Rewind ⬅️📽️

Rewind is an application that periodically takes screenshots of your computer screen, recognizes the text in these images, and allows you to search for screenshots by the text on them or by the time of creation. It also intelligently prevents duplicate screenshots to save storage space.

Text search

Timeline

Features 🚀

• Automatic screen capture: Takes screenshots at a set frequency.
• Text Recognition: Uses Tesseract OCR to extract text from screenshots.
• Text Search: Saves screenshots and extracted text in the SQLite database.
• Duplicate Prevention: Uses perceptual hashing (pHash) and text similarity to prevent saving near-duplicate screenshots.
• Console Application: Allows you to search by screenshots in the console.

Installation 🛠️

To install Rewind on Arch Linux, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/Forwall100/rewind.git
   cd rewind

2. Run the installation script:

   ./setup.sh

   This script will execute:

   • Installation of necessary dependencies.
   • Build and install the package.
   • Enabling and launching the Rewind service to create screenshots.

Usage 🎮

Launch

To launch the Rewind client application, run:

rewind

This will open a console application where you can search for screenshots by text or the time they were created.

Navigation in the client interface

• Search: Enter your query and use the arrows to select the desired screenshot.
• Timeline Mode: Press Tab to switch the timeline mode. Use the left and right arrows to navigate through different timestamps.
• Open Image: Press Enter to open the selected screenshot.
• Exit: Press Esc to exit the application.

Data storage 💾

Rewind stores its data in the SQLite database located at the path ~/.config/rewind/screenshots.db. Screenshots are saved as binary data, and the text extracted from them is saved as plain text. The perceptual hash (pHash) of each image is also stored for efficient similarity checking.

Configuration ⚙️

The configuration file is located at ~/.config/rewind/config.yaml. You can configure the following settings:

• languages: Languages for text recognition. Default is eng+rus. Multiple languages are indicated by a '+'.
• max_db_size_mb: Maximum size of the database in megabytes. Default is 20000.
• screenshot_period_sec: Period between screenshots in seconds. Default is 30.
• similarity_threshold: Threshold for image similarity (0.0 to 1.0). Default is 0.9. This threshold determines how similar two images must be to be considered duplicates. The value ranges from 0.0 to 1.0, where 1.0 means the images must be identical. A value of 0.9 allows for slight differences (like cursor movement or clock changes) while still catching most duplicates.
• text_similarity_threshold: Threshold for text similarity (0.0 to 1.0). Default is 0.8. Similar to the image similarity threshold, but for the extracted text. This helps catch cases where the images might be slightly different, but the text content is essentially the same. A value of 0.8 allows for small differences in recognized text while still catching most duplicates.

Example of config.yaml

languages: "eng+rus"
max_db_size_mb: 20000
screenshot_period_sec: 30
similarity_threshold: 0.9
text_similarity_threshold: 0.8

Caution

Restart systemd service rewind-screenshot.service to make the config changes take effect

Systemd Service 🔄

The background service is managed by systemd. The service file rewind-screenshot.service is installed in /usr/lib/systemd/user/.

To manually start or stop the service, use:

systemctl --user start rewind-screenshot.service
systemctl --user stop rewind-screenshot.service

To enable the service when logging in:

systemctl --user enable rewind-screenshot.service

Dependencies 📦

Rewind depends on the following packages:

• python
• python-pillow
• python-pytesseract
• python-yaml
• python-numpy
• python-scipy
• python-levenshtein
• tesseract
• tesseract-data-eng
• tesseract-data-rus
• grim (for Wayland)
• scrot (for X11)

These dependencies are automatically installed during the configuration process. To add new OCR languages, you need to install the appropriate tesseract-data-[langcode] packages and edit the config.

Delete 🗑️

To remove Rewind, follow these steps:

1. Stop and disable the service:

   systemctl --user stop rewind-screenshot.service
   systemctl --user disable rewind-screenshot.service

2. Delete the installed files:

   sudo rm /usr/bin/rewind
   sudo rm /usr/lib/systemd/user/rewind-screenshot.service
   sudo rm -rf ~/.config/rewind

3. Delete the package

   sudo pacman -R rewind