

FYI: they use Claude Code.

Just in case anyone has an issue with that.

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Pro-tip: Block the user "claude" on GitHub and it'll show you a warning for every repository where they forgot to remove the Co-Author tags:

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 2 points 21 hours ago

Lots of people leave the tag in for transparency. The world must feel like such a conspiracy for you.

[–] dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago

Where ~~they forgot to remove~~ there are co-author tags.

There are plenty of people who are interested in using tools that are available and also recognize that it is underhanded to hide that fact for people who feel strongly about it.

[–] ddd@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I accidentally upgraded by blindly using the latest Docker tag, and the frontend of the new version is so much faster than before. Love to see it!

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 54 minutes ago

and that's why you never ever use the latest tag, just below your comment: https://lemmy.ml/comment/26842059

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 9 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Last time I looked at Paperless-NGX it insisted on taking the source files and moving/renaming them so it could manage them itself. In fact IIRC the only way to add files was to give them to the app (or upload via web UI) so it could take them over.

Does it still do that?

I don't like tools that demand to take over the original files. I'd prefer it if it could watch a read-only folder for new files. Immich for example or Jellyfin can do that.

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yes i have waited to start with my paperless journy because of the extra features und breaking changes.

[–] iamthetot@piefed.ca 14 points 2 days ago (4 children)

I may be mistaken, but I had looked into Paperless before and saw they had AI features before this. Is it just more, or more in your face? I was under the impression they were optional, at least when I looked into it.

[–] BartyDeCanter@piefed.social 66 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Honestly, this is one of those things where you need to define what AI means. Paperless 2.x used a machine learning-backed OCR library called Tesseract that has been in development since 1985.

The current version of Tesseract does use a LSTM neural network, since 2018. Is that an AI? Fuck if I know because AI is a basically meaningless term.

It’s not an LLM or a diffusion model, which is what backs a lot of the things people are calling AI nowadays.

[–] WaterWaiver@aussie.zone 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

As long as it's not gambling or a scam. (Points are most "technology" companies and their products)

[–] Willdrick@lemmy.world 23 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Paperless always had some sort of primitive AI for document classification and auto tagging. I haven't yet read the changes on 3.x but I've been using it for years and it's like a dumb AI that needs a lot of guidance and manual tagging at first, but as time goes on, it "figures out" every document you throw in the ingest. I've been sending it emails, or uploading straight from the mobile app and its amazing, can't go back to a folder filled with "Download(739).pdf" or "IMG_4926.jpg" files of random recipts and invoices

[–] vext01@feddit.uk 12 points 2 days ago

I agree. The AI features were very lightweight before. Just for auto tagging etc.

Hope this isn't a shitshow.

[–] vividspecter@aussie.zone 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I had a quick look and the AI features that are added:

  • LLM driven tagging suggestions
  • Remote OCR (Azure AI)

They do look to be optional at least. I'd probably be a bit more concerned if the code was largely written with LLMs, given the large number of commits in what looks to be only a few months.

[–] cr8urown@lemmy.world 15 points 2 days ago

I upgraded and havent enabled the AI stuff and I literally cant tell it's there, not sure why people are freaking out. Seems like theres a lot more in it as well.

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