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I want to be able to scan from the terminal and then send the scanned output to a specific directory. Can this be done from the terminal.

Luis Alvarado
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3 Answers3

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scanimage is installed by default.

And here's me using it:

$ scanimage -L
device `epson2:libusb:002:003' is a Epson PID 084F flatbed scanner

$ scanimage -d "epson2:libusb:002:003" --format tiff > rawr.tiff

Obviously that generates a tiff-formatted file. Lossless but usually quite vast. You can convert this down withou an intermediary file by installing imagemagick and then piping the scan output into the convert command:

$ scanimage -d "epson2:libusb:002:003" --format=tiff | convert tiff:- scan.jpg
Oli
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  • Can I save the file as JPEG? `man scanimage` just says I can use `pnm` or `tiff` with `--format`. Neither of these are what I want and both are producing incredibly large files (25 MB!) – Aaron Franke Sep 17 '17 at 17:53
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    You can convert them with `convert` command in the `imagemagick` package. I'll update the answer. – Oli Sep 17 '17 at 20:38
  • Modern scanimage supports png and jpeg natively, no imagemagick required (which is nice) – LovesTha Dec 27 '18 at 05:51
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Tested in 18.04 LTS, works fine.

You may need to set a scan resolution (150/300/600 dpi). To do this use "--resolution" param (this param don't mentioned in scanimage manpage docs). It helps you to reduce the size of produced files.

Example for 600 dpi scan with png output:

scanimage "epson2:libusb:002:003" --resolution 600 --format=png

Output file size difference between 300 and 600 dpi is significant if you scan an image (not text).

My values for default A4 image:

  • 300 dpi: 2560px * 3150px image, 2-20 Mb *.png file
  • 600 dpi: 5120px * 7020px image, 30-65 Mb *.png file
xenia-zelenaya
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  • In order to avoid the error `scanimage: argument without option: 'epson2:libusb:002:003'; try scanimage --help` you need to add `-d ` or `--device-name=` before the device identifier – Yogev Neumann Jan 07 '23 at 03:36
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Here's a simple command line tool I wrote for myself to scan documents, uses scanimage and imagemagic to scan:

https://github.com/pohape/command-line-scanner

To get a JPEG file with the scan result:

./scan.sh ./test.jpg

To get a PNG file with the scan result:

./scan.sh ./test.png

To get a PDF file with the scan result:

./scan.sh ./test.pdf

Pavel Geveiler
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  • Welcome to Ask Ubuntu and thank you for your answer! It seems that you are the author of the tool in your answer, so can you please [edit] it to disclose your affiliation with the project? See this post from the Help Center: [How to not be a spammer](https://askubuntu.com/help/promotion) – BeastOfCaerbannog Dec 02 '22 at 16:44
  • @BeastOfCaerbannog done =) – Pavel Geveiler Dec 03 '22 at 11:38