Recaptures: a one‑minute screen capture journal (C#)

Why I built it

In 2020, everyone was home; Parents, kids, teachers. My son had school on the computer and I had work. Like many parents, “Trust is good, control is better,” my wife said, so I built a way to see what my son was actually doing.

I wanted a visual record of work without manual logging—something I could glance back on to reconstruct what he did. So I wrote Recaptures, a tiny Windows app that screenshots once per minute and uploads the JPEG to remote storage.

• Language: C# / .NET (WinForms host)
• Packages: FluentFTP for FTPS, Serilog for logs
• Strategy: minimal timer + full-screen capture + JPEG quality control

Repo: https://github.com/neilspink/recaptures

Prolog

My son hated it. When he was caught not working on school stuff, he quickly discovered why: the app. :) It was fun (for me) watching him try to hack it in real time.

For him, it was surveillance. For me, it was peace of mind. But I’ll give him credit: it raised his IT game, and that, in a way, was also part of the lesson.