I kept forgetting to stop Hubstaff, so I built a free, open-source app to see what it captures

Hey everyone!

I use Hubstaff for work, and I’ve had two recurring problems with it.

The first one is forgetting to stop the timer.

I’ve done this quite a few times, and Hubstaff could accidentally capture something personal, like private conversations, YouTube videos, or games. One time, Hubstaff actually captured an entire CS2 match I was playing. Luckily, I noticed afterward that the timer was still running and deleted the extra tracked time.

Hubstaff already has a screenshot history, but screenshots don’t always appear immediately on the website, and constantly checking the web interface to see what was captured isn’t very convenient.

Sometimes screenshots take a while to show up, and by the time you remember that something sensitive might have been captured, it’s already the next day. At that point, the screenshot is locked, and you have to ask your manager to delete it.

The second problem is idle time.

If I step away to use the bathroom, take a smoke break, or just get distracted by something, Hubstaff eventually shows an idle time notification. In my case, that’s after 20 minutes of inactivity. You can either discard those 20 minutes or keep them marked as idle time. The funny thing is, I somehow often manage to come back to my PC right around that 20-minute mark 🙂 I tried looking for existing solutions to these problems, but couldn’t find a simple local tool for reviewing and analyzing screenshots. Most idle time solutions I came across were pretty crude and involved simulating activity (which Hubstaff can detect and potentially report to managers).

So I decided to build something myself. That’s how TrackMirror came about.

The project is currently in public preview. It’s Windows-only for now, and I still need to test it on more machines and different Hubstaff configurations.

GitHub (source code and releases):

https://github.com/algazukin/track-mirror

I’d really appreciate some feedback.

Does anyone here use Hubstaff or similar tracking software? Have you ever had personal stuff captured accidentally? How do you handle idle time or avoid forgetting to stop the timer?