[switchbak]

I never got in this habit, and I guess I'm old enough to only become aware that it is a habit recently.

I do take screenshots while debugging or if I want to show someone something curious, and I'll take those pretty aggressively just in case (the files are small, hard drives are cheap). But I feel no compulsion here.

Where does the drive to take so many screenshots come from?

[GaggiX]

For me probably in thinking I found something interesting that I could share with my friends, but eventually it developed into taking screenshots for even the most remotely interesting stuff, which no one really cares about but me.

[exikyut]

  $ ls -1 | grep scrot | wc -l
  76422

That's just this laptop. My file server's broken at the moment (ZFS redundancy FTW \o/ first ever disk failure) and it has a few more moved onto it from different machines (probably maybe 50-70k), and then there's probably 20k on my previous desktop I haven't moved over. Hrm, and then there are my phones... maybe 200k all up?

I'll eventually figure out an aggregation and OCR pipeline. In the meantime while circumstances don't permit that I've slowly accepted the scale I've decided to operate at. It's a commitment. It started out as OCD and now it's just... an interesting habit I actually think would be suboptimal to break. I've never known how to organize words into a journal format, so this is the next best thing I've got.

And it's fun holding down the 'p' key in sxiv and just rewinding through the flickery slideshow of interestingness. Literally everything has a story in it. It's fun.

[GaggiX]

I should put everything into CLIP and make a semantic search engine. (Also OCR is a good idea)

[hgsgm]

I and many others can easily empathize if we look back at our phone camera libraries, full of mundane momentarily interesting images from our lives.

But what screenshots trigger that capture itch?

One thing I have (on my phone) are high score/achievement moments in games. Ironically, Threes game has its own internal hall of fame, and the UI is made up like a framed picture on a wall.

[BlueTemplar]

It's quite a common thing, Xfire went even further and introduced its Flashback feature 15 years ago :

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/82410-xfire-gets-video-c...

> The TiVo-like function allows users to go back and record footage five to ten seconds after it happened.