🦥 My Screenshots Folder Was a To-Do List That Never Reminded Me. So I Hired a Sloth

Description and use

Screenshots on a desktop become forgotten tasks and exposed sensitive data. The local tool slothlens processes them nightly, generating reminders, redacting sensitive content, and organizing files, producing a daily digest.

Problem

Screenshots accumulate on a desktop as forgotten to‑do items and sensitive data, with no reminders or organization.

Outcome

After nightly processing, the user receives a digest of actionable tasks and a list of sensitive items to delete or secure, with all screenshots organized into folders and searchable by content.

Workflow

• 1. Configure slothlens to run nightly during a user‑defined window (default 00:30‑07:00).
• 2. When the machine is idle, slothlens wakes, checks CPU and battery usage, and stops if conditions are not met.
• 3. It processes one screenshot at a time, sending the image to a local Gemma 3‑4B model via Ollama.
• 4. The model generates a caption and classifies the screenshot (e.g., "booking", "credentials", "error").
• 5. Text is redacted in three layers before being stored in SQLite.
• 6. Results are committed immediately; failed images are retried on the next nap.
• 7. In the morning, the user runs slothlens digest --html to view a Markdown/HTML report of to‑dos and sensitive items.
• 8. The user can search with slothlens find <query> or tidy up with slothlens tidy --apply and undo with slothlens undo.
• 9. The tool respects user activity, stopping if keyboard/mouse input occurs within 5 minutes or CPU >35%.
• 10. The tool runs with lowest priority (os.nice(19)) and does not drain battery when unplugged.

Evidence

A screenshot is an intention with no reminder attached.

Source

slothlens is a sloth that eats your screenshots while you sleep.

Source

After midnight, on AC power, when nobody has touched the keyboard for a while, it wakes up and reads your screenshots one at a time with Gemma 3 4B running locally through Ollama.

Source

No cloud, no account, no API key. Screenshots only ever go to the Ollama server on localhost, and extracted text passes through three layers of redaction before it is stored.

Source

The sloth rules: Only works at night, Never drains your battery, Yields to humans, Yields to other work, Lowest priority on the machine, One bite at a time, Never loses its place.

Source