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Askerman
Asked: 2017-10-20 01:07:55 +0800 CST

How to start a scan with a hotkey and automatically save the result into a directory?

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I have a Canon Lide 120 scanner connected to my Ubuntu computer via standard USB.

To scan a document I have to open the scanner app, hit the scan, and then select a directory to save the image into. This is very time consuming, because I need to scan billions of pictures every day.

Is there any way to bind say a hotkey on my keyboard, or to rig a button on the scanner, so that if I press they hotkey or the scanner button, it will immediately scan the document inside of the scanner and save it into a directory, with no extra interaction needed?

Thanks

shortcut-keys

1 Answers

  1. To have access to a scanner we need the permission to do so. This is done by making us member of the group scanner either with the graphical users tool or from the command line with

    sudo usermod -aG scanner $USER

    Having the scanner buttons work on the Ubuntu desktop is a different story. I do not know how to do that with your scanner or the driver you use. There may be a proprietary software to help you with that.

    However it is possible to assign a command line scanning command to a custom keyboard shortcut. If we had installed the scanner with the SANE backend we can use scanimage for this, e.g.:

     scanimage -x 200 -y 300 --format=tiff >image.tiff

    For more options see the manpage for scanimage.

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