this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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[AIT] paperless-ngx 3.0.0 (github.com)
submitted 1 day ago by tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
38 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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 44 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (3 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.

[–] Knossos@lemmy.world 8 points 7 hours 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 12 points 10 hours 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 8 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] shamoon@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Hey, dont believe me, Im just a random, but this guy seems like worth a listen: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/linus-torvalds-to-critics-of-ai-coding-in-linux-fork-it-or-just-walk-away/

[–] Mister_Hangman@lemmy.world 4 points 7 hours 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 1 points 35 minutes 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

[–] ddd@feddit.org 2 points 7 hours ago

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!

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 23 hours ago

FYI: they use Claude Code.

Just in case anyone has an issue with that.

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 6 points 20 hours 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.

[–] SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 1 points 10 hours ago

You can define the folder structure used by the app, so if needed, you can backup your documents as raw files (of course, you'll lose metadata from Paperless).

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 2 points 18 hours ago

Yeah it maintains it's own folder structure and I'm not aware of a way past that (not that I looked).

There's several more options to get the documents into it though. Ingest folder, via email, certainly more.

[–] MIXEDUNIVERS@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 19 hours ago

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

[–] iamthetot@piefed.ca 12 points 1 day 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 61 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

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

[–] Willdrick@lemmy.world 22 points 1 day 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 11 points 1 day ago

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

Hope this isn't a shitshow.

[–] vividspecter@aussie.zone 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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 1 day 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.

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 25 minutes ago) (1 children)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
NAS Network-Attached Storage
Plex Brand of media server package
RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC Single-Board Computer
SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
VPN Virtual Private Network

[Thread #60 for this comm, first seen 23rd Jul 2026, 10:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 3 points 16 hours ago

@two9a@lemmy.world your bot is breaking again pulling in words not used in the discussions.

[–] Tealk@rollenspiel.forum 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Just installed via Ansible and it's running without any issues so far. As far as I could tell visually, it's running much faster.

[–] EarMaster@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

That's good to hear. The performance of the UI was always an issue for me.

[–] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Goddamnit. I hope someone forks 2.20.

[–] something183786@lemmy.world 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Why? The new LLM features are opt-in. Just don’t turn it on if you don’t want them. Or is there something else you don’t like?

[–] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 2 points 12 hours ago

If they weren't using LLMs to code, I'd mostly agree with that. But projects that put effort into integrating LLMs likely use them as well (as is the case here).

[–] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I wonder if there’s a blogpost or something somewhere summarizing the main changes.

I bet you could use AI summarize all the changes. LOL

spoilerBreaking changes

The biggest upgrade risks are removal of API v1 compatibility, dropping support for API version 9, dropping Python 3.10, removing support for document and thumbnail encryption, removing pybzar as a barcode reader, and changing the pre/post consume scripts so they no longer accept positional arguments.

There’s also a change that decouples OCR control from archive file control, plus a refactor of advanced database settings to allow more user configuration. Search and indexing

A major headline item is replacing the Whoosh search backend with Tantivy, along with unifying text search around Tantivy.

The release also adds a number of search-related improvements, including better fuzzy matching, highlighting in title/content searches, better handling of special characters and CJK text, and fixes for date/query compatibility during the migration. AI and document intelligence

Paperless-ngx v3 adds a larger AI feature set: Paperless AI, remote OCR with Azure AI, support for Ollama embeddings, direct LLM language selection, LLM timeout and context settings, and a revamped AI vector store approach.

It also includes fixes and safety improvements around AI indexing, chat, embeddings, and permissions, suggesting this area was a big focus of the release. Documents and workflow

The release introduces document file versions, sharelink bundles, a document parser plugin framework, and several workflow enhancements like more actions and trigger filters.

There are also new or improved document-management behaviors such as moving to trash, password removal actions, better merge dialogs, live document updates, saved view sharing, and more detailed document attributes. UI and tasks

The task system was redesigned, with a new Tasks UI, task summaries in system status, and better monitoring access.

On the frontend side, the release updates Angular to v22, moves toward zoneless reactive behavior, improves mobile search behavior, refines thumbnails and image loading, and generally modernizes the UI. Performance and storage

Performance work is a major theme: there are database indexes for common query patterns, SQLite tuning, faster imports/exports, memory reductions in document importing, and indexing optimizations.

The release also standardizes checksums on SHA256, improves bulk operations, and adds a variety of backend and file-response fixes that should help reliability and speed. Practical impact

For a fresh install, v3.0.0 mainly means newer architecture, better search, and more AI/document features. For an existing install, the main things to watch are the breaking changes around API compatibility, Python version, encryption support, and the search/index migration from Whoosh to Tantivy.