20 ms·

Take more screenshots

657 points by goranmoomin 4y ago

lolive 4y ago
I use Obsidian to manage my notes. And 90% of them contain images, most of the times screenshots [taken with Greenshot]. My killer duo, at work, to never forget something that was shown to me during a Google Meet, or something that I read in a power point presentation.
thinkpad13 4y ago
any thoughts how to manage the screenshot? because I have thousanda and its kinda hard to browse them
nagonago 4y ago
Similar advice if you make electronic music: always save lossless raw audio (wav, flac etc), not just project files. Software updates break project files, hardware updates break old software, backwards compatibility is often imperfect, licenses expire, old VST plugins become unusable, source files for the project become lost, etc. It's always safer to have a pure raw audio export of all your projects even if they're unfinished because there's a chance you'll want to use or reference those unfinished snippets in the future.
- wazoox 4y ago
  Oh yes. I have a tremendous amount of Cubase .arr files I can't read, and heaps of floppies in various weird formats from old workstations that there's no easy way to read except by using the original hardware, which is slowly dying out (my second MV-30 gave up the ghost recently).
behnamoh 4y ago
macos makes it really easy to record the screen. cmd-shift-5 brings up the screenshot app. but converting them to gifs or other video formats is not possible, unless you use third party apps. in that case, you might as well just use a better screenshot app that does that for you. what I wish we could record, however, is the system interactions (kinda like how you record games inside the game itself). it doesn’t record a video, but rather your mouse movements and keyboard inputs, along with the location of apps and windows and their state. it would take more space but it would be more useful in case you wanna go back and run counterfactuals.
- yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
  Here you go. https://imgur.com/a/BARUMWQ https://imgur.com/a/BARUMWQ EDIT: Ah, I realise now this achieves the same thing. But it does record video, so I'm not sure what's missing other than a visual representation of keyboard input.
- eastbound 4y ago
  My gripe with MacOS is that it creates huge files. A few MB for a screenshot, when 250KB are often enough; and probably 10MB per minute for a small area, for video, which makes it immediately impossible to send to customers.
  - cyberge99 4y ago
    You can configure the native screenshot app to create jpegs (smaller), but I think you lose transparency.
    - behnamoh 4y ago
      he was talking about videos and he’s right, recorded videos are huuuge
imperialdrive 4y ago
ShareX for you Windows folks. It's great. https://getsharex.com/ https://getsharex.com/
- TuringNYC 4y ago
  This seems like just what I need. Does anyone have recommendations for something similar for MacOS?
  - rejectfinite 4y ago
    https://flameshot.org/ https://flameshot.org/ posted above. Not sure if it does all that sharex does.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  Was going to post this. It is amazing. But I think it will upload to imgur, be sure to configure it off. I have it sent to have in a local folder. It also has great .gif making support and can also screen record to a .mp4
- binarycrusader 4y ago
  If you're on Windows 10 or later, there's also Win + G which will bring up the Xbox Game Bar. There you can capture screenshots and video or set up custom key shortcuts to start recording, etc.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Windows 10 and up also has Win-Shift-S, which brings up a screenshot UI similar to that found on macOS with the Command-Shift-5 shortcut.
- karencarits 4y ago
  You can also configure sharex to run tesseract ocr locally on the images, making them searchable while keeping everything sound in terms of privacy. There is also a hack to compress pngs so that the file size becomes next to nothing
suby 4y ago
I've gotten mixed reactions whenever I share this, but when I program I like to record my screen with OBS. * It's a mental hack to keep me accountable, especially now working from home. If I'm in an office anyone can look over and see whether or not I'm working. It started as an attempt to mimic this feeling at home, even though I'll be the only one to ever see the recordings. * It allows me to go back and see how I worked in the past. I have a few videos of myself working from 2015 which I think is pretty neat just because of how different my workflow was back then compared to now. I'm not using the same tools or even on the same operating system. * I'm working on video games which is what makes this very useful for me. If something visually interesting happens, or if there's graphical bug of some kind, I can go back and breakdown exactly what happened. I've stepped through videos frame by frame in the past to debug, it's been surprisingly helpful. * It allows me to go back and see my progress. I can know what I was working on a given day, see how far I've progressed, it's just generally a good motivator. You can of course do this with git, but if you're working on something visual it can be nice to see it in motion rather than a textual diff.
- coldblues 4y ago
  I did the same for a while. It's a neat productivity hack. There are a few services that market accountability by hooking you up with strangers. Both of you must have your webcams enabled, and you just work on whatever you need to do for a set period of time without talking.
  - saimiam 4y ago
    I used one such service. It was such a drag. Hated it. Does anyone use it repeatedly with different strangers? I think I’d prefer live streaming to keep myself accountable to one-on-one sessions with both cams on.
- akersten 4y ago
  It sounds intriguing, but where do you find the space to store all the recordings? A bunch of external drives? Feels like 8hr/day × 20 days/month of recording my multi-monitor setup would fill up my drive pretty fast.
easterncalculus 4y ago
Anytime screenshots come up in conversation I have to recommend Flameshot, it totally changed my workflow with including them. You can create, crop, and edit screenshots really quickly and it's a must-install for me at this point. Open source and cross platform. https://flameshot.org/ https://flameshot.org/
- snerbles 4y ago
  A wonderful tool that promptly broke when I switched to Wayland.
- LightHugger 4y ago
  Flameshot is great, the only thing that would be better is if you could video record a screen region using the same UI instead of just taking screenshots. Most screen recorders are incredibly cludgy. They either require extra cropping and editing after the fact or tank framerate into being unusable. I don't understand the technical problems and the whys though.
- gaws 4y ago
  Flameshot is great. I wish there was a way to use a different image hosting service -- a self-hosted one preferably -- than imgur.
mmphosis 4y ago
I take screenshots of the Windows update with an iPhone. A spinner shows with the words Working on updates. 100% complete. Don't turn off your computer Windows 11 is ready—and it's free! Get the latest version of Windows with a new look, new features, and enhanced security. [Download and install] [Stay on Windows 10 for now] Checking for updates ...
muro 4y ago
Is there some software (macos) to regularly create screenshots throughout the day? Preferably if it merges it into a time-lapse. I could probably create something with cron, but maybe a neater solution already exists.
- wanderingstan 4y ago
  Yes, I have ten years of screenshots (and webcam shots) at half hour intervals from having LifeSlice: Source:https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifeslice https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifeslice Download page: http://wanderingstan.github.io/Lifeslice/ http://wanderingstan.github.io/Lifeslice/ I developed it as an early Quantified Self tool primarily for the Webcam shots, but also have been saved on more than one occasion by having screenshots of work that would otherwise be lost. Edit: the first version was just a shell script, which if you want a starting point to modify: https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifeslice/blob/master/1.0-Shell-Script/INSTALL.command https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifeslice/blob/master/1.0-S...
- yonrg 4y ago
  Something bash'ish while sleep 5 do import -id root `date -Is`.png done Then make a time lapse with mplayer et.al.
  - scubbo 4y ago
    $ which import import not found How should I install that tool?
    - foodstances 4y ago
      It's part of ImageMagick.
      - scubbo 4y ago
        Got it, thanks!
  - hikarudo 4y ago
lawgimenez 4y ago
Last month while I was backing up my old files from my 2005-ish laptop, I also realized that screenshots are very nostalgic. Just like this old Android project I worked a decade ago and if anyone wants to feel nostalgic on Google’s Nexus 7: https://initviews.com/2022/07/16/legacy-projects-part.html https://initviews.com/2022/07/16/legacy-projects-part.html
- Aeolun 4y ago
  That looks pretty horrible (text on top of placeholder/label?!), but seeing the OS again is indeed nostalgic. Plus just the feeling of WIP app I guess. That could have been me.
  - lawgimenez 4y ago
    Yeah it was just an experimental UI design thing. I remember back in the day I don’t give a crap about UI/UX. As long as the ListView functions smoothly.
pkdpic 4y ago
I couldn't agree more an I appreciate someone giving permission to not feel bad about accumulating screenshots. I just went through three years worth of screenshots from attending tech bootcamp and working my first dev job. It was a great reminder of projects and people I care about who I'll probably never get to work with again. Like random office polaroids for the remote work era (as if I'm that old). To my own surprise my only regret was that I should have taken more screenshots... Also they're all pngs...
- mywacaday 4y ago
  I am a big advocate of this, I spend a lot of time in online meetings and presentations and use Onenote to take my notes. A screenshot in context is extremely useful when revisiting later as I am a visual thinker. The ability of Onenote to index text in a screenshot is one of the most useful features in any program and allows me to find items even if I only recall a snippet of context.
marcinreal 4y ago
