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Introduction

Get rid of paper from your life with phpMyArchive.

Paper is a terrible way of storing information - it takes up space, and you can never find the piece of paper you need. With the advent of cheap hard disks and flatbed scanners, there is now an alternative for home / small office users. Scan the paper, then never look at it again (for more on document management at home, read this article by Jason Hunter - the inspiration for phpMyArchive).

phpMyArchive is intended to be an entry-level document management system for domestic or small office use, where an industrial strength system like KnowledgeTree is just too big and complicated (for more about my own system, see my blog). phpMyArchive is licensed under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

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Design Goals

phpMyArchive is designed to overcome the main obstacles to using a document management system at home:

Scanning documents is a really, really boring process
phpMyArchive is designed to make scanning as fast and painless as possible. A simple command line program presents you with the minimal number of prompts, using sensible defaults, so most of the time you just have to hit the Return key.
Scanned images are no use if you can't find them
phpMyArchive provides a simple web interface which allows you to tag documents for future retrieval. If you know what you are looking for (e.g. a bank statement), and roughly when it was dated, phpMyArchive will find it.
Scanned images are no use if you can't read them
For maximum portability, all scanned documents are converted to pdf format before storing in the archive. There is also a utility to store documents already in pdf format in the archive (e.g. if your bank provides statements on-line in pdf format).
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Dependencies

The phpMyArchive query engine is written in php and MySQL, and should run on any platform with these packages installed. The scanning scripts are written in BASH, and use other common Linux software: SANE; pdftk; and ImageMagick. On an Ubuntu Linux system these can be installed with:
sudo apt-get install sane-utils pdftk imagemagick.

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Installation

If you have already installed any other LAMP software, then installing phpMyArchive will be straightforward.