Set Up OCR Hot Folders for Mac & NAS (Synology / SMB)

How to watch local folders on your Mac or on the network in just a few steps and have new documents from your network scanner (images such as JPGs, PNGs, or TIFFs, or PDFs) processed automatically in the background.

Make sure OnDevice OCR Business is installed and open.
In the sidebar on the left, go to “Hot Folders” → “Add Folder”.

The app with the empty Hot Folders page and the Add Folder button

In the first step, choose the folder you want to watch.

It can be on a NAS, in iCloud, on a connected drive, or locally on your Mac.
In the next step, optionally choose the output folder where the finished PDFs should be saved.

If you do not choose an output folder, the finished PDFs are saved in the input folder. If the original has the same name, as with PDFs, the finished file gets the suffix _ocr so that the original file is not overwritten.

You can configure the hot folder further. More on that in the next section, Configure the hot folder.
Click “Add” and confirm access to the selected folders.

These permissions are required so that the app is allowed to read and save documents on your file system.

The Add Hot Folder window with Input Folder, Output Folder, and the Add button

Done

That completes the setup of the hot folder. You can now quit OnDevice OCR Business completely. The background service stays active in the menu bar and keeps running after your Mac restarts.

Configure the hot folder#

Each hot folder you set up can be configured individually. The following overview briefly describes the individual options. Detailed explanations of advanced options such as “Name Files” and “Sort Files” can be found on their respective subpages.

Settings of a hot folder with More Options expanded

Setting	Default	Effect
OCR Language	Automatic	Specify which languages OnDevice OCR Business should recognize. “Automatic” recognizes most Western languages with a Latin alphabet (German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.) and is preselected.
Detect Separator Sheets	on	Larger stacks of documents are automatically split into individual documents using a QR separator sheet. You can place as many separator sheets as you like within the stack and split it into as many PDFs as you like. Simply click the “Create Separator Sheet…” button and print the separator sheet with the QR code.
Archive Originals	off	After successful processing, the original documents are automatically moved to a subfolder of the input folder named “Archived Originals” and, depending on the setting, filed either by week or by month.
Name Files	off	With the Name Files feature, your documents are named automatically according to templates, content, or rules. You can find detailed instructions here.
Sort Files	off	With the Sort Files feature, you can have the finished files saved in a specified folder depending on the document’s content. Documents containing the word “Invoice”, for example, can be saved in an “Invoices” subfolder.
Improve Readability	off	Scans are visually enhanced through higher contrast, optimized brightness, and shadow reduction.
Create PDF/A-2b	off	The PDF files are saved in the ISO-compliant PDF/A-2b format for long-term archiving.
Add Finder Tags	off	The PDFs are then tagged with the specified Finder tags. Separate multiple tags with commas.
PDF Quality	Balanced	Specify how strongly the finished PDFs should be compressed. “Balanced” is preselected and offers a good compromise between quality and file size.
Intelligent Orientation	on	OnDevice OCR Business detects the text direction of scanned documents. Rotated documents are detected and automatically turned the right way up, regardless of whether the documents are written in landscape or portrait format.
Straighten Pages	off	Documents scanned slightly askew (0.5–7 degrees) are automatically straightened.
Skip Already Searchable PDFs	on	“Digital” (vector) PDFs that are already searchable, such as invoices received by email, are detected and skipped.
Keep Existing Finder Tags	on	The Finder tags of the original files are carried over, if present.
Scan Interval	5 seconds	Specifies how often the folder is checked for new documents.