Settings reference

Every knob in Recall, what it does, and when to touch it. Recall has two configuration surfaces:

• Settings (01) — everything you set up. Folders, Tesseract, theme, calendar, backup + restore, plus a collapsible Advanced section for power-user controls.
• Parse (02) — the operational tab. Watch Folder toggle + the Run Parse button. That's the whole tab — nothing to configure here.

Persistence: every setting saves to the active profile's settings.json (see How it works → Where things live on disk) the moment you change it. No "Save" button. Switching profiles via the masthead chip loads a different settings.json — so each profile has its own screenshots folder, Tesseract path, toggle states, etc.

Settings tab

01 / Directories

Screenshots Folder

The folder Recall watches for new Overwatch screenshots.

On Windows, the first-run Settings hero presents a 2 × 2 card grid naming each canonical capture source. Click a card with a green "found" dot and that folder becomes the watch directory in one step; cards with a gray "not found" dot are read-only and tell you which path Recall expected for that source so you can configure your capture tool to write there. A Pick a different folder… tile under the grid opens the native folder picker for everything else.

Once a folder is set, the steady-state Settings row exposes Reveal (opens the folder in your OS file manager), Detect (re-runs the legacy single-best-path probe), Change… (native picker), and Reset (clears the folder and re-shows the picker grid). You can point Recall at any directory — useful if you keep screenshots in a synced folder (Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud Drive) or want to feed it screenshots from a friend's matches. Changing the folder while Watch Folder is armed restarts the watcher against the new directory; no manual restart needed.

Data Location

Read-only paths showing where Recall stores its database and settings.json on this machine. Each path has a Copy button; in the desktop app, Open opens the directory in your OS file manager.

02 / Engine

Tesseract Binary

Path to the Tesseract OCR binary Recall shells out to. The status row underneath shows:

• Detected (green) + version + path: Recall found a working Tesseract. You're good.
• Not Found (red) + the OS error: Recall looked at the default install path for your OS and didn't find anything. Click Locate Tesseract… to point it at the real binary.

Recall auto-detects the UB-Mannheim default on first launch: C:\Program Files\Tesseract-OCR\tesseract.exe.

Version compatibility: Tesseract 5.x is the supported series. Versions 3.x and 4.x predate the Overwatch post-match font and misread "ELIMINATIONS" / "ASSISTS" / "DEATHS" reliably. Recall shows an amber "not officially supported" warning under the status row when it detects 3.x or 4.x — parsing still runs but you'll see lower accuracy.

If your install path has drifted, the Use default link under the path row resets to the default in one click.

03 / Appearance

Theme

Two preview cards: Day (light palette, cream + brand orange) or Night (dark palette, off-black + brand orange). Click a card to apply; the active card shows an orange ring. Recall remembers the choice across launches.

04 / Calendar

First Day of Week

Anchors the Week of … headers on the Matches tab when you group by week. Seven-cell grid (S / M / T / W / T / F / S). The selected cell fills orange; a caption underneath spells it out ("Weeks begin on Sunday") so the two-T / two-S ambiguity is always resolved. Matches the cultural default in your region:

• US, Canada, Japan: Sunday
• Most of Europe + ISO 8601: Monday
• Middle East: Saturday

Doesn't change which matches appear in which week — Recall calculates the week boundary from this setting, so a Tuesday match shows up under either "Week of Sunday Jan 12" or "Week of Monday Jan 13" depending on what you picked.

05 / Backup & Restore

Export Data

Download a portable backup of every parsed match. Two formats:

• JSON — the canonical Recall format. Smallest, round-trips losslessly through Import. One file.
• CSV — a ZIP archive of one CSV per database table, for opening in Excel / Google Sheets.

Settings and screenshots aren't included — only parsed match records. A confirmation chip flashes the save path once the export completes.

Import Data

Restore a previously-exported backup. JSON and CSV (the same ZIP format Export emits) both work — Recall sniffs the content type automatically.

Two-step confirm: clicking Import Backup… arms the action and turns the row's stripe red, then Choose File… opens the file picker. Replaces the current database — local matches that aren't in the backup will be lost. Cancel button next to it backs out without touching anything.

06 / Advanced

A collapsible section, closed by default. Contains power-user controls most players never need to touch.

Clear Parse Database

Permanently delete every parsed match record from the local SQLite database. Settings and the screenshots folder are untouched — you can re-parse at any time to rebuild from scratch.

Two-step confirm (the button label changes to Delete N Records in red after the first click). Cancel button next to it to back out.

When to use:

• You want a fresh start.
• A parser upgrade meaningfully changed how fields are extracted and you'd rather re-parse everything than live with mixed-version rows.
• You're sharing a screenshot bug with the maintainer and want a clean reproduction.

When NOT to use:

• You think Recall is showing stale data. The right move is Parse → Run Parse (which re-reads any unparsed screenshots) — not a full wipe.
• You think a single match record is wrong. Re-capture the SUMMARY and PERSONAL screens for that match into the folder; Recall will merge them into the existing record without duplicating it.

Re-parse All Screenshots

Re-runs Tesseract OCR on every PNG / JPG in the watched folder, including files already in the database. Use after a Recall release that tightens hero/map matching — for example the short-name fuzzy fix that stopped Miyazaki from being silently attributed to Mei — to retroactively correct older records. Two-step confirm (button flips to Confirm re-parse for 6 seconds; Cancel backs out).

Annotations, queue and play-mode overrides, hidden flags, and reviews all key on match_key (which is timestamp-derived and stable) so they survive the re-parse — only the parsed hero / map / mode / stats are rewritten.

Estimated time: ~1 second per screenshot. The masthead Parse indicator + status bar mirror the activity in real time; nothing else changes while it runs.

When to use:

• After upgrading Recall to a version whose release notes mention a parser tightening or YAML roster update.
• After the new Reference data gaps section on the Unknown tab surfaces records the latest release can now resolve.

Parse tab

Watch Folder

Auto-parse new screenshots as they appear in the screenshots folder. Big switch — Off by default, Armed when on. Disabled (greyed out) when Tesseract is not detected.

Behavior when armed:

1. Recall registers a filesystem watch on the screenshots folder.
2. When a new .png or .jpg lands, Recall starts a 60-second timer. Every subsequent new file resets the timer.
3. After 60 seconds of silence, Recall runs Parse against all new files in one batch.

The debounce window matches a typical post-match capture session (SUMMARY → TEAMS → PERSONAL × hero count, ~5–15 seconds of tabbing). The whole batch lands as one match record instead of several "partial-data" rows.

Run Parse

Big primary button. Same parse logic as the watcher but on demand — useful if you just dragged screenshots into the folder from another machine, want to re-parse after upgrading Tesseract, or simply prefer not to leave the watcher armed.

The button shows the count of new screenshots in the folder (Run Parse · 5) and disables itself when there's nothing new to parse. Re-running it against the same screenshots is idempotent — Recall stores which files it's already seen, so duplicates don't create duplicate matches.

The status line below shows either:

• Last run · X ago · N records on record — when there are no new screenshots to process.
• All screenshots already parsed — nothing new in the folder. — same idea, sterner.
• Blocked — needs Tesseract. — Engine row needs fixing first; click Fix in Settings → to jump to Settings → Engine.

While parsing, the button reads Parsing… and a progress panel expands under the row showing per-file status. Click the chevron to collapse it down to a single progress bar.

Updates & game data

Recall ships two parallel update channels — the binary itself, and the reference data the parser uses (hero roster, map roster, capture-tool filename grammars). The data files travel separately from the app so a new hero added in a roster patch can land in your install the same day, without waiting for a Recall release.

Check for updates (masthead button)

The masthead's right-hand block shows the running Recall version + a Check for updates button. Clicking it queries GitHub's releases API and the project's GitHub Pages live-data channel in parallel, then opens a modal with two sections.

Recall app — shows the running version vs the latest release. The first ~500 chars of the release notes render inline; the Open release page button takes you to the full GitHub release page so you can download the new installer. (Recall does not auto-update itself; this is a deliberate opt-in step.)

Game data — shows what's different between the rosters bundled into your binary, anything you've previously applied, and the live main channel published at https://sound-barrier.github.io/recall/data/. The header line spells out the comparison frame ("MAIN @ abc1234 · 14 d ago → MAIN @ def5678 · just now"), the headline gives a count ("3 NEW · 1 RETIRED"), and the diff manifest lists every changed hero / map / source name with a + (added) or − (removed) sign.

Update game data downloads the three YAMLs + per-file SHA-256 sidecars, verifies each, atomically writes them under <RECALL_DATA_DIR>/data/, and triggers an in-process parser reload so new heroes/maps are recognised immediately. No restart needed. The button is disabled when game data is already current; the modal shows MAIN UNREACHABLE when GitHub Pages is blocked or down.

Applied state writes to <RECALL_DATA_DIR>/data/manifest.json so a future Check for updates can show "MAIN @ abc1234 · 2 d ago" in the freshness header. Embedded YAML stays in the binary as a safety net — if a downloaded file is ever corrupted, the parser falls back to the embedded version on next launch.

Note: Recall does not ship a release-channel YAML apply path. If you want the YAMLs that were bundled with a specific Recall release, upgrade the Recall binary — same bytes, simpler model.

"Haven't checked in a while" banner

If you've never run a check, or your last successful check was more than 90 days ago, a slim banner appears above the tab nav saying Update check overdue with a Check now button and a dismiss ×. Dismissing snoozes the banner until the next 90-day cycle (or until you run a check yourself, which resets the timer). The cadence is a code constant — not user-tunable — chosen so a quiet install gets nudged roughly twice a season.

Where applied YAMLs live

<RECALL_DATA_DIR>/
  data/
    heroes.yaml                  # applied override (release or main)
    heroes.yaml.tmp              # only present during an in-flight apply
    maps.yaml
    maps.yaml.sha256             # local copy of the verified sidecar
    screenshot_sources.yaml
    manifest.json                # applied tag/commit + per-file SHA-256
  check_state.json               # {"last_checked_at": "RFC3339"}

Delete the data/ directory or manifest.json to revert to the binary's embedded roster. Recall reads it back into memory on next launch; no restart of the parser pipeline needed.

Steam install path (auto-correlation works on all supported sources)

The four canonical capture sources Recall auto-detects on Windows — Nvidia Overlay, OW PrntScn default, Win Snip tool, and Steam install — all parse end-to-end. Steam's in-game F12 captures (YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_N.jpg) folded in alongside the other three in mid-2026; nothing extra to configure.

Sidebar version block (masthead, lower-right)

Not strictly a "setting" but worth knowing about:

• The version chip shows the running Recall version (or vX.Y.Z-dev on builds from source).
• The Check for updates button next to the chip is the entry point to the Updates & game data flow above — there's no silent on-mount network call.

Next chapter

• Slice your match history: Filtering and grouping
• Triage parse failures: Unknown screenshots