71: Automated Capture

Thanks @sylumer! That’s exactly what I was looking for. I think with this starting point and the documentation provided I could likely craft what I’m looking for.

Ideally I would want something that would work the same regardless of the platform as I quite frequently read articles on my iPad.

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I think it was @MacSparky on this episode who was talking about capturing text messages. I have a very simple Shortcut that I use to do this, maybe it will be helpful to others. It requires Toolbox Pro and DEVONthink

The Shortcut only has a few actions, and can be easily built to individual use cases.

  1. If the input is a Screenshot, move on. Otherwise, Get last screenshot.
  2. Use Toolbox Pro to OCR text in the screenshot
  3. Convert to JPG (smaller than the native PNG)
  4. Create file in DEVONthink with the image as the file and the recognized text as the comment.

This allows me to save the source image, but still search by the text.
Get the Shortcut

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Huh. I hadn’t thought of using screenshots and DEVONthink to do this, but I like what you’ve done. I created a shortcut a little while ago to capture the relevant information of a message and add it to Things. I’ve been meaning to write it up for a while, and hearing @MacSparky and @RosemaryOrchard talk about this prompted me to finish and publish that post.

Great episode. I’m new to the show and to automation in general but am all in with Shortcuts and drinking from the fire hose! THANK YOU for sharing all of this great information!

I’m here looking for ways to completely automate capture of everything I do:

  • Podcast listens
  • YouTube views
  • music plays in Apple Music
  • Calendar events
  • Locations
  • news events
  • purchases
  • health data
  • food consumption
  • etc.

And then of course, I’m using many of the Drafts flows mentioned in this podcast, but you’ve given me ideas to kick it up several notches. (Thanks!)

I’m trying to Life Log even the tiniest bits of a day with time stamps, locations, the weather, etc.

I understand that Apple is required to send collected data upon request but I’m hoping to write automations to grab these items in real time, and passively in the background.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Best,
Doug

PS The capybara has been recently fed :herb:

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Depending on what apps you use, this should be possible! There might be some tricky parts (YouTube for example), but if you tackle one piece of the puzzle at a time I’m sure you’ll make it.

You might want to check out on the IndieWeb movement. Lots of people there track everything (Aaron Parecki for example). Here on the forums a lovely member whose name currently escapes me puts everything in Airtable too.

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Thank you @RosemaryOrchard ! Very much appreciated!

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:herb: have you tried the heart button

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