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Show HN: Offline text extractor from screenshots in macOS

125 pointsghostffcode44 comments

I've always had an issue with the screenshot flow on my computers. They save to the desktop by default and I can't seem to find screenshots easily when I needed it. They create too much clutter too. So I set out to solve this problem. My major concern was with privacy so I made sure to make it work entirely offline. Here's the final product, let me know what you think. - https://visionshot.app/

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Major personal use cases:

- SS during conf demo calls

- SS competitor products (UI designers, game and product designers to convey flow / features)

- SS images that don't allow download on sites (memes, fb, insta)

- SS chats to convey conversation (TG, Whatsapp, etc.)

Feedback w/o trying app:

- Would be great if it could classify app / tag app names if it recognizes the client as I may not remember the content initially but would remember whether it was chrome or whats app

- Would be great to classify and extract conversations

- Would be great to group same app SS within same time period (last hr) into the same folder

- Support video screen cap though I do this less

- Save the URL of SS if in browser

- JPEG compression

Its funny because this is an activity most people in the information work space do almost certainly weekly and there has been no innovation on this. You have plenty of room to 10x the user experience here and make a must-have app. Good luck and pls share v2 on HN!

There are a number of Chrome extensions to facilitate instagram downloading.

If the CLI is more your thing: https://github.com/althonos/InstaLooter

Trusting these types of extensions are a gamble nowadays imho. Every month Chrome or infosec researchers are constantly unearthing bad actors that have built but more likely acquired large user base extensions to either inject ads, false ad attribution, or recording user behavioral data for bot fraud heuristics.

I don't disagree thought ... as most aren't privacy conscious

Thank you for the detailed feedback. I like the idea of grouping certain screenshots based on tags and origin. I wanted to put out the initial iteration and see what works before putting in more time. I am also working on an extension that can interface with the desktop app to provide finer details about the origin of a screenshot. Also thinking about optional backup for folks who want it. Thank you once again and I'll be sure to update on the next iteration.

It's been awhile since I've used it, but Snagit does a lot of what you want. Not free though.

Very nice!

I found more and more of my workflows getting screenshot driven. It's fast, reliable and accurate. Often-times, I don't care that much about the added overhead of pngs vs text.

E.g. I found the only viable way to export my fb timeline (including pictures and comments), when I left, was to screenshot the entire thing. ~500 images.

Looking forward to having those indexed!

Also really like the software delivery here. No way I would have uploaded that content to a SaaS.

Just out of curiosity, why did you want to archive your FB timeline?

Visionshot looks neat! It looks like there's a few different apps trying to solve a similar set of problems.

Screenotate by Omar Rizwan is the one I used for a while: https://screenotate.com/

Yeah, I've been wanting to find a way to throw money at Omar/screenotate, though havent yet because I already purchased Prizmo (mac only) which has an okay-but-not-perfect screenshot ocr as sortof a side feature: https://creaceed.com/prizmo

Someone recently made dpScreenOCR ( https://danpla.github.io/dpscreenocr/ ) on linux , haven't tried yet

Onyx will let you change the directory where screenshots are saved on Mac (among a lot of other things) https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

My screenshots go into ~/screenshots and my desktop has icons disabled via the same aforementioned tool.

One of the most powerful modifications I made in university was that every screenshot automatically got uploaded to a service and my clipboard was populated with a link. I used it constantly.

I also used the hotkey Combo to zoom my entire screen in. Any time I did any reading I'd really quickly and fluidly zoom to fill the column into the screen.

Dropbox app does this and it is a very useful for some use cases.

You can change the location to which screenshots are saved as a standard macos feature. Just cmd+shift+5, click Options, click Other Location...

Yea, also right under Options on touchbar screenshot feature.

I already have screenshots going into a Dropbox -> Screenshots directory (with "Fan" display from my macOS Dock), which I like.

However I do want non-cloud OCR / text search on existing + new screenshots.

Basically I don't want you to change anything about my screenshot setup except make it searchable.

Does VisionShot do this for me?

Yes, go to import and change the directory you want it to import from and choose the "Import Only" option.

For moving screenshots to another location than the desktop, this setting works on macOS 10.14.6

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Downloads/

As of a few years ago, you can change this in the cmd + shift + 5 screenshot tool, and it'll persist to the other screenshot shortcuts https://i.imgur.com/tsAmsFe.png

Useful. Thanks!

OK so there are a few use cases here. (1) Finding something in a sea of timestamps. (2) Storing not to Desktop (which always gets cluttered). (3) Searchability when you want something.

It seems like you have a hyper-focused solution to 1-2-3 which only allows you to solve screenshots. What about other use cases? Could you not make this more general? (1) Auto-rename files matching a certain pattern when they are created in certain directories using a filter (eg. current OCR/image analysis approach). (2) Allow also moving, based on a similar inotify (or similar) API. (3) Make the OCR output an existing search platform (eg. Mac search) pluggable module.

All of these would be possible to achieve cross-platform.

While I'm sympathetic to your generalised (1)–(3), "why not solve this more general problem before solving the specific one?" is usually a great way not solve anything because you're worried you haven't solved the perfect thing. It's almost always easier to make a working solution more general than it is to create a working but specific solution in the first place.

Yes. However, in the context of sharing something in this sort of community, one would assume breadth of application is a reasonable scope for discussion.

This doesn't work for me... no screenshots are imported, and no new ones appear (running latest Catalina)

+1, tried a few things and just get '0 screenshots imported' all the time, looked in Console and couldn't see anything obvious.

Also please add some kind of support contact method as the only link to you in the app is a Twitter account with direct messages locked.

Hi, I've gotten a couple of reports on this and I'm looking into it. Please be patient while I figure out the cause.

Same problem here - on Mojave 10.14.6

I already had a custom location for screen shots and selected that as Import folder in VisionShot

I don’t know if this was intentional or just a happy accident, but I’m really glad that the menu bar app doesn't disappear automatically on mouse click. It means I can type into the search input with the macOS Accessibility Keyboard without the app closing on me—which is what happens to me in most menu bar apps.

A happy accident I guess. I'll be sure to keep it that way in updates and upcoming versions, cheers.

And 3 hours later, VisionShot finished importing my 2,000+ screenshots lol.

I'm acquainted with the creator of a similar tool that I think is awesome and might provide some inspiration: https://screenotate.com/

How does this work? I mean is there a text extraction model and some data format somewhere keeping track of everthing?

Yes, but that's all done locally on your computer. All results are stored in a local config file and used for the search sorting.

Lush will check it out (e.g. buy)

Your feedback will go a long way too, thank you!

Awesome, reminds me of https://www.screenomex.com/record-recall.

I changed screenshot directory in cmd + shift + 5 screenshot tool, can I change it in VisionShot too ?

Yes, you can. Go to import and change to your screenshots directory. Then select "Import Only"... restart the app and your default screenshot directory will be the new directory it watches for new screenshots.

One minor suggestion: compress the image from your website for faster loading time.

Done, thank you for the tip.

Really nice landing page. Going to borrow style for some projects. :)

Can you dnd screenshots from your app?

Yes, you can.

with mac you can screenshot right to the clipboard though

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