Hi,
A member of Polycount made a little software very usefull and called RefBoard.
http://www.designerjon.com/refboard.html
It allow’s you to use refs on top of other applications.
You can add refs and zoom on it.
little video to show you the program.
I think it’s very usefull and even if we can add some view to do the same, it’s easier on refBoard to look at the ref.
Thanks for letting us know.
A lot of people have been asking about blender and floating panels in the past, apparently 2.4 series had some floating panels, would be nice to have em back, for stuff like this.
What’s wrong with just setting an image viewer window to “Always on top”? Also ew, it requires Adobe AIR…
And how can you make a window always on top on win 8 ?
Ok with deskpin it’s possible, but, not as good as refBoard again.
Hmm! I always use a blender tools)
probably use it because in Maya not have the same tool
the only advantage RefBoard it’s a little more flexibility.
thanks
I’ve never used Win8, did they remove that functionality after 7?
@so3Datel
exactly what I was also using.
Before I install a second monitor and become really happy. LOL
Any system viewer can serve well, then.
Hey!
Maybe an alternative would be PureRef?
More functionality and is self-contained. 
Both Refboard and Pureref looks nice but none of them are available for Linux yet it seems.
On my windows workstation I have a second monitor to display my references on so I really only need this for when I’m working on my Linux station.
try this one out, you can make your reference images transparent…
http://www.digitalartistguild.com/misc/UtilityExplain/UtilityExplain.html
or you can use this irfanview, open you image and in the options menu click always on top
this is a nice app it has the capability of batch resizing and renaming images…
So can PureRef! Both on individual images and globally the through master opacity setting. 
We’re working on porting it to both Linux and Mac as soon as possible! I’ll let you know when it’s up and running!
Or spend some time creating appropriate image collages with GIMP or similar program.
B.t.w. one of the most critical advices I got about hard surface modeling was a tutorial in which, instead of using a blueprint as is, the different parts were neatly separated into different images, the scale of the parts was carefully unified and the positions carefully coordinated. 15 minutes of design/preparation work which made the rest of the modeling a breeze.