I totally understand the desire to keep a record of the past, and space is cheap so why not. I used to be a big "digital hoarder", virtually never deleting anything that might be a bit interesting. But a couple years back I deleted most, though not all of the "archive" of past me. It was a great decision that I don't regret. The important things you did will still surface from time to time. It's also always cool to accidentally find a photobucket or google docs account you forget you had and look through it for 10 minutes. But I just don't find value in intentionally preserving a digital record of myself, and instead allow serendipity to poke my nostalgia centers on occasion. Sorry for the violating the spirit of the thread with a contrarian opinion. My point is just that I've done the digital hoarding thing for years and it turned out to not have value, for me.
- nickstinemates 4y ago
  I used to feel the same way. Then the internet forgot the stuff that I thought would be there forever. Now only a few remanants remain. I still look at my DeviantArt and Livejournal accounts when feeling nostalgic. Those will also one day be relics of the past. I should back them up somewhere.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  It’s not always about hoarding. Legally it’s very helpful if you create a paper trail of your work
  - marcinreal 4y ago
    Yeah, I think it can be great if you're intentional about what you're preserving and why. To elaborate a bit, I went from having tens of thousands of emails a few years ago to "only" having about 5k now. I did that by adopting a strategy of aggressively deleting trivial emails. I apply "aggressive decluttering" throughout my digital life, with screenshots also (trying to stay on topic a bit), old conversations, failed creative projects, etc, and have found the benefits of less clutter to be profound. I never really regret deleting something, but that could be because I try to keep my life simple, within reason, and focus on the future. I also recognize, as you point out, that there are limits to this -- sometimes there is a genuine need to keep a record. As a programmer, my work is all tracked in git. For a creative professional, I assume that a basic requirement of that sort of job is an excellent backup system.
300bps 4y ago
I taught myself Commodore BASIC and 6502 Assembly including writing a BBS program between 1982-1985. I kept literally nothing from that time or probably even a decade after. Literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
amelius 4y ago
I make lots of screenshots. The problem is organizing them ... Perhaps if I ran them through OCR, it would be easier to grep through them.
- liotier 4y ago
  Not just OCR, but object recognition - just has to be smart enough to read the window's title bar to tag the shot by applications present in it and by document name when some are visible.
- anodyne33 4y ago
  Google Photos does it for you. Very handy a few years ago, I took a picture of the private wifi password backstage at a bar I used to work at, lost the saved login when I swapped phones. Searched my photos for "Thunderbird" and boom... a picture of text saying "Thunderbird private WIFI password".
  - wonderbore 4y ago
    I'm a bit disappointed that this doesn't work in Apple Photos. The app does a fairly good job at recognizing photos and doing OCR, but you can't search the text.
sircastor 4y ago
When I was 8 or 9, my dad brought home a Macintosh SE/30. On it, I used MacPaint to create 5 or so black and white paintings using the various patterns and brushes. It is probably the first creative thing I did on a computer. When we upgraded to System 7, the version of MacPaint didn’t run and he told me that essentially the art was lost and unrecoverable. I can picture in my mind what they look like, and wish I had the file to look at.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  It's probably not much help now, but if you still have the floppy disks, those pictures can definitely still be viewed again.
  - krallja 4y ago
    You can even bring them into the modern world with Mini vMac… by taking a screenshot of it!
  - sircastor 4y ago
    Tragically, they weren’t ever saved to any disk that I’m aware of.
morsch 4y ago
It's too bad that screenshots don't have more useful metadata. Or any useful metadata, beyond a timestamp. I'd like to have the names of all programs visible in the screenshot (easy), possibly application specific metadata like the opened filename or a URL (more difficult) and more generally full OCR of the visible text (pretty easy). You'd need a PDF to get the most out of this, but presumably most other image formats have generic metadata storage.
- jll29 4y ago
  Additional meta-data may in the future be extracted through machine learning from such videos. Regarding open programs: I once led a project where we developed something that keeps track of the software you're running (no screen recording) in order to conduct research into attention and distraction. We didn't have the resources to support many platform versions, so we wrote only a Windows client (most used OS on the floor). It was similar to RescueTime https://www.rescuetime.com/ https://www.rescuetime.com/ but more respecting one's privacy and absolutely avoiding the cloud, as we deployed the experiment in a lawyer-intensive environment; for instance we logged running program names but not titles of open windows because file names often reveal sensitive matter. We questions occasionally how productive they felt in the last half hour, and they could comment.
  - frozencell 4y ago
    > Additional meta-data may in the future be extracted through machine learning from such videos. Why can't we le the ML models figure classification themselves and then give them the human data to adjust to be readable by the human.
- sooheon 4y ago
  A paid tool in this direction is APSE (https://apse.io https://apse.io) which bills itself as a personal search engine that OCRs intermittent screencaps. I loved the idea, but in practice it lacked polish. I agree that additional metadata like foremost application filepath/url would take this to another level.
- noyesno 4y ago
Pakdef 4y ago
I still have files I made from the 90s... but my guess is that they won't be around forever.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I do wish that I had kept a universally readable record of more of my work over the years. I've managed to preserve a fair deal of it, but there are notable holes and a lot of it is software which isn't going to run without some tinkering, particularly the projects with significant third party dependencies. Web stuff (e.g. RoR projects) is particularly bad in this regard, often being nigh unrecoverable. The bigger thing to emphasize I think though regardless of archival method is to make sure to regularly back things up. Some of my earliest things from the 90s were on the boot drive and got wiped when the family computer needed a reformat. Later on when I had my own computer, a lot of stuff was on an external drive to make room on the boot drive, but one day the external decided to kick the bucket and everything on it went up in flames because there were no other copies. I didn't have much cash at that point since I was a high schooler but I'm sure I could've figured out something that would've preserved at least the most prized documents. These days I have everything automatically incrementally backed up with Backblaze but now that Time Machine on macOS uses APFS snapshots and is more storage efficient I also want to use my home server for backup.
yair99dd 4y ago
I've been using timesnapper on Windows. It will capture a screen shot and timeline it based on title/program text. For years. The time portal aspect is fascinating, and ultimately useless.
- karencarits 4y ago
  This looks interesting but my antivirus didn't like it as it detected "SWF.Exploit.Kit.Rig.tht.Talos" when downloaded from https://timesnapper.com/ https://timesnapper.com/
  - LeonB 4y ago
    Founder here… looking into this.
    - karencarits 4y ago
      Thank you, I appreciate your time and help! I guess it's a false positive on my side but have emailed details to support
      - LeonB 4y ago
        Here's a virus total report on the file. I find virus total useful (as a product developer) because it will help show cases where some smaller scanner is reporting a positive. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/718fe790bb2c1d9742819983051d4d880b8083a1ff210738fadbd9faf76b44cf/details https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/718fe790bb2c1d97428199830... tl/dr -- virus total is happy with the file. It remains possible that middleware of some sort has altered the file before you accessed it. You can check the hash of the file like this: get-filehash ".\TimeSnapperProSetup.exe" and it should return "B50A4449C9C36871280A842A530EA19694C7CBC4CF55CED5A620D8838D87CA1E" -- the same hash shown in the virus total report.
        karencarits 4y ago
        Thank you for your quick response! I get the same hash, so a false positive it is. I am really excited to test your product, it seems very nice!
BenFranklin100 4y ago
Tropy is an application to turn photos into documents and organize the items via collections. It’s free and open source. My partner’s research involves collecting images and they find it works well. https://tropy.org/ https://tropy.org/
aosaigh 4y ago
I use Hazel[0] to archive everything in my "downloads" folder after a month. Files get separated into "~/Archive/Images/", "~/Archive/Screenshots/" "~/Archive/Audio" ..." depending on certain criteria (mostly file type). Each sub-folder is broken down by year and month, for example "~/Archive/Images/2015/05/". I also occasionally dump stuff that doesn't belong elsewhere into the same folder system, for example WhatsApp media. Basically, if it doesn't need to be specifically filed somewhere, I just put it in my "downloads", knowing that it will be somewhat searchable in the archive by either date, file type or in-document search. This is great for all of the bits and pieces that you don't necessarily have a home for or want to manage. [0] https://www.noodlesoft.com/ https://www.noodlesoft.com/
- balaji1 4y ago
  Bit late to this thread. Another "archive" idea is to capture archive.org links of past projects. And it can be used to showcase things in the future.
- gnatolf 4y ago
  Is there a similar program for Windows?
  - ics 4y ago
