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Comment by xpressvideoz | Hacker News Reader

I have been taking screenshots for years, but it developed into a hoarding OCD. And it is ruining my life. My regular life is being interrupted by taking screenshots all the time, so I have relatively less time to work on important things. I don't even view those screenshots again in the future so the time spent on those screenshots is completely wasted. I don't recommend having a habit of taking screenshots to those that may be vulnerable to OCD.

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> My regular life is being interrupted by taking screenshots all the time, so I have relatively less time to work on important things.

I think I lack perspective on this and am not quite understanding what you mean. Where is the interruption coming from? Why do you need to take screenshots?

> I think I lack perspective on this and am not quite understanding what you mean. Where is the interruption coming from? Why do you need to take screenshots?

I have this too but it's in the form of saving URLs of interesting things. I just fear stumbling upon something nice, not saving it and then not being able to find it again (which happens regularly btw; Google search and reddit search are pretty bad at finding things when my only context is "I saw it last week or something")

Honestly it's exhausting.

Safari (and I think other browsers) has some great history search features. You maybe could explore those.

https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/search-your-web-brows...

>Your Mac can keep your browsing history for as long as a year, while some iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models keep browsing history for a month.

>Your History shows the pages you've visited on Chrome in the last 90 days.[1]

I'm not sure if nextaccountic would find 1 year or 1 month or 90 days sufficient.

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95589

I don't use macs.. Firefox history is pretty much useless but there are some extensions like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-bette... .. but none really satisfying

Generally the best extension to save things is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...

It could be worse once you realize that webpages can disappear. So your saved URL doesn’t even help, you’ll actually need to save the page as some kind of archive.

The tool I mentioned above auto save the full text content of your visited web pages locally so you could look back even if the server is down

You can use a personal search engine, it runs locally, allowing you search back the content you visited without SEO junks nor privacy leak.

https://github.com/beenotung/personal-search-engine

Doesn't yacy do the same thing?

Sounds like it's a compulsion, same as people who check the stove or faucet just in case, GP takes screenshots just in case.

Just set up a screen recorder to record a frame once every second into a video file.

I used to use TimeSnapper for that. The classic version is free.

It did use a crapload of disk space though (20GB per week?), and most of the data is almost identical, so I started designing an algorithm to store only the differences between images before realizing I had reinvented video codecs... so I just made a ffmpeg one liner to convert the image sequences to mp4 :)

You can capture straight from the GPU into the GPU's video encoder and directly get h265 frames efficiently without laundering the whole framebuffer through system RAM each time.

Nvenc is actually quite nice and easy to use for that, but if you want to do any serious post processing you'll need to parse h265 (headers at least) and it's not the easiest parser to write.

How can I do that?

On Windows, there's an API to capture the display as a DX texture. Then either use NVENC or AMF to encode. You'll get compressed frames that you can just stuff straight into whichever video container you like.

Good thing you realized this is exactly what video codecs have been doing for decades. Thanks for the chuckle, though.

Since you used the phrase “my regular life is being interrupted,” it really does sound like a bit of a compulsion. I’m sorry to hear that.

Have you tried talking to a psychologist or a psychiatrist? OCD and similar disorders are hard to “cure,” but I know from close friends and family that therapy and some drugs both can be helpful in giving you back some control, as well as dealing with some of the itinerant anxiety and depression.

Either way, hope you’re doing okay!

You can download existing auto-screenshot-tools or even setup a cron to take them every 2 seconds. Maybe it could reduce your OCD by knowing it is always being done for you?

I feel like screenshots every 2 seconds would take more space than a full screen video capture.

It does! I ran into this issue (disk filling up with screenshots) and realized that the optimal compression solution already existed and was called a video file, so set up a script to run on cron to convert the folder full of pngs to a mp4.

What size differences are we talking about here? I took one screenshot (+webcam shot) once every hour for three years and it takes up around 5gb for 14,000 images. I believe I compressed it slightly some time ago.

Yeah, TimeSnapper takes them every 5 seconds, so I'd get 5-10 thousand images per day, about 1GB per day depending on quality settings.

I appreciated the (relatively) high frame rate because I enjoyed watching the timelapse at the end of the day, as a kind of review.

I never got in this habit, and I guess I'm old enough to only become aware that it is a habit recently.

I do take screenshots while debugging or if I want to show someone something curious, and I'll take those pretty aggressively just in case (the files are small, hard drives are cheap). But I feel no compulsion here.

Where does the drive to take so many screenshots come from?

For me probably in thinking I found something interesting that I could share with my friends, but eventually it developed into taking screenshots for even the most remotely interesting stuff, which no one really cares about but me.

I and many others can easily empathize if we look back at our phone camera libraries, full of mundane momentarily interesting images from our lives.

But what screenshots trigger that capture itch?

One thing I have (on my phone) are high score/achievement moments in games. Ironically, Threes game has its own internal hall of fame, and the UI is made up like a framed picture on a wall.

It's quite a common thing, Xfire went even further and introduced its Flashback feature 15 years ago :

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/82410-xfire-gets-video-c...

> The TiVo-like function allows users to go back and record footage five to ten seconds after it happened.

  $ ls -1 | grep scrot | wc -l
  76422

That's just this laptop. My file server's broken at the moment (ZFS redundancy FTW \o/ first ever disk failure) and it has a few more moved onto it from different machines (probably maybe 50-70k), and then there's probably 20k on my previous desktop I haven't moved over. Hrm, and then there are my phones... maybe 200k all up?

I'll eventually figure out an aggregation and OCR pipeline. In the meantime while circumstances don't permit that I've slowly accepted the scale I've decided to operate at. It's a commitment. It started out as OCD and now it's just... an interesting habit I actually think would be suboptimal to break. I've never known how to organize words into a journal format, so this is the next best thing I've got.

And it's fun holding down the 'p' key in sxiv and just rewinding through the flickery slideshow of interestingness. Literally everything has a story in it. It's fun.

I should put everything into CLIP and make a semantic search engine. (Also OCR is a good idea)

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