It appears to be as simple as tesseract <infile><outfile>. Possibly could even pipe (or tee) the screenshot straight into that and save both an image and a text file in a single command line.
It is much better to search using ElasticSearch or Sphinx. Grep is super slow, non indexed and can’t do natural language full text searches. It’s pretty much useless for any real world text search you’d want from OCRed content. And all these better tools are free and open source, so really a no brainer.
I found a small command to run KDE Spectacle (screenshot software) with Tesseract so I can OCR a screenshot if I want to, I only had to install Tesseract and a main language, you could easily do the same with an API and/or a local AI.
its a cronjob that runs each minute (*/1) in any hour, any day, any month, on any weekday, gnome-screenshot obviously takes a screenshot and outputs it to the given file path and filename, where the filename is written as the current date as string and .png as format
It’s a crontab entry which, once a minute, uses the gnome-screenshot program to take a screenshot of your monitor and save it to /Microsoft/yourPrivacy.
What does that command do?
Takes a screenshot every minute and saves it
Can you search the screenshots with OCR though? That’s Recall’s main selling point
You can start by running
sudo apt install tesseract-ocrand then reading its docs.It appears to be as simple as
tesseract <infile> <outfile>. Possibly could even pipe (or tee) the screenshot straight into that and save both an image and a text file in a single command line.So something like this should do the trick:
Skip the database, just use
grepto search that directory if you need to find anything. Voilà, homemade Recall.It is much better to search using ElasticSearch or Sphinx. Grep is super slow, non indexed and can’t do natural language full text searches. It’s pretty much useless for any real world text search you’d want from OCRed content. And all these better tools are free and open source, so really a no brainer.
Fulfills the AI quota 👍
I can’t imagine it’d be that hard to write some code that does that using an existing AI model.
Llava and Bakllava are two Ollama models than can not only extract text but also describe what’s happening on screen.
Using
tesseract-ocr, as the other guy suggested, is probably simpler and less resource intensive though.I found a small command to run KDE Spectacle (screenshot software) with Tesseract so I can OCR a screenshot if I want to, I only had to install Tesseract and a main language, you could easily do the same with an API and/or a local AI.
You’re probably right.
This is a shitpost and not a real suggestion.
its a cronjob that runs each minute (*/1) in any hour, any day, any month, on any weekday, gnome-screenshot obviously takes a screenshot and outputs it to the given file path and filename, where the filename is written as the current date as string and .png as format
It’s a crontab entry which, once a minute, uses the gnome-screenshot program to take a screenshot of your monitor and save it to /Microsoft/yourPrivacy.