    File Juggler (https://www.filejuggler.com https://www.filejuggler.com) seems to be the recommended alternative.
- wingerlang 4y ago
  I do something similar, except files are moved from Desktop > Downloads > 'Needs Review' after 1/7/30 days. The vast majority of files are trash, and I simply delete them every other week from the 'Needs Review' folder manually.
BenFranklin100 4y ago
For Windows folks, I’ve found OneNote’s screenshot tool convenient for quickly adding screenshots while taking notes.
jarenmf 4y ago
One of the things I regret most is not keeping backups of the programs I wrote as a child almost 25 years ago. They all just gone, tens of thousands of lines of code. I remember spending whole summers coding and it's all gone.
radiojasper 4y ago
I use ShareX[0] to screenshot all my work. I have it set up so that CTRL-SHIFT-F6 makes a screenshot of a region and it's automatically uploaded to some shared hosting server. It's a lot of fun to see work back from years ago! [0] https://getsharex.com/ https://getsharex.com/
pluijzer 4y ago
I like to take a screenshot too when having just created something. Myself I like to create a screenshot of my whole desktop. Years later I get a nice feeling of nostalgia seeing what theme, wm, apps etc. I used to work with. For the same reason I usually enjoy old photos more for what is in the background than the subject itself.
ffitch 4y ago
Can’t pass by without recommending my https://shottr.cc https://shottr.cc (app for Mac.) I’ve set a dedicated folder for screenshots and save there literally everything now — purchase receipts, important chat conversations, work in progress, reminders to myself, zoom slides. Agree with the author, screenshots are under-appreciated.
- keybits 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing - installed and liking it so far. Looks like it can replace Monosnap for me.
peckrob 4y ago
A few years back I was going through some old floppy disks I found in a box and, on one of them, I found a screenshot I took of my desktop circa winter of 2000. In it was a window open with a MUD I was logged into at the time. Another window had Winamp open with a playlist of songs and another window had ICQ open. The only reason I took it was because there was an unofficial competition between our pub and another pub elsewhere on the MUD about which was more popular, and we had finally surpassed them. It's amazing how many emotions seeing that one image gave me. But the biggest was just this overwhelming sense of nostalgia. As I looked at that, I could remember what I was thinking, what I was feeling, everything that was happening in my super confusing teenage life at that time. Occasionally I will look at that image now, even 22 years later, I can still feel all those feeling again. Of course, my ex's character is in the screenshot too. So, a bit bittersweet as well. :/
- vjerancrnjak 4y ago
  Interesting madeleine cookie
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mastazi 4y ago
    maybe some HN readers don't get the madeleine reference: https://www.thelocal.fr/20190814/french-expression-of-the-day-madeleine-de-proust/ https://www.thelocal.fr/20190814/french-expression-of-the-da...
    - Jalad 4y ago
      I'll expand on this since I found it interesting. Essentially it's a reference to a French epic called "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust. It was his life's work and is around 4.2k pages or 1.3 million words! That's much larger than "War and Peace", "Les Miserables", "Crime and Punishment", "The Iliad", and "The Odyssey" combined; which is super impressive.
asdff 4y ago
Zoom meetings have been great for screenshot potential. Previously if someone had an interesting slide at a conference you would have to zoom way in with your phone and hope you got it with enough resolution from your seat.
paulryanrogers 4y ago
For a few months I ran a simple Python keylogger to study my keyboard usage, in response to pain. Much later I found disk was filling up and traced it back to periodic screenshots, like every few minutes. It was a creepy feeling but also kind of fun to step back in time and see what I had been doing. Would've been more fun if it were during the days when I did 3D modeling and pixel art.
kragen 4y ago
Alex says, "Digital work is inherently ephemeral." This is precisely backwards; digital work is one of the least ephemeral aspects of human material culture, exceeded only by occasional miraculous analog exceptions like the Pyramids, potsherds, the Lascaux paintings, and Ötzi's axe. The Torah is digital—encoded in a sequence of discrete symbols rather than continuously varying quantities—and that's why it's survived for 3000 years. The digitization of Socrates's words by Plato and Xenophon is the reason we argue about him today, 2500 years later, rather than his forgotten Persian contemporaries or even Heraclitus. Being digital is what makes the idea of an "exact copy" make sense. You can make an exact copy of some version of the Torah or the Symposium because it's only the discrete letters that matter; the analog nuances of tone of voice or thickness of pen stroke do not count. So digitality is the alternative to the ephemerality of the analog, which is inevitably eaten up by moths and rust. We all know this about digitized language, but for some reason now that we've digitized reasoning in the form of computer programs, we habitually throw up our hands and declare defeat in the face of inevitable ephemerality. This is bullshit. What I really want, instead of screenshots, is a deterministic, reproducible computing environment. The idea is something like uxn or Nock: a platform that's simple enough to stay compatible forever, and efficient enough to be used for many things, even if there are a few things that I do on a computer that need more performance. There are a lot of inspirational examples that offer tempting evidence that this is possible for large, interesting classes of computations: the Smalltalk-78 revival emulator Vanessa Freudenberg wrote, the UM of the Cult of the Bound Variable (which had over 300 successful independent reimplementations), Nguyen and Kay's sketch of Chifir, Lorie's archival UVC, Wirth's RISC, uxn/Varvara, the JVM, and the numerous emulators of things like the MS-DOS environment, the NES, and the Gameboy that are good enough to run the original games. I'm not saying it would be an improvement to do all your digital creative work on an emulated Gameboy in order to ensure that it was reproducible. I think we can do a lot better than that. None of the presently existing archival virtual machines are adequate. But I think the reproducibility of Gameboy games tells us that we don't have to accept bitrot as the price of using computers. Alex says, "They’re not as good as having the original, working thing – but they’re much better than nothing". Well, let's figure out how we can have the original, working thing! This is software, it's a simple matter of programming.
- 4y ago
stolenmerch 4y ago
Not exactly a screenshot, but I recently found a file from December 1991 that was a proprietary image file of the home screen of a local BBS I used to visit in high school. Was actually able to convert it to a PNG after some work. This might be my oldest file that I personally saved to disk. Now if only I had all those cassette tapes from my TRS-80.
greenthrow 4y ago
I disagree with this advice. Nostalgia is a waste of time. I started coding in about 1988. I have nothing that goes back further than 2010. And I don't waste any time on anything I'm not currently working on. Keep working, keep moving forward. Don't waste your time looking backwards. That's just my opinion, obviously. But I find the obsession with nostalgia in our culture to be sad and destructive.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > But I find the obsession with nostalgia in our culture to be sad and destructive My occassional evenings spend looking back through the life that brought me where I am are sad and destructive? I find them to be very effective tools for reflection.
  - greenthrow 4y ago
    Re-read what you quoted, please. I did not say "individuals occasionally recollecting their past experiences is destructive." I said the cultural level obsesssion with nostalgia. There's a big difference.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      Is there? What do you consider the cultural level obsession then?
  - jiggunjer 4y ago
    You seem to be conflating reminiscence with reflection.
- thn-gap 4y ago
  This sounds really sad. I really hope that you can build memories that are worth spending some time remembering with joy.
- mippenhappen 4y ago
  I wouldn't say nostalgia is sad or destructive, but it is also not for me. I delete everything when I'm done with it. I backup less than 2 GB of personal data. I have around 100 photos of my entire life, and I'm certain I'll get around to deleting all of them too.
artur_makly 4y ago
We've automated this nicely for you on any public URL, and even some private one's that use cookies for access: https://VisualSitemaps.com https://VisualSitemaps.com Lot's of folks use us just for archiving purposes. We also have a nifty Ai that compares visual changes in the screenshots.
- ctxc 4y ago
  Wish I'd discovered you sooner...
donio 4y ago
Using tools, formats or workflows that you will lose access to in the future is the problem here. I have work going back decades and not much that I can think of that I couldn't resurrect in some form with relatively little effort. Having screenshots of thing that are otherwise lost would just make me sad. It's like preserving a single frame from a movie and losing the rest.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > It's like preserving a single frame from a movie and losing the rest. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, because you are unlikely to ever rewatch the movie anyway (and then it won’t be as good as your recollection). The point is to be reminded of the fact the movie existed at a time when you wouldn’t ordinarily think of it.
jordanmorgan10 4y ago
My technological life is the antithesis of this post. Screenshots are hosed as soon as I use them or send them.
sharikous 4y ago
The author says correctly that it takes a lot of time but I find the VM experience on modern PCs to be very satisfying as long as you are emulating systems from >10 years ago. On my M1 Mac I have well functioning QEMU VMs for MacOS 7, 9, 10.4, 10.11, Windows XP Windows 11 and some Linuces. I don't use proprietary SAAS formats so by all purposes I can read 99.9% of all files I have ever created with little effort.
edwinwee 4y ago
https://luke.cat https://luke.cat
- gaws 4y ago
  Any more sites like this?
digitalsushi 4y ago
I'm not even allowed to save an email on my work computer. i can still copy and paste but i cant save. I always wonder how much longer I'll be allowed to screenshot an app by default.
keeptrying 4y ago
Everything changes. Your access to a website could change or the server could go down or a website may get bought. Good reason to keep taking screenshots. There have been dozens of times I ve been saved by a screenshot. - insurance cards on phone - a random screenshot I took of a photo of my citizenship certificate saved me 2 weeks For travel - names of peopel - context during a call
- martinflack 4y ago
  I've found "print to PDF" to be great for web pages I want to keep, as well. You can then search, copy, print, etc.
nevster 4y ago
And if you've got any old floppy or hard disks - save those suckers now! I managed to get most of the data off my old Apple IIGS hard drive but there were definitely block errors. So I can still boot up the desktop I had in the 80's and 90's in an emulator. Brings back so many memories. http://www.oldcomputerstuff.com/resurrecting-my-apple-iigs-after-20-years/ http://www.oldcomputerstuff.com/resurrecting-my-apple-iigs-a...
wonderbore 4y ago
I had a scheduled screenshot every few minutes for years. At time it helped me recover data that I lost but eventually I stopped using it and deleted my archive when I realized I couldn't police my screenshots. Any one of them could have sensitive information or, ahem, sensitive information Overall though it's nice to see old screenshots even on my phone, but intentionally "taking a screenshot for the memory" feels weird as every one of my screens is boring on its own.
- dr_kiszonka 4y ago
  Funny comment! You could write a script that would not take screenshots of, e.g., incognito, windows.
soruly 4y ago
I take screenshots of my computer screen every minute since 2008. I've a dedicated 2TB hdd storing these archives compressed with 7z It takes just about 100-200MB/day so it's quite easy to store. These archives saved me from data loss a few times (due to powerloss, or bad mistakes). I just browse through the archive to look for the screenshot where I was coding to recover them by typing it again. this is the screenshot tool I use https://github.com/soruly/TimeSnap https://github.com/soruly/TimeSnap
- chaostheory 4y ago
  That’s impressive. I would also like this, but what worries me is privacy. There’s already so little that it makes me wonder whether this is degrade it even faster.
- avnigo 4y ago
  I'm glad you found something that works for you, and I don't mean to dissuade you even if I could, but to me that feels like an antipattern if you only use it for typed text. Consider that with a text editor like Vim, for example, you can "time travel" [0] through your file's edits, or even have undo branches/trees [1][2] available per file. That saves you the trouble of having to transcribe text from screenshots, and also barely uses any storage space. Plain text is also highly more portable and more likely to be recoverable in case of drive failure or file corruption. Additionally, or alternatively, you could try any sort of manual versioning system or background automatic backup solution that keeps versions of files as you work on them. [0]: https://vimtricks.com/p/vimtrick-time-travel-in-vim/ https://vimtricks.com/p/vimtrick-time-travel-in-vim/ [1]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/undo.html#undo-tree https://neovim.io/doc/user/undo.html#undo-tree [2]: https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo
godelmachine 4y ago
Open question → What's your favorite screenshotting tool? Mine's CloudShot. I can upload some screengrabs straightaway to Google Drive. You have the option to configure keyboard shortcuts to do that.
- soruly 4y ago
  I write my own powershell script for taking screenshots periodically https://gist.github.com/soruly/889d926fcd4b2b8e8dc113a100b9d988 https://gist.github.com/soruly/889d926fcd4b2b8e8dc113a100b9d...
  - godelmachine 4y ago
    Supercool. If you wanted to add a functionality wherein you could upload to Google Drive like CloudShot, what would you need to write?
gcau 4y ago
Is there any program, maybe using ShareX, to just automatically and periodically take a screenshot in the background and save it to a folder?
ctxc 4y ago
This was my idea when I built Electron-vLog: automated screenshots of whatever Electron app I'm building right now whenever I run it, so that I can stitch images together later and watch the evolution. If there's no change from the last screenshot, it doesn't save the current screenshot - helps curb duplicates. The core part works, but never got around to releasing it as an npm package. https://github.com/CatalanCabbage/electron-vlog https://github.com/CatalanCabbage/electron-vlog
erbdex 4y ago
What is your software pipeline to manage screenshots? If we could: - bucket and tag - turn them to tasks - follow ups
anon2020dot00 4y ago
I've been using Notebloc Android app more for this purpose. It can take pictures of pages in a notebook and crop nicely. Also good for taking screenshots of a computer. Although it might seem strange to use a mobile phone to take a picture of a screen, I like that I have a centralized tool that can capture even non-digital stuff like handwritten notes. Also, it packages pictures into a PDF which I find to be more organized than a bunch of pictures scattered about. I usually close the PDF every day and so each PDF corresponds to pictures taken during a day which gives it a context to make stuff easier to find.
jezzamon 4y ago
For my creative coding projects (which are usually looping animations) I've set up scripts that export a short video at every git commit. Going back and seeing things develop is quite satisfying, and also useful if I stumbled upon a configuration that I like and want to branch from
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  That’s a fantastic idea, thanks for sharing. It’d be fun to set something like this up for gamedev
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  Do you have the scripts or a demo somewhere? sounds cool
iluvblender 4y ago
I absolutely agree with you pcr9103303. I have been following this practice since 5 years and I have benefited immensely from it (recall, retention and revision). I have a dedicated screenshots root folder with sub folders that gets synchronized with the cloud and I go through them regularly.
jl6 4y ago
I take screenshots at fairly random intervals and have done for years. My earliest screenshots are from the 1990s. I consider this an adjunct to my photography hobby. When I travel, I take opportunistic photos of interesting things I see. When I use the computer, I am a traveller in a digital universe and I do the same. I find it really interesting to see the evolution of desktop UIs that I have used over the years, and to see the slow change in applications I typically use.
jeena 4y ago
I'd say blog about your stuff with the screenshots/screencasts, I have one 12 years old of an iPhone game I made https://jeena.net/monster-tiles https://jeena.net/monster-tiles
submeta 4y ago
> I can open them in a modern word processor, and they look similar – but it’s not the same. Some of the fonts and graphics are missing, and I don’t know where I’d find replacements. Why not convert your documents to PDF? That‘ll preserve the layout.
petesergeant 4y ago
My relationship with my screen has been transformed since I learned the OS X screenshot short-cuts -- taking notes, writing documentation, etc, all a breeze since muscle-memory captured Shft+Cmd 4 with Ctrl+Click giving you copy to clipboard
lkrubner 4y ago
At one point I realized that whenever I went on vacation I took pictures of wherever I went: Germany, France, Sweden, Costa Rica, Texas, Florida, etc. But then I realized most of the "traveling" that I do is the different places that I go on my computer. If I'm going to take photos when I travel, I should also be taking screenshots constantly, to document places I went on my computer. Such screenshots are useful because they will capture: 1. the large number of websites that exist in a particular year, but which won't exist 5 years later 2. minor interests I have one year that I don't have later. Occasionally I'm curious when I first got into a particular interest, and seeing the screenshots is helpful for documenting that. When I go back to the oldest entries of my weblog, from 2005, I notice that more than 80% of the links are now 404. The Web is constantly disappearing. Like a forest on its way to extinction, you might as well photograph it now, because it won't be there 10 years later. Most of the websites you visit, you cannot go back and visit them a few years later. Take a photo of them while they still exist.
stanleychink 4y ago
jonnycomputer 4y ago
Screenshot history: 1988 - Emacs 18.52 1992 - Emacs 18.59 1994 - Emacs 19.7 1996 - Emacs 19.7 1998 - Vim ???? 2002 - Emacs 21.1 2006 - Emacs 21.1 2012 - Emacs 24.1 2018 - Emacs 26.1 2022 - Emacs 28.1
WhyNotHugo 4y ago
I keep many old screenshots around. A lot from my "eye candy phase" are a mix of hilarious and cringe to look at. But it's also really amusing to see how my workflow and setup has evolved over the years.
ebfe1 4y ago
I love taking screenshots and even wrote a script a while back to take screenshot when there is mouse movement periodically when handling incidents, i also have crontab job to compress and gpg encrypt the folder with my key at the end of the day if it's not empty. This, together with another script to record all terminal activities during incident helped me a lot of time in the past when writing up post incident write-up after many late nights! Unfortunately i only see the old version here with flameshot taking screenshot at full resolution.. my few later versions turn screenshot to black and white and applied a few imagemagick tweaks to make screenshot file incredibly smaller to store but you get the idea :): https://gist.github.com/santrancisco/9d14e0105316cfa15f98f0fa7c35f8a0 https://gist.github.com/santrancisco/9d14e0105316cfa15f98f0f...
larsrc 4y ago
Having worked in digital archiving, I wholeheartedly approve of this suggestion. Digital artifacts degrade alarmingly quickly.
electric_dreams 4y ago

