812
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by ordellrb@lemmy.world to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] hitwright@lemmy.world 58 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Takes a screenshot every minute and saves it

[-] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 7 points 3 weeks ago

Can you search the screenshots with OCR though? That's Recall's main selling point

[-] Aux@lemmy.world 58 points 3 weeks ago

You can start by running sudo apt install tesseract-ocr and then reading its docs.

[-] Morphit@feddit.uk 29 points 3 weeks ago

Fulfills the AI quota 👍

[-] MacNCheezus 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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:

gnome-screenshot -f - | tee /Microsoft/yourPrivacy/$(date +%s).png | tesseract - /Microsoft/yourPrivacy/$(date +%s).txt

Skip the database, just use grep to search that directory if you need to find anything. Voilà, homemade Recall.

[-] Aux@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] MacNCheezus 1 points 3 weeks ago

I’m sure there are many ways to improve on this solution, but they would all require significantly more effort (ElasticSearch isn’t exactly trivial to set up).

This is really just a proof of concept, the most minimal viable implementation that gets you something similar in terms of functionality.

For instance, Windows Recall stores OCR content tagged by app, this solution doesn’t. Also, as others have mentioned, a practical implementation should likely check if anything has changed at all and discard any screenshots that don’t have any new data.

[-] R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 21 points 3 weeks ago

I can't imagine it'd be that hard to write some code that does that using an existing AI model.

[-] not_amm@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee 5 points 3 weeks ago

You're probably right.

[-] MacNCheezus 3 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[-] JackbyDev@programming.dev 7 points 3 weeks ago

This is a shitpost and not a real suggestion.

this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
812 points (98.8% liked)

linuxmemes

19701 readers
274 users here now

I use Arch btw


Sister communities:

Community rules

  1. Follow the site-wide rules and code of conduct
  2. Be civil
  3. Post Linux-related content
  4. No recent reposts

Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS