Batch-scan trading cards front and back on macOS, at 600 dpi, with a real
scanner-background border — and get numbered _F / _B pairs a listing tool
can read. ScanDeck drives a duplex ADF document scanner, crops each side to
the card (or its toploader) plus 3 mm of genuine captured background, and
publishes a finished folder in one atomic step.
Built for card dealers and TCG sellers who scan in volume on a Mac and feed the images into a listing pipeline — CardUploader, TCG Automate, Card Dealer Pro, a CSV workflow, or a grading/centering check.
MIT licensed. No account, no cloud, no upload, no telemetry. Your scans stay on your machine.
| What it does | Duplex ADF pass → front/back pairs → review → one atomic published folder |
| Output | scan_000114_F.jpg + scan_000114_B.jpg, JPEG q95, 24-bit RGB, 600 dpi |
| Border | 3 mm per edge of real captured scanner background, never synthetic padding |
| Platform | macOS 26, Apple Silicon |
| Scanner | Ricoh / Fujitsu fi-8170 (the only model supported today — see below) |
| Cost | Free, MIT, open source |
| Tests | 251 tests in 29 suites, no scanner required |
PaperStream Capture is Windows-only. Ricoh's own system requirements list Windows 11, Windows 10 and Windows Server — and no macOS. So a dealer who buys an fi-series scanner and uses a Mac gets the ICA driver and Apple Image Capture, and the capture application Windows dealers rely on simply has no Mac equivalent from the vendor.
That gap is real and well known. ScanDeck is one answer to it, with a specific opinion about what matters: the border is evidence. A crop that clips the card edge destroys the thing a buyer inspects and a centering grader measures, and it does so in a way that still looks fine in a thumbnail. ScanDeck measures the margin on every side, warns when the two sides of a card disagree, and refuses to publish a batch it cannot vouch for — rather than silently padding or clamping.
ScanDeck is not the only way to scan cards on a Mac, and you should know the alternatives before installing anything.
| Tool | Mac? | Free? | Open source? | Built for cards? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScanDeck | Yes | Yes | Yes (MIT) | Yes |
| Trading Card Scanner (Card Dealer Pro / CollX) | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| PaperStream Capture (Ricoh/PFU) | No — Windows only | Bundled | No | No (general documents) |
| Apple Image Capture | Yes (built in) | Yes | No | No |
| VueScan | Yes | Paid | No | No |
| ExactScan | Yes | Paid | No | No |
| NAPS2 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No (scan-to-PDF) |
Trading Card Scanner is the closest existing option and it is good: free,
native Mac and Windows, tested on the same fi-8170, auto-crops, optional black
border, writes TCS-00000001-front.jpg. If you want something finished and
supported, try it first.
Pick ScanDeck instead when you want:
- Open source you can audit, fork, and keep. MIT, no account, no vendor tie.
- A margin verdict, not just a crop. ScanDeck measures the real background on all four edges of every side, cross-checks the two sides of each card against each other, and blocks Complete Batch on a pair it cannot justify.
- Nothing leaving your machine. No login, no upload, no analytics. The one optional network feature (a centering check) asks for fresh confirmation every single run and names the destination and the exact image count first.
- Deskew that never invents a pixel. Every card comes off an ADF slightly rotated — measured at 0.19°–1.00°, median 0.54°. ScanDeck squares it, but only after proving all four corners of the squared crop lie inside the captured frame. If it can't prove that, it doesn't rotate.
ScanDeck deliberately does no card recognition, pricing, or listing. It produces clean, numbered, correctly-oriented image pairs and stops. That is the listing tool's job.
- CardUploader — AI card identification and eBay/Shopify/TCGplayer listing export. Accepts JPG and wants both front and back for ungraded cards. ScanDeck's naming was designed against this flow.
- TCG Automate — bulk listing across 30+ TCGs and sports, with an explicit Front & Back upload mode.
- Card Dealer Pro, Ximilar, spreadsheet/CSV workflows, or your own script — the output is just numbered JPEGs in a folder.
Practical tip on upload order. CardUploader documents that uploaded files are ordered alphabetically, and
scan_000114_B.jpgsorts beforescan_000114_F.jpg. If your tool treats the first image of a pair as the one to match on, confirm it is picking the front. This is an inference from their documented ordering rule, not a defect we have reproduced — but it costs nothing to check, and front and back centering tolerances differ by 5×.
Nobody listed above has endorsed or tested ScanDeck. These are the tools its output is shaped for, described from their own public documentation.
- macOS 26, Apple Silicon
- Xcode 26 to build (Swift 6.2)
- A Ricoh / Fujitsu fi-8170 with the PFU ICA driver installed
ScanDeck currently supports one scanner model. It matches on USB identity —
0x04c5:0x15ff (Fujitsu-branded) and 0x05ca:0x03d8 (Ricoh-branded), which are
the same fi-8170 — and any other device is detected, named, and explicitly
refused before a session opens.
That is deliberate, not laziness. The pipeline depends on duplex, 600 dpi, a fixed scan area, and four PFU vendor features (overscan cropping, multifeed detection off, blank-page skip off, pre-pick off). Overscan is what captures the real background border the whole design rests on. A scanner missing any of it would produce output that looks plausible and is wrong — so ScanDeck refuses rather than guesses.
Widening this is the single most valuable contribution available. If you
have a duplex ADF scanner with a macOS ICA driver, swift run scandeck-m0 --list
and --inspect cost you nothing and produce exactly the data needed. See
CONTRIBUTING.md.
git clone https://github.com/eliseorobles/ScanDeck.git
cd ScanDeck
swift build
bash Scripts/bundle-app.sh --runbundle-app.sh builds .build/ScanDeck.app, ad-hoc signs it, and launches it.
Use the bundle rather than swift run ScanDeck — a bare SwiftPM executable
registers as background-only, which means text fields silently ignore every
keystroke.
bash Scripts/bundle-app.sh --syntheticThis swaps only the page source. Crop analysis, margin verdicts, deskew and atomic publication all still run for real, so it exercises the production path. It is the fastest way to see what ScanDeck does without an fi-8170.
swift run scandeck-m0 --list # enumerate scanners
swift run scandeck-m0 --inspect --device fi-8170 # capabilities + vendor features
swift run scandeck-m0 --scan --device fi-8170 --output ./out # one duplex cardAlso accepts --timeout SECONDS (inactivity, not total elapsed) and
--scan-window WxH (an investigation flag; the app never sets it). --scan
requires a new or empty output directory and expects exactly two pages.
<destination you picked>/
└── aug01-sale/ ← appears only on Complete Batch, by atomic rename
├── scan_000114_F.jpg
├── scan_000114_B.jpg
├── scan_000115_F.jpg
└── scan_000115_B.jpg
- JPEG, quality 0.95, 24-bit RGB, 600 dpi written into both the image properties and the JFIF density fields
- Rotation baked into the pixels, never left as an EXIF orientation flag, so the file is correct in every consumer
- A six-digit persistent counter that survives relaunches, crashes and cancellations; deleted cards leave intentional gaps rather than reusing numbers
- The batch folder is created by atomic rename from a staging directory on the same volume. ScanDeck never merges into or overwrites an existing batch.
These come from SPEC.md and are enforced by an event-sourced reducer with 251 tests behind it, not by UI code:
- Never lose an acknowledged page. No jam, multifeed, disconnect, crash or save failure may discard a page the app already accepted.
- The border is real captured background. If the requested margin would cross the captured frame, ScanDeck flags it and blocks completion. It never silently pads or clamps.
- The batch folder appears only on Complete Batch, atomically.
- An incomplete card blocks everything until it is retried or removed.
- A cancelled batch burns no counter numbers.
Crash recovery resumes an unfinished batch with its images, margins and destination intact.
Pure SwiftPM. Zero external dependencies — every import is an Apple system framework.
| Target | Role |
|---|---|
ScanDeckCore |
Hardware-free domain: batch reducer, pairing, margins, counters, durable files |
ScanDeckScanner |
ImageCaptureCore adapter: device probe, pass client, reconnect policy |
ScanDeckImagePipeline |
Media detection, deskew, real-margin crop, JPEG encode, atomic publication |
ScanDeckApp |
SwiftUI shell |
ScanDeckM0 |
CLI probe — the proven hardware path |
Keeping ImageCaptureCore inside one target is what makes the domain
deterministic and the test suite possible without hardware.
The app scans real batches end to end on a physical fi-8170 — including a 186-card production run. Milestones M0–M2 are met.
Still open: a job/profile editor (there is one built-in profile today), an app
icon, accessibility passes, CI, and a supported-scanner matrix. There is no CI
yet, so there is no build badge — swift test on your own machine is the honest
signal.
Contributions go through a branch and a pull request:
git checkout -b my-change
# ... make your change, run swift test ...
git push -u origin my-changeThen open a PR against main. main is protected and takes changes only by
reviewed pull request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the build and
hardware-testing workflow, and please never commit card scans — they are
someone's property and the repository has never contained one.
Is there a PaperStream Capture for Mac? No. Ricoh does not ship PaperStream Capture for macOS; its system requirements list Windows only. ScanDeck is an independent open-source app that covers the card-scanning workflow on macOS.
How do I scan Pokémon or sports cards front and back automatically?
Use a duplex ADF scanner, which images both sides in a single pass. ScanDeck
pairs the two sides into one card and names them _F and _B from a shared
counter.
Does it work with any Mac scanner? Not yet — only the fi-8170. Other scanners are detected and explicitly refused rather than silently producing wrong output. Widening support is the most useful contribution available.
Will it scan graded slabs or semi-rigids? No. Supported media are raw cards and cards in toploaders. Semi-rigids stay unsupported until they pass physical thickness, transport and duplex testing — an unsafe format stays unsupported rather than being forced through an ADF.
Does it identify cards or set prices? No, by design. ScanDeck publishes a counter and a side, nothing more. A filename cannot tell you a card is holo or silver-foil, so it does not pretend to. Identification belongs to your listing tool.
Does it upload my scans anywhere? No. There is one optional post-publication centering check, and it asks for fresh confirmation on every run, naming the service and the exact image count before anything is sent. It is never automatic and never remembered.
Why 600 dpi when other tools use 400? More detail for centering and surface inspection, at a larger file. The published DPI is written into the file metadata, so downstream tools measure in the right unit.
ScanDeck is free and MIT licensed. If it saves you time:
- ☕ Buy me a coffee
- 🌐 eliseorobles.com
- ⭐ Star the repo — it is how other Mac card sellers find it
ScanDeck is an independent open-source project with no affiliation to PFU Limited, Ricoh, or Fujitsu. "PaperStream" is their trademark and is used here only to refer to their product. "Pokémon", "eBay", "TCGplayer", "PSA", "BGS", "CGC" and other marks belong to their respective owners and are used only to describe what this software is for. No PFU code, assets, screenshots, or resources are used or vendored anywhere in this repository.
MIT © Eliseo Robles