657 points by goranmoomin 4y ago

I use Obsidian to manage my notes. And 90% of them contain images, most of the times screenshots [taken with Greenshot]. My killer duo, at work, to never forget something that was shown to me during a Google Meet, or something that I read in a power point presentation.

thinkpad13 4y ago

any thoughts how to manage the screenshot? because I have thousanda and its kinda hard to browse them

nagonago 4y ago

Similar advice if you make electronic music: always save lossless raw audio (wav, flac etc), not just project files. Software updates break project files, hardware updates break old software, backwards compatibility is often imperfect, licenses expire, old VST plugins become unusable, source files for the project become lost, etc. It's always safer to have a pure raw audio export of all your projects even if they're unfinished because there's a chance you'll want to use or reference those unfinished snippets in the future.

wazoox 4y ago
Oh yes. I have a tremendous amount of Cubase .arr files I can't read, and heaps of floppies in various weird formats from old workstations that there's no easy way to read except by using the original hardware, which is slowly dying out (my second MV-30 gave up the ghost recently).

behnamoh 4y ago

macos makes it really easy to record the screen. cmd-shift-5 brings up the screenshot app. but converting them to gifs or other video formats is not possible, unless you use third party apps. in that case, you might as well just use a better screenshot app that does that for you. what I wish we could record, however, is the system interactions (kinda like how you record games inside the game itself). it doesn’t record a video, but rather your mouse movements and keyboard inputs, along with the location of apps and windows and their state. it would take more space but it would be more useful in case you wanna go back and run counterfactuals.

yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
Here you go. https://imgur.com/a/BARUMWQ https://imgur.com/a/BARUMWQ EDIT: Ah, I realise now this achieves the same thing. But it does record video, so I'm not sure what's missing other than a visual representation of keyboard input.
eastbound 4y ago
My gripe with MacOS is that it creates huge files. A few MB for a screenshot, when 250KB are often enough; and probably 10MB per minute for a small area, for video, which makes it immediately impossible to send to customers.
- cyberge99 4y ago
  You can configure the native screenshot app to create jpegs (smaller), but I think you lose transparency.
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    he was talking about videos and he’s right, recorded videos are huuuge

imperialdrive 4y ago

ShareX for you Windows folks. It's great. https://getsharex.com/ https://getsharex.com/

TuringNYC 4y ago
This seems like just what I need. Does anyone have recommendations for something similar for MacOS?
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  https://flameshot.org/ https://flameshot.org/ posted above. Not sure if it does all that sharex does.
rejectfinite 4y ago
Was going to post this. It is amazing. But I think it will upload to imgur, be sure to configure it off. I have it sent to have in a local folder. It also has great .gif making support and can also screen record to a .mp4
binarycrusader 4y ago
If you're on Windows 10 or later, there's also Win + G which will bring up the Xbox Game Bar. There you can capture screenshots and video or set up custom key shortcuts to start recording, etc.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Windows 10 and up also has Win-Shift-S, which brings up a screenshot UI similar to that found on macOS with the Command-Shift-5 shortcut.
karencarits 4y ago
You can also configure sharex to run tesseract ocr locally on the images, making them searchable while keeping everything sound in terms of privacy. There is also a hack to compress pngs so that the file size becomes next to nothing

suby 4y ago

I've gotten mixed reactions whenever I share this, but when I program I like to record my screen with OBS. * It's a mental hack to keep me accountable, especially now working from home. If I'm in an office anyone can look over and see whether or not I'm working. It started as an attempt to mimic this feeling at home, even though I'll be the only one to ever see the recordings. * It allows me to go back and see how I worked in the past. I have a few videos of myself working from 2015 which I think is pretty neat just because of how different my workflow was back then compared to now. I'm not using the same tools or even on the same operating system. * I'm working on video games which is what makes this very useful for me. If something visually interesting happens, or if there's graphical bug of some kind, I can go back and breakdown exactly what happened. I've stepped through videos frame by frame in the past to debug, it's been surprisingly helpful. * It allows me to go back and see my progress. I can know what I was working on a given day, see how far I've progressed, it's just generally a good motivator. You can of course do this with git, but if you're working on something visual it can be nice to see it in motion rather than a textual diff.

coldblues 4y ago
I did the same for a while. It's a neat productivity hack. There are a few services that market accountability by hooking you up with strangers. Both of you must have your webcams enabled, and you just work on whatever you need to do for a set period of time without talking.
- saimiam 4y ago
  I used one such service. It was such a drag. Hated it. Does anyone use it repeatedly with different strangers? I think I’d prefer live streaming to keep myself accountable to one-on-one sessions with both cams on.
akersten 4y ago
It sounds intriguing, but where do you find the space to store all the recordings? A bunch of external drives? Feels like 8hr/day × 20 days/month of recording my multi-monitor setup would fill up my drive pretty fast.

easterncalculus 4y ago

Anytime screenshots come up in conversation I have to recommend Flameshot, it totally changed my workflow with including them. You can create, crop, and edit screenshots really quickly and it's a must-install for me at this point. Open source and cross platform. https://flameshot.org/ https://flameshot.org/

snerbles 4y ago
A wonderful tool that promptly broke when I switched to Wayland.
LightHugger 4y ago
Flameshot is great, the only thing that would be better is if you could video record a screen region using the same UI instead of just taking screenshots. Most screen recorders are incredibly cludgy. They either require extra cropping and editing after the fact or tank framerate into being unusable. I don't understand the technical problems and the whys though.
gaws 4y ago
Flameshot is great. I wish there was a way to use a different image hosting service -- a self-hosted one preferably -- than imgur.

mmphosis 4y ago

I take screenshots of the Windows update with an iPhone. A spinner shows with the words Working on updates. 100% complete. Don't turn off your computer Windows 11 is ready—and it's free! Get the latest version of Windows with a new look, new features, and enhanced security. [Download and install] [Stay on Windows 10 for now] Checking for updates ...

muro 4y ago

Is there some software (macos) to regularly create screenshots throughout the day? Preferably if it merges it into a time-lapse. I could probably create something with cron, but maybe a neater solution already exists.

wanderingstan 4y ago
Yes, I have ten years of screenshots (and webcam shots) at half hour intervals from having LifeSlice: Source:https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifeslice https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifeslice Download page: http://wanderingstan.github.io/Lifeslice/ http://wanderingstan.github.io/Lifeslice/ I developed it as an early Quantified Self tool primarily for the Webcam shots, but also have been saved on more than one occasion by having screenshots of work that would otherwise be lost. Edit: the first version was just a shell script, which if you want a starting point to modify: https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifeslice/blob/master/1.0-Shell-Script/INSTALL.command https://github.com/wanderingstan/Lifeslice/blob/master/1.0-S...
yonrg 4y ago
Something bash'ish while sleep 5 do import -id root `date -Is`.png done Then make a time lapse with mplayer et.al.
- scubbo 4y ago
  $ which import import not found How should I install that tool?
  - foodstances 4y ago
    It's part of ImageMagick.
    - scubbo 4y ago
      Got it, thanks!
- hikarudo 4y ago

lawgimenez 4y ago

Last month while I was backing up my old files from my 2005-ish laptop, I also realized that screenshots are very nostalgic. Just like this old Android project I worked a decade ago and if anyone wants to feel nostalgic on Google’s Nexus 7: https://initviews.com/2022/07/16/legacy-projects-part.html https://initviews.com/2022/07/16/legacy-projects-part.html

Aeolun 4y ago
That looks pretty horrible (text on top of placeholder/label?!), but seeing the OS again is indeed nostalgic. Plus just the feeling of WIP app I guess. That could have been me.
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  Yeah it was just an experimental UI design thing. I remember back in the day I don’t give a crap about UI/UX. As long as the ListView functions smoothly.

pkdpic 4y ago

I couldn't agree more an I appreciate someone giving permission to not feel bad about accumulating screenshots. I just went through three years worth of screenshots from attending tech bootcamp and working my first dev job. It was a great reminder of projects and people I care about who I'll probably never get to work with again. Like random office polaroids for the remote work era (as if I'm that old). To my own surprise my only regret was that I should have taken more screenshots... Also they're all pngs...

mywacaday 4y ago
I am a big advocate of this, I spend a lot of time in online meetings and presentations and use Onenote to take my notes. A screenshot in context is extremely useful when revisiting later as I am a visual thinker. The ability of Onenote to index text in a screenshot is one of the most useful features in any program and allows me to find items even if I only recall a snippet of context.

