Show HN: Record all your web browsing with fully searchable screenshots | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Record all your web browsing with fully searchable screenshots

github.com

82 pointsidibidiart23 comments

This is neat, but I think it just nuked my browser history. That's bad.

BTW disabling or uninstalling the plugin restores access to the "normal" history. And I infer that it didn't stop recording history while active, so that's good.

Slightly different, but I use a program called timesnapper [1] that takes a screen grab every second. It is so useful for figuring out exactly what I did a couple of weeks ago. The contents of your screen is a very useful data source.

[1] http://www.timesnapper.com/

Great idea. I tried this addon now. One limitation I see is that it's only saving single screenshot for each URL, not full page. So on a long (vertically scrolling) page only a small part is saved.

That's an interesting problem I think will all the screenshotting tools out there. If you want the full page the extension has to scroll down the page and stitch the individual pictures together. You'd think there would be a way to capture the whole page easily but it's quite the tricky problem.

I wrote a really basic ruby library to take full page screenshots: https://github.com/ctide/screenshotter/blob/master/lib/scree... using selenium & webdriver. Not great for a chrome extension, but useful nonetheless. :)

I'm pretty sure that a chrome extension can take a screenshot of the full page not just whats visible

EDIT: here it is: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/desktopCapture#metho...

Interesting. Will experiment with it and will push changes if successful. I guess the API is relatively new (Chrome 34) and I hadn't come across it, till now. Thanks!

That or just record what I've actually scrolled. Why would I archive content I've never seen?

Well, it's interesting. My main concern with capturing the entire tab as image is that the site being captured maybe one of those infinitely scrollable pages (i.e. same as the history.html page) in which case, depending on implementation, the tab may be very very long (tens of thousands of pixels in height) and 99% blank (if employing an infinite scroll mechanism that puts only the currently viewed items in the DOM)

Edit: so capturing on each scroll step (over say 3 seconds) > $('body').height()/3 and grouping the multiple screenshots under the given item is one possible way. Thanks for your thought.

Yes, I've used wkhtmltopdf for that, but I don't think it works if the page requires authentication, or you want to check what happens if you have particular cookies set.

This is pretty cool. I've had the urge to build something similar ever since reading Gwern's article about archiving[1]. My approach was going to either be an extension that ships URLs or just ship the history db wholesale to a webapp which does the archiving, which would allow for multiple machines.

[1]: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs

Great job. I love useful chrome extensions. I wonder where all the extension security haters on HN went today :p

I use to use greplin for something similar. Where did I hear about this band? Search for it, see it was a tweet from my friend a year ago. Cool project.

I was working on the exact same tool. My links used to be spread all over the place and it was not searchable. Good work, this seems very useful.

Nice.

There was similar extension with Firefox which integrated with Beagle desktop search on Linux. I would love to see something like this for Rekonq.

Since this is HN, https://github.com/idibidiart/AllSeeingEye might be a better link.

Thanks. We changed to that from [1] because it is more informative and includes a link to [1] anyway.

1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/all-seeing-eye/kio...

I'll take things I may consider putting on my girlfriend's computer for $400 Alex.

I can't imagine a large amount of people would be interested in this addon. People who use addons are usually power users, who I don't imagine would have the need for something like this. Plus a lot of people would be sceptical of an addon which visually saves their browsing history. What about private records (ie viewing a PDF, bank balance, e-mail)?

I'd like something like this add-on to work flawlessly, maybe giving me the option to selectively save the page rather than doing it systematically.

I may not be useful when you are checking your email, and you may not want it when doing some type of transactions online, but it would be great when you are doing research on a subject: storing and organising images is simple, viewing them is simple, sharing them is simple, you get to keep the full look of the original page with all its content and being searchable, you can easily find what you are looking for.

It's a poor man's web archive but somehow, it's easier than saving pages through the Save As browser menu.

It's better than bookmarks since you can do visual and textual searches and you don't have to rely on the original content still being online.

I agree. I was planning on letting the user add a "Do Not Capture" list of URLs in the Options page, but didn't have time to do it on initial release. Sorry.

Done

https://github.com/idibidiart/AllSeeingEye

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/all-seeing-eye/kio...

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