Remember Everything with Timed Screenshots on Mac

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I use TimeSnapper on windows.  It’s a great little app that lets me very quickly go back in time and see what I was doing.  It basically takes a screeshot every 10 seconds which I can then play as a video.  This comes in very handy specially when I am coding because sometimes I will make a bad change that breaks my code and can’t really remember how I got there.  Now I can go back in time and see what I was typing or doing.

I couldn’t find anything like this on the Mac, so I had to hack it together.  I have never done any shell scripting on the mac before, so this could all be wrong.  Any help is greatly appreciated.  Here is what I did:

Create a launchd agent

Basically, I created a plist file and saved it in ~/Library/LaunchAgents and called it me.screenshot.plist – see below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
 <key>Label</key>
 <string>me.screenshot</string>
 <key>ProgramArguments</key>
 <array>
 <string>/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/timesnap.sh</string>
 </array>
 <key>StartInterval</key>
 <integer>10</integer>
 <key>RunAtLoad</key>
 <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

The file above runs my shell script every 10 seconds and it starts running as soon as I login.

Create a shell script

The shell script simply creates a folder for the day and then takes a screenshot and saves it with the date and time in the filename to make it easy to sort and find specific files.  I put them in folder for every day for better organization.  I also generate 2 filenames to take a screenshot of both monitors, if the second monitor is disconnected, only 1 image is created. Here is the script

#! /bin/bash
foldername=""`eval date +%Y-%m-%d`""
mkdir "/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername"
filename1="/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername/image_01_"`eval date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`".png"
filename2="/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername/image_02_"`eval date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`".png"
screencapture -x "$filename1" "$filename2"

What’s missing? I Need Help

I would like to detect idle time and skip saving the screenshot if I am idle to save some storage space.  Any ideas?

UPDATE

I figured out how to detect idle time, so my mac isn’t just snapping away all day…   Here is the updated script.

#! /bin/bash
x=20
if [ $((`ioreg -c IOHIDSystem | sed -e '/HIDIdleTime/ !{ d' -e 't' -e '}' -e 's/.* = //g' -e 'q'` / 1000000000)) -lt $x ]; then
 echo "taking screenshot"
 foldername=""`eval date +%Y-%m-%d`""
 mkdir "/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername"
 filename1="/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername/image_01_"`eval date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`".png"
 filename2="/Users/emad/Desktop/Screenshots/$foldername/image_02_"`eval date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`".png"
 screencapture -x "$filename1" "$filename2"
else
 echo "idle - no screenshot"
fi

Basically, it will not take a screenshot if the computer has been idle for 20 seconds or more.