marcinreal 4y ago

I totally understand the desire to keep a record of the past, and space is cheap so why not. I used to be a big "digital hoarder", virtually never deleting anything that might be a bit interesting. But a couple years back I deleted most, though not all of the "archive" of past me. It was a great decision that I don't regret. The important things you did will still surface from time to time. It's also always cool to accidentally find a photobucket or google docs account you forget you had and look through it for 10 minutes. But I just don't find value in intentionally preserving a digital record of myself, and instead allow serendipity to poke my nostalgia centers on occasion. Sorry for the violating the spirit of the thread with a contrarian opinion. My point is just that I've done the digital hoarding thing for years and it turned out to not have value, for me.

nickstinemates 4y ago
I used to feel the same way. Then the internet forgot the stuff that I thought would be there forever. Now only a few remanants remain. I still look at my DeviantArt and Livejournal accounts when feeling nostalgic. Those will also one day be relics of the past. I should back them up somewhere.
jbverschoor 4y ago
It’s not always about hoarding. Legally it’s very helpful if you create a paper trail of your work
- marcinreal 4y ago
  Yeah, I think it can be great if you're intentional about what you're preserving and why. To elaborate a bit, I went from having tens of thousands of emails a few years ago to "only" having about 5k now. I did that by adopting a strategy of aggressively deleting trivial emails. I apply "aggressive decluttering" throughout my digital life, with screenshots also (trying to stay on topic a bit), old conversations, failed creative projects, etc, and have found the benefits of less clutter to be profound. I never really regret deleting something, but that could be because I try to keep my life simple, within reason, and focus on the future. I also recognize, as you point out, that there are limits to this -- sometimes there is a genuine need to keep a record. As a programmer, my work is all tracked in git. For a creative professional, I assume that a basic requirement of that sort of job is an excellent backup system.

300bps 4y ago

I taught myself Commodore BASIC and 6502 Assembly including writing a BBS program between 1982-1985. I kept literally nothing from that time or probably even a decade after. Literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

amelius 4y ago

I make lots of screenshots. The problem is organizing them ... Perhaps if I ran them through OCR, it would be easier to grep through them.

liotier 4y ago
Not just OCR, but object recognition - just has to be smart enough to read the window's title bar to tag the shot by applications present in it and by document name when some are visible.
anodyne33 4y ago
Google Photos does it for you. Very handy a few years ago, I took a picture of the private wifi password backstage at a bar I used to work at, lost the saved login when I swapped phones. Searched my photos for "Thunderbird" and boom... a picture of text saying "Thunderbird private WIFI password".
- wonderbore 4y ago
  I'm a bit disappointed that this doesn't work in Apple Photos. The app does a fairly good job at recognizing photos and doing OCR, but you can't search the text.

sircastor 4y ago

When I was 8 or 9, my dad brought home a Macintosh SE/30. On it, I used MacPaint to create 5 or so black and white paintings using the various patterns and brushes. It is probably the first creative thing I did on a computer. When we upgraded to System 7, the version of MacPaint didn’t run and he told me that essentially the art was lost and unrecoverable. I can picture in my mind what they look like, and wish I had the file to look at.

LeoPanthera 4y ago
It's probably not much help now, but if you still have the floppy disks, those pictures can definitely still be viewed again.
- krallja 4y ago
  You can even bring them into the modern world with Mini vMac… by taking a screenshot of it!
- sircastor 4y ago
  Tragically, they weren’t ever saved to any disk that I’m aware of.

morsch 4y ago

It's too bad that screenshots don't have more useful metadata. Or any useful metadata, beyond a timestamp. I'd like to have the names of all programs visible in the screenshot (easy), possibly application specific metadata like the opened filename or a URL (more difficult) and more generally full OCR of the visible text (pretty easy). You'd need a PDF to get the most out of this, but presumably most other image formats have generic metadata storage.

jll29 4y ago
Additional meta-data may in the future be extracted through machine learning from such videos. Regarding open programs: I once led a project where we developed something that keeps track of the software you're running (no screen recording) in order to conduct research into attention and distraction. We didn't have the resources to support many platform versions, so we wrote only a Windows client (most used OS on the floor). It was similar to RescueTime https://www.rescuetime.com/ https://www.rescuetime.com/ but more respecting one's privacy and absolutely avoiding the cloud, as we deployed the experiment in a lawyer-intensive environment; for instance we logged running program names but not titles of open windows because file names often reveal sensitive matter. We questions occasionally how productive they felt in the last half hour, and they could comment.
- frozencell 4y ago
  > Additional meta-data may in the future be extracted through machine learning from such videos. Why can't we le the ML models figure classification themselves and then give them the human data to adjust to be readable by the human.
sooheon 4y ago
A paid tool in this direction is APSE (https://apse.io https://apse.io) which bills itself as a personal search engine that OCRs intermittent screencaps. I loved the idea, but in practice it lacked polish. I agree that additional metadata like foremost application filepath/url would take this to another level.
noyesno 4y ago

Pakdef 4y ago

I still have files I made from the 90s... but my guess is that they won't be around forever.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

I do wish that I had kept a universally readable record of more of my work over the years. I've managed to preserve a fair deal of it, but there are notable holes and a lot of it is software which isn't going to run without some tinkering, particularly the projects with significant third party dependencies. Web stuff (e.g. RoR projects) is particularly bad in this regard, often being nigh unrecoverable. The bigger thing to emphasize I think though regardless of archival method is to make sure to regularly back things up. Some of my earliest things from the 90s were on the boot drive and got wiped when the family computer needed a reformat. Later on when I had my own computer, a lot of stuff was on an external drive to make room on the boot drive, but one day the external decided to kick the bucket and everything on it went up in flames because there were no other copies. I didn't have much cash at that point since I was a high schooler but I'm sure I could've figured out something that would've preserved at least the most prized documents. These days I have everything automatically incrementally backed up with Backblaze but now that Time Machine on macOS uses APFS snapshots and is more storage efficient I also want to use my home server for backup.

yair99dd 4y ago

I've been using timesnapper on Windows. It will capture a screen shot and timeline it based on title/program text. For years. The time portal aspect is fascinating, and ultimately useless.

karencarits 4y ago
This looks interesting but my antivirus didn't like it as it detected "SWF.Exploit.Kit.Rig.tht.Talos" when downloaded from https://timesnapper.com/ https://timesnapper.com/
- LeonB 4y ago
  Founder here… looking into this.
  - karencarits 4y ago
    Thank you, I appreciate your time and help! I guess it's a false positive on my side but have emailed details to support
    - LeonB 4y ago
      Here's a virus total report on the file. I find virus total useful (as a product developer) because it will help show cases where some smaller scanner is reporting a positive. https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/718fe790bb2c1d9742819983051d4d880b8083a1ff210738fadbd9faf76b44cf/details https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/718fe790bb2c1d97428199830... tl/dr -- virus total is happy with the file. It remains possible that middleware of some sort has altered the file before you accessed it. You can check the hash of the file like this: get-filehash ".\TimeSnapperProSetup.exe" and it should return "B50A4449C9C36871280A842A530EA19694C7CBC4CF55CED5A620D8838D87CA1E" -- the same hash shown in the virus total report.
      - karencarits 4y ago
        Thank you for your quick response! I get the same hash, so a false positive it is. I am really excited to test your product, it seems very nice!

BenFranklin100 4y ago

Tropy is an application to turn photos into documents and organize the items via collections. It’s free and open source. My partner’s research involves collecting images and they find it works well. https://tropy.org/ https://tropy.org/

aosaigh 4y ago

I use Hazel[0] to archive everything in my "downloads" folder after a month. Files get separated into "~/Archive/Images/", "~/Archive/Screenshots/" "~/Archive/Audio" ..." depending on certain criteria (mostly file type). Each sub-folder is broken down by year and month, for example "~/Archive/Images/2015/05/". I also occasionally dump stuff that doesn't belong elsewhere into the same folder system, for example WhatsApp media. Basically, if it doesn't need to be specifically filed somewhere, I just put it in my "downloads", knowing that it will be somewhat searchable in the archive by either date, file type or in-document search. This is great for all of the bits and pieces that you don't necessarily have a home for or want to manage. [0] https://www.noodlesoft.com/ https://www.noodlesoft.com/

balaji1 4y ago
Bit late to this thread. Another "archive" idea is to capture archive.org links of past projects. And it can be used to showcase things in the future.
gnatolf 4y ago
Is there a similar program for Windows?
- ics 4y ago
  File Juggler (https://www.filejuggler.com https://www.filejuggler.com) seems to be the recommended alternative.
wingerlang 4y ago
I do something similar, except files are moved from Desktop > Downloads > 'Needs Review' after 1/7/30 days. The vast majority of files are trash, and I simply delete them every other week from the 'Needs Review' folder manually.

