Replacing ScanSnap Manager on MacOS

Current status

• This article is WIP that’s being updated as I learn more.
• For now I ended up staying ScanSnap Manager because it still functions in current MacOS Sequoia, and there’s nothing else producing similar results. I think I will wait until it no longer works, and end up upgrading the scanner.
• I am trying to use OwlOCR app for making PDFs searchable, since I learned that the OCR in ScanSnap Manager is nowhere near as good as using the Apple Vision framework. OwlOCR uses Apple Vision framework and has a CLI (command line interface). When you give OwlOCR a non-searchable PDF, and save it as searchable, it produces much better results than ScanSnap Manager, recognizing all kinds of weird text formats.
• Discovered that OwlOCR has a bug when you load many PDFs at once into it — the recognition will freeze. Want to try writing a loop with bash/CLI instead.

Background

I use an old Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M. The first scan was in 2009 (15 years ago as of this writing), and it still works beautifully. I don’t want to replace it.

However, just now (November 2024) ScanSnap Manager software was discontinued in favor of ScanSnap Home. I went down the rabbit hole of making a better scanning pipeline to see if I can keep my scanner.

Note: I’m on latest MacOS Sequoia (15.1 at the time of this writing).

Does ScanSnap S1500M work with ScanSnap Home software?

Nobody on the internet answers this question. So here’s the answer.

If you have ScanSnap Manager installed, and you go ahead and install ScanSnap Home on top of it, it will do this weird thing where ScanSnap Home will actually start your ScanSnap Manager when you press the “scan” button in it. This may give you the impression that ScanSnap Home works with the old scanner, but it actually just delegates to ScanSnap Manager, which is why it seems to work. This of course doesn’t solve the problem that ScanSnap Manager is discontinued and can no longer be relied on.

If you use the ScanSnap Uninstaller to then uninstall the ScanSnap Manager, it will trigger ScanSnap Home to try to connect to your scanner directly. This will fail, because ScanSnap Home will not find your ScanSnap S1500M. It does not work with it at all, without also having the EOL’ed ScanSnap Manager installed. So no, ScanSnap Home does not work with S1500M, but it tricks you into thinking it does if you still have ScanSnap Manager installed.

Trying VueScan

VueScan has a lot of settings, but if you put most of them on Auto, then it will not produce as good results as ScanSnap Manager. You don’t get consistent results compared to ScanSnap Manager’s auto settings. This is unfortunate. Also, the cost of VueScan’s license doesn’t quite justify keeping the old scanner vs. upgrading to a new one.

Trying to use VueScan made me realized that “auto” settings are a priority for me — they should produce good results. I don’t want to adjust settings each time when scanning multi-page stacks.

Rough notes on open source solutions

• SANE project has drivers for this scanner
• sane-backends is the Homebrew package for scanimage tool and SANE drivers
• ScanSnap Manager app has to be shut down for scanimage to recognize the scanner
• There is only one good command line solution for making PDFs searchable that I could find that uses Apple Vision framework (instead of tesseract), and it’s OwlOCR app available on Mac App Store. It has command line interface. I immediately gave money to this guy. It worked really well on a simple test I did.
• The problem with scanimage is that it doesn’t support auto-color, auto-resolution, etc. Which is why it’s still worth it to look into other options.

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