I do like to look at screenshots I took over the years, whether by accident or on purpose, so this is pretty good advice. Maybe I could configure a timer to take screenshots at random times automatically.
I do this too. I think there’s an opportunity to build some product around this - OCR all your screenshots, make it searchable, also infer context based on the screenshot (i.e. is it a screenshot of Twitter, a blog, a website, etc.) and add those as tags. I’d be interested if something like this exists or if someone is working on something similar!
I’m not aware of anything that will auto-tag like you suggest, but various note taking applications will automatically OCR images to make them searchable. OneNote will do this by default and Obsidian can do this with the “text extractor” plugin. I rely on this heavily for my workflow.
I’m a big fan of CleanShot, in particular the following features:
You can drag the screenshot straight into a piece of software. I often snap a quick area of my screen (Command+Shift+4) and then drag the shot directly into a Slack/Discord channel or a Google Doc.
You can click “Copy” and then paste screenshots directly into things too
It has “Capture History”, which I can use to get back screenshots I took recently
Crucially, it has an “annotate” feature with the most important annotation feature: the ability to drop a big pink arrow onto the screenshot. I use this all the time.
All of that seems supported natively by (recent) macos, though perhaps less conveniently.
Although sadly these improvements have gone along with what I think are usability regressions in Preview, which make it less convenient for quick annotations.
Screenshot.app, which comes with macOS, can be set to save captures to iCloud Drive (or other locations) by using the Options button in the bar at the bottom of the screen. It is great if you don’t need the bells and whistles from CleanShot.
If you’re a Linux user, I cannot recommend flameshot enough https://flameshot.org/
Daaaamn, that looks nice. Thanks for the rec. I have been very unhappy with Gnome’s screenshot tool for years
It looks like there is support for Windows and macOS too!
I do like to look at screenshots I took over the years, whether by accident or on purpose, so this is pretty good advice. Maybe I could configure a timer to take screenshots at random times automatically.
I do this too. I think there’s an opportunity to build some product around this - OCR all your screenshots, make it searchable, also infer context based on the screenshot (i.e. is it a screenshot of Twitter, a blog, a website, etc.) and add those as tags. I’d be interested if something like this exists or if someone is working on something similar!
I’m not aware of anything that will auto-tag like you suggest, but various note taking applications will automatically OCR images to make them searchable. OneNote will do this by default and Obsidian can do this with the “text extractor” plugin. I rely on this heavily for my workflow.
I’m a big fan of CleanShot, in particular the following features:
Example (which I snapped and than dragged straight onto Transmit to upload to my S3 bucket): https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2023/pink-arrow.png
All of that seems supported natively by (recent) macos, though perhaps less conveniently.
Although sadly these improvements have gone along with what I think are usability regressions in Preview, which make it less convenient for quick annotations.
Windows users: screenx
do you perhaps mean
ShareX?Screenshot.app, which comes with macOS, can be set to save captures to iCloud Drive (or other locations) by using the Options button in the bar at the bottom of the screen. It is great if you don’t need the bells and whistles from CleanShot.