BenFranklin100 4y ago

For Windows folks, I’ve found OneNote’s screenshot tool convenient for quickly adding screenshots while taking notes.

jarenmf 4y ago

One of the things I regret most is not keeping backups of the programs I wrote as a child almost 25 years ago. They all just gone, tens of thousands of lines of code. I remember spending whole summers coding and it's all gone.

radiojasper 4y ago

I use ShareX[0] to screenshot all my work. I have it set up so that CTRL-SHIFT-F6 makes a screenshot of a region and it's automatically uploaded to some shared hosting server. It's a lot of fun to see work back from years ago! [0] https://getsharex.com/ https://getsharex.com/

pluijzer 4y ago

I like to take a screenshot too when having just created something. Myself I like to create a screenshot of my whole desktop. Years later I get a nice feeling of nostalgia seeing what theme, wm, apps etc. I used to work with. For the same reason I usually enjoy old photos more for what is in the background than the subject itself.

ffitch 4y ago

Can’t pass by without recommending my https://shottr.cc https://shottr.cc (app for Mac.) I’ve set a dedicated folder for screenshots and save there literally everything now — purchase receipts, important chat conversations, work in progress, reminders to myself, zoom slides. Agree with the author, screenshots are under-appreciated.

keybits 4y ago
Thanks for sharing - installed and liking it so far. Looks like it can replace Monosnap for me.

peckrob 4y ago

A few years back I was going through some old floppy disks I found in a box and, on one of them, I found a screenshot I took of my desktop circa winter of 2000. In it was a window open with a MUD I was logged into at the time. Another window had Winamp open with a playlist of songs and another window had ICQ open. The only reason I took it was because there was an unofficial competition between our pub and another pub elsewhere on the MUD about which was more popular, and we had finally surpassed them. It's amazing how many emotions seeing that one image gave me. But the biggest was just this overwhelming sense of nostalgia. As I looked at that, I could remember what I was thinking, what I was feeling, everything that was happening in my super confusing teenage life at that time. Occasionally I will look at that image now, even 22 years later, I can still feel all those feeling again. Of course, my ex's character is in the screenshot too. So, a bit bittersweet as well. :/

vjerancrnjak 4y ago
Interesting madeleine cookie
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mastazi 4y ago
  maybe some HN readers don't get the madeleine reference: https://www.thelocal.fr/20190814/french-expression-of-the-day-madeleine-de-proust/ https://www.thelocal.fr/20190814/french-expression-of-the-da...
  - Jalad 4y ago
    I'll expand on this since I found it interesting. Essentially it's a reference to a French epic called "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust. It was his life's work and is around 4.2k pages or 1.3 million words! That's much larger than "War and Peace", "Les Miserables", "Crime and Punishment", "The Iliad", and "The Odyssey" combined; which is super impressive.

asdff 4y ago

Zoom meetings have been great for screenshot potential. Previously if someone had an interesting slide at a conference you would have to zoom way in with your phone and hope you got it with enough resolution from your seat.

paulryanrogers 4y ago

For a few months I ran a simple Python keylogger to study my keyboard usage, in response to pain. Much later I found disk was filling up and traced it back to periodic screenshots, like every few minutes. It was a creepy feeling but also kind of fun to step back in time and see what I had been doing. Would've been more fun if it were during the days when I did 3D modeling and pixel art.

kragen 4y ago

Alex says, "Digital work is inherently ephemeral." This is precisely backwards; digital work is one of the least ephemeral aspects of human material culture, exceeded only by occasional miraculous analog exceptions like the Pyramids, potsherds, the Lascaux paintings, and Ötzi's axe. The Torah is digital—encoded in a sequence of discrete symbols rather than continuously varying quantities—and that's why it's survived for 3000 years. The digitization of Socrates's words by Plato and Xenophon is the reason we argue about him today, 2500 years later, rather than his forgotten Persian contemporaries or even Heraclitus. Being digital is what makes the idea of an "exact copy" make sense. You can make an exact copy of some version of the Torah or the Symposium because it's only the discrete letters that matter; the analog nuances of tone of voice or thickness of pen stroke do not count. So digitality is the alternative to the ephemerality of the analog, which is inevitably eaten up by moths and rust. We all know this about digitized language, but for some reason now that we've digitized reasoning in the form of computer programs, we habitually throw up our hands and declare defeat in the face of inevitable ephemerality. This is bullshit. What I really want, instead of screenshots, is a deterministic, reproducible computing environment. The idea is something like uxn or Nock: a platform that's simple enough to stay compatible forever, and efficient enough to be used for many things, even if there are a few things that I do on a computer that need more performance. There are a lot of inspirational examples that offer tempting evidence that this is possible for large, interesting classes of computations: the Smalltalk-78 revival emulator Vanessa Freudenberg wrote, the UM of the Cult of the Bound Variable (which had over 300 successful independent reimplementations), Nguyen and Kay's sketch of Chifir, Lorie's archival UVC, Wirth's RISC, uxn/Varvara, the JVM, and the numerous emulators of things like the MS-DOS environment, the NES, and the Gameboy that are good enough to run the original games. I'm not saying it would be an improvement to do all your digital creative work on an emulated Gameboy in order to ensure that it was reproducible. I think we can do a lot better than that. None of the presently existing archival virtual machines are adequate. But I think the reproducibility of Gameboy games tells us that we don't have to accept bitrot as the price of using computers. Alex says, "They’re not as good as having the original, working thing – but they’re much better than nothing". Well, let's figure out how we can have the original, working thing! This is software, it's a simple matter of programming.

4y ago

stolenmerch 4y ago

Not exactly a screenshot, but I recently found a file from December 1991 that was a proprietary image file of the home screen of a local BBS I used to visit in high school. Was actually able to convert it to a PNG after some work. This might be my oldest file that I personally saved to disk. Now if only I had all those cassette tapes from my TRS-80.

greenthrow 4y ago

I disagree with this advice. Nostalgia is a waste of time. I started coding in about 1988. I have nothing that goes back further than 2010. And I don't waste any time on anything I'm not currently working on. Keep working, keep moving forward. Don't waste your time looking backwards. That's just my opinion, obviously. But I find the obsession with nostalgia in our culture to be sad and destructive.

Aeolun 4y ago
> But I find the obsession with nostalgia in our culture to be sad and destructive My occassional evenings spend looking back through the life that brought me where I am are sad and destructive? I find them to be very effective tools for reflection.
- greenthrow 4y ago
  Re-read what you quoted, please. I did not say "individuals occasionally recollecting their past experiences is destructive." I said the cultural level obsesssion with nostalgia. There's a big difference.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    Is there? What do you consider the cultural level obsession then?
- jiggunjer 4y ago
  You seem to be conflating reminiscence with reflection.
thn-gap 4y ago
This sounds really sad. I really hope that you can build memories that are worth spending some time remembering with joy.
mippenhappen 4y ago
I wouldn't say nostalgia is sad or destructive, but it is also not for me. I delete everything when I'm done with it. I backup less than 2 GB of personal data. I have around 100 photos of my entire life, and I'm certain I'll get around to deleting all of them too.

artur_makly 4y ago

We've automated this nicely for you on any public URL, and even some private one's that use cookies for access: https://VisualSitemaps.com https://VisualSitemaps.com Lot's of folks use us just for archiving purposes. We also have a nifty Ai that compares visual changes in the screenshots.

ctxc 4y ago
Wish I'd discovered you sooner...

donio 4y ago

Using tools, formats or workflows that you will lose access to in the future is the problem here. I have work going back decades and not much that I can think of that I couldn't resurrect in some form with relatively little effort. Having screenshots of thing that are otherwise lost would just make me sad. It's like preserving a single frame from a movie and losing the rest.

Aeolun 4y ago
> It's like preserving a single frame from a movie and losing the rest. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, because you are unlikely to ever rewatch the movie anyway (and then it won’t be as good as your recollection). The point is to be reminded of the fact the movie existed at a time when you wouldn’t ordinarily think of it.

jordanmorgan10 4y ago

My technological life is the antithesis of this post. Screenshots are hosed as soon as I use them or send them.

sharikous 4y ago

The author says correctly that it takes a lot of time but I find the VM experience on modern PCs to be very satisfying as long as you are emulating systems from >10 years ago. On my M1 Mac I have well functioning QEMU VMs for MacOS 7, 9, 10.4, 10.11, Windows XP Windows 11 and some Linuces. I don't use proprietary SAAS formats so by all purposes I can read 99.9% of all files I have ever created with little effort.

edwinwee 4y ago

https://luke.cat https://luke.cat

gaws 4y ago
Any more sites like this?

digitalsushi 4y ago

I'm not even allowed to save an email on my work computer. i can still copy and paste but i cant save. I always wonder how much longer I'll be allowed to screenshot an app by default.

keeptrying 4y ago

Everything changes. Your access to a website could change or the server could go down or a website may get bought. Good reason to keep taking screenshots. There have been dozens of times I ve been saved by a screenshot. - insurance cards on phone - a random screenshot I took of a photo of my citizenship certificate saved me 2 weeks For travel - names of peopel - context during a call

martinflack 4y ago
I've found "print to PDF" to be great for web pages I want to keep, as well. You can then search, copy, print, etc.

nevster 4y ago

And if you've got any old floppy or hard disks - save those suckers now! I managed to get most of the data off my old Apple IIGS hard drive but there were definitely block errors. So I can still boot up the desktop I had in the 80's and 90's in an emulator. Brings back so many memories. http://www.oldcomputerstuff.com/resurrecting-my-apple-iigs-after-20-years/ http://www.oldcomputerstuff.com/resurrecting-my-apple-iigs-a...

wonderbore 4y ago

I had a scheduled screenshot every few minutes for years. At time it helped me recover data that I lost but eventually I stopped using it and deleted my archive when I realized I couldn't police my screenshots. Any one of them could have sensitive information or, ahem, sensitive information Overall though it's nice to see old screenshots even on my phone, but intentionally "taking a screenshot for the memory" feels weird as every one of my screens is boring on its own.

dr_kiszonka 4y ago
Funny comment! You could write a script that would not take screenshots of, e.g., incognito, windows.

soruly 4y ago

I take screenshots of my computer screen every minute since 2008. I've a dedicated 2TB hdd storing these archives compressed with 7z It takes just about 100-200MB/day so it's quite easy to store. These archives saved me from data loss a few times (due to powerloss, or bad mistakes). I just browse through the archive to look for the screenshot where I was coding to recover them by typing it again. this is the screenshot tool I use https://github.com/soruly/TimeSnap https://github.com/soruly/TimeSnap

chaostheory 4y ago
That’s impressive. I would also like this, but what worries me is privacy. There’s already so little that it makes me wonder whether this is degrade it even faster.
avnigo 4y ago
I'm glad you found something that works for you, and I don't mean to dissuade you even if I could, but to me that feels like an antipattern if you only use it for typed text. Consider that with a text editor like Vim, for example, you can "time travel" [0] through your file's edits, or even have undo branches/trees [1][2] available per file. That saves you the trouble of having to transcribe text from screenshots, and also barely uses any storage space. Plain text is also highly more portable and more likely to be recoverable in case of drive failure or file corruption. Additionally, or alternatively, you could try any sort of manual versioning system or background automatic backup solution that keeps versions of files as you work on them. [0]: https://vimtricks.com/p/vimtrick-time-travel-in-vim/ https://vimtricks.com/p/vimtrick-time-travel-in-vim/ [1]: https://neovim.io/doc/user/undo.html#undo-tree https://neovim.io/doc/user/undo.html#undo-tree [2]: https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo https://github.com/simnalamburt/vim-mundo

godelmachine 4y ago

Open question → What's your favorite screenshotting tool? Mine's CloudShot. I can upload some screengrabs straightaway to Google Drive. You have the option to configure keyboard shortcuts to do that.

soruly 4y ago
I write my own powershell script for taking screenshots periodically https://gist.github.com/soruly/889d926fcd4b2b8e8dc113a100b9d988 https://gist.github.com/soruly/889d926fcd4b2b8e8dc113a100b9d...
- godelmachine 4y ago
  Supercool. If you wanted to add a functionality wherein you could upload to Google Drive like CloudShot, what would you need to write?

gcau 4y ago

Is there any program, maybe using ShareX, to just automatically and periodically take a screenshot in the background and save it to a folder?

ctxc 4y ago

This was my idea when I built Electron-vLog: automated screenshots of whatever Electron app I'm building right now whenever I run it, so that I can stitch images together later and watch the evolution. If there's no change from the last screenshot, it doesn't save the current screenshot - helps curb duplicates. The core part works, but never got around to releasing it as an npm package. https://github.com/CatalanCabbage/electron-vlog https://github.com/CatalanCabbage/electron-vlog

erbdex 4y ago

What is your software pipeline to manage screenshots? If we could: - bucket and tag - turn them to tasks - follow ups

anon2020dot00 4y ago

I've been using Notebloc Android app more for this purpose. It can take pictures of pages in a notebook and crop nicely. Also good for taking screenshots of a computer. Although it might seem strange to use a mobile phone to take a picture of a screen, I like that I have a centralized tool that can capture even non-digital stuff like handwritten notes. Also, it packages pictures into a PDF which I find to be more organized than a bunch of pictures scattered about. I usually close the PDF every day and so each PDF corresponds to pictures taken during a day which gives it a context to make stuff easier to find.

jezzamon 4y ago

For my creative coding projects (which are usually looping animations) I've set up scripts that export a short video at every git commit. Going back and seeing things develop is quite satisfying, and also useful if I stumbled upon a configuration that I like and want to branch from

ChadNauseam 4y ago
That’s a fantastic idea, thanks for sharing. It’d be fun to set something like this up for gamedev
lloydatkinson 4y ago
Do you have the scripts or a demo somewhere? sounds cool

iluvblender 4y ago

I absolutely agree with you pcr9103303. I have been following this practice since 5 years and I have benefited immensely from it (recall, retention and revision). I have a dedicated screenshots root folder with sub folders that gets synchronized with the cloud and I go through them regularly.

jl6 4y ago

I take screenshots at fairly random intervals and have done for years. My earliest screenshots are from the 1990s. I consider this an adjunct to my photography hobby. When I travel, I take opportunistic photos of interesting things I see. When I use the computer, I am a traveller in a digital universe and I do the same. I find it really interesting to see the evolution of desktop UIs that I have used over the years, and to see the slow change in applications I typically use.

jeena 4y ago

I'd say blog about your stuff with the screenshots/screencasts, I have one 12 years old of an iPhone game I made https://jeena.net/monster-tiles https://jeena.net/monster-tiles

submeta 4y ago

> I can open them in a modern word processor, and they look similar – but it’s not the same. Some of the fonts and graphics are missing, and I don’t know where I’d find replacements. Why not convert your documents to PDF? That‘ll preserve the layout.

petesergeant 4y ago

My relationship with my screen has been transformed since I learned the OS X screenshot short-cuts -- taking notes, writing documentation, etc, all a breeze since muscle-memory captured Shft+Cmd 4 with Ctrl+Click giving you copy to clipboard

lkrubner 4y ago

At one point I realized that whenever I went on vacation I took pictures of wherever I went: Germany, France, Sweden, Costa Rica, Texas, Florida, etc. But then I realized most of the "traveling" that I do is the different places that I go on my computer. If I'm going to take photos when I travel, I should also be taking screenshots constantly, to document places I went on my computer. Such screenshots are useful because they will capture: 1. the large number of websites that exist in a particular year, but which won't exist 5 years later 2. minor interests I have one year that I don't have later. Occasionally I'm curious when I first got into a particular interest, and seeing the screenshots is helpful for documenting that. When I go back to the oldest entries of my weblog, from 2005, I notice that more than 80% of the links are now 404. The Web is constantly disappearing. Like a forest on its way to extinction, you might as well photograph it now, because it won't be there 10 years later. Most of the websites you visit, you cannot go back and visit them a few years later. Take a photo of them while they still exist.

stanleychink 4y ago

jonnycomputer 4y ago

Screenshot history: 1988 - Emacs 18.52 1992 - Emacs 18.59 1994 - Emacs 19.7 1996 - Emacs 19.7 1998 - Vim ???? 2002 - Emacs 21.1 2006 - Emacs 21.1 2012 - Emacs 24.1 2018 - Emacs 26.1 2022 - Emacs 28.1

WhyNotHugo 4y ago

I keep many old screenshots around. A lot from my "eye candy phase" are a mix of hilarious and cringe to look at. But it's also really amusing to see how my workflow and setup has evolved over the years.

ebfe1 4y ago

I love taking screenshots and even wrote a script a while back to take screenshot when there is mouse movement periodically when handling incidents, i also have crontab job to compress and gpg encrypt the folder with my key at the end of the day if it's not empty. This, together with another script to record all terminal activities during incident helped me a lot of time in the past when writing up post incident write-up after many late nights! Unfortunately i only see the old version here with flameshot taking screenshot at full resolution.. my few later versions turn screenshot to black and white and applied a few imagemagick tweaks to make screenshot file incredibly smaller to store but you get the idea :): https://gist.github.com/santrancisco/9d14e0105316cfa15f98f0fa7c35f8a0 https://gist.github.com/santrancisco/9d14e0105316cfa15f98f0f...

larsrc 4y ago

Having worked in digital archiving, I wholeheartedly approve of this suggestion. Digital artifacts degrade alarmingly quickly.

electric_dreams 4y ago