• DannyBoy@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    That’s not the worst idea ever. Say a screenshot is 10 mb. 10x60x 8 hours =4800mb per work day. 30 days is 150gb worst case scenario. I suppose you could check the previous screenshot and if it’s the same, then don’t write a new file. Combine that with OCR and a utility to scroll forward and backward through time, it might be a useful tool.

    • RandomLegend [He/Him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      Are you on 16k resolution or something?

      When i take a screenshot of my 3440x1440 display it’s 1MB big. I mean this doesn’t change the issue in its core but dramatically downsizes it

        • RandomLegend [He/Him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          6 months ago

          Also, 1MB on full resolution. You could also downscale the images dramatically after you OCR them. So let’s say we shoot in full res, OCR and then downscale to 50%. Still enough so everything is human readable, combined with searchable OCR you’re down to 7,5GB for a whole month.

          Absolutely feasable. Let’s say we’re up to 8GB to include the OCR text and additional metadata and just reserve 10GB on your system for that to make double sure.

          Now you have 10GB to track your whole 3440x1440 display.

      • DannyBoy@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        Once a minute, and only if the screen contents change. I imagine there’s something lightweight enough.

      • RandomLegend [He/Him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        You could optimize it though.

        As said one comment above, check if it’s the same composition as before and don’t take a screenshot if it didn’t change. Make some rules to filter out video content so if you have a youtube video open it doesn’t take a screenshot every second just because the video is running.

        Or you could actually integrate this with your window manager. Only take a screenshot if you move / resize / open / close a window. Make a small extension for browsers that tell it to make a screenshot if you scroll / close / open a page. Then you don’t have to make a screenshot and compare with the one before.

        This wouldn’t be as thorough as just forcing screenshots all the time and you would probably not catch stuff like writing a text in libreoffice as you don’t change anything with the window. But it could be a resourceful way to do that.

        And if for example no screenshot was taken for 1 minute because nothing called for that, you could just take one regardless. That way you have a minimum of one screenshot per minute or as often as window manager / browser calls for it.

    • Evotech@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      That’s what recall is… It’s literally screenshotring and. Ocr / ai parsing Combined with a sqllite database

      • barsquid@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I think it would be hugely useful.

        But obviously I don’t want a malware company like Microsoft doing that “for me” (actually the purpose is hyperspecific ads if not long term planning to exfiltrate the data).

        Not sure if I even trust myself with the security that data would require.

      • Cargon@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        If only MS used DuckDB then they wouldn’t have such a huge PR disaster on their hands.

    • takeheart@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I mean taking the screenshot is the easy part, getting reliable OCR on the other hand …

      In my experience (tesseract) current OCR works well for continuous text blocks but it has a hard time with tables, illustrations, graphs, gui widgets, etc.

    • renzev@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I suppose you could check the previous screenshot and if it’s the same

      Hmmm… this gives me an idea… maybe we could even write a special algorithm that checks whether only certain parts of picture have changed, and store only those, while re-using the parts that haven’t changed. It would be a specialized compression algorithm for Moving Pictures. But that sounds difficult, it would probably need a whole Group of Experts to implement. Maybe we can call it something like Moving Picture Experts Group, or MPEG for short : )

        • R00bot
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          6 months ago

          I can’t imagine it’d be that hard to write some code that does that using an existing AI model.

          • not_amm@lemmy.ml
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            6 months ago

            I found a small command to run KDE Spectacle (screenshot software) with Tesseract so I can OCR a screenshot if I want to, I only had to install Tesseract and a main language, you could easily do the same with an API and/or a local AI.

    • macniel@feddit.de
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      6 months ago

      its a cronjob that runs each minute (*/1) in any hour, any day, any month, on any weekday, gnome-screenshot obviously takes a screenshot and outputs it to the given file path and filename, where the filename is written as the current date as string and .png as format

    • DaPorkchop_@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      It’s a crontab entry which, once a minute, uses the gnome-screenshot program to take a screenshot of your monitor and save it to /Microsoft/yourPrivacy.

    • ordellrb@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 months ago

      It does not work like shown here, but with the same line in a script and the script as crontab it works.

  • widw@ani.social
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    6 months ago

    Am I the only one who honestly thinks Recall is totally useless? I feel like everyone is acting like it’s useful and the only thing to debate over is whether it’s “worth the security risk”. But I feel like it’s not even worth anything at all. Even if there was no risk and I was 100% in control I don’t think I would ever use such a feature.

    Wouldn’t you waste just as much (if not more) time looking through old screenshots, than to just go look up a solution the old fashioned way? Whatever you were looking at is probably still in your browser history too.

    I know the point is it has some AI crap with it, but that still requires you to remember enough information about what you’re looking for to filter them. And if you know that much information I think you could probably just find whatever you were looking for again normally.

    • renzev@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I’ve never heard a single good thing said about recall from anyone lol. Maybe my social media feed a bit of an echo chamber 😅

    • crispy_kilt@feddit.de
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      6 months ago

      That’s because you know how to find information in a computer quickly and precisely. Recalk is for clueless people. They can ask the computer in plain English.

      • widw@ani.social
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        6 months ago

        Yeah but to what end? Is a clueless person going to find answers to something by looking back through their past clueless behavior? Or maybe it’s just so they have a record of what they screwed up so they can fix it? In that case I think some sort of changelog to all system wide settings that the user modifies, with timestamps, would be infinitely more useful than Recall.