
Show HN: Offline text extractor from screenshots in macOS - ghostffcode
I&#x27;ve always had an issue with the screenshot flow on my computers. They save to the desktop by default and I can&#x27;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&#x27;s the final product, let me know what you think. - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;visionshot.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;visionshot.app&#x2F;</a>
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riter
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!

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

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riter
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

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heinrichhartman
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.

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

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skadamat
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/](https://screenotate.com/)

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seltzered_
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](https://creaceed.com/prizmo)

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

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whalesalad
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](https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html)

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

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

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siruncledrew
Yea, also right under Options on touchbar screenshot feature.

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philfreo
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?

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

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

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

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madeofpalk
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](https://i.imgur.com/tsAmsFe.png)

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spookybones
Useful. Thanks!

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contingencies
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.

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JadeNB
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.

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contingencies
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.

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

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betageek
+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.

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blakewatson
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.

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

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

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

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ghostffcode
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.

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

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

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microdrum
Awesome, reminds me of [https://www.screenomex.com/record-
recall](https://www.screenomex.com/record-recall).

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

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ghostffcode
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.

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

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ghostffcode
Done, thank you for the tip.

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

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miki_tyler
Can you dnd screenshots from your app?

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ghostffcode
Yes, you can.

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s09dfhks
with mac you can screenshot right to the clipboard though

