I know a lot of people love pureref, but here’s another alternative (that’s free). I’ve been using Obsidian for quite a long time for notes and a few other things (like tasks, projects, etc.). I’ve been limiting myself to very basics of it’s functions.
Today I decided to check what it’s canvas thingy is about. To my surprise - one of the thing that it looks to be great at is making reference boards! Not only you can simply paste images there, but also add a lot of other files like videos. You can even embed external things, like web sites or YT videos. And gifs do animate :D. What’s also neat you can add notes, group and link stuff and even embed one canvas inside the other (hierarchical reference boards!). Here’s one of the test ref boards I made:
I tried to use it for some “extended” notes / knowlege collections because you can put webpages onto this… but it seems it only stores the URL as ref and not a image (picture) of the website… (???) so when it is gone some “special” knowlege collections get’s blown apart… (!?)
Also exporting this to something usable without the app seems not possible. Any experience according these “issues” ?
Of course i could have missed this because i’m extrmely indignant with something like this because is used some apps where i “lost” most of the work i have done because i seems to choose apps which are abandoned soon after i start to use it…
I don’t think that first issue is really solvable (unless you want to do a full copy of the URL). If you bring in the picture of a web page, it’s stored locally though.
The 2nd issue is not really an issue with Obsidian (for some value of not an issue). It stores all things in simple files. Most things are just markdown files. That canvas is a json-like file that’s readable and easily processable by scripts.
That looks cool , I especially like the fact that you can add videos !
It’s probably useful when you start a project where you need some reference alongside some text and other informations.
However for purely visual work from what I see in the capture it looks limited, how can it manage a high amount of images like so :
can you rotate, arrange, flip, grayscale your images ?
How much you can easily zoom in and out of an image ?
Can the file you save embed images ? and can you extract them ?
Furthermore now puref allows to draw onto the map , which is quite useful too. It’s really though for working with references so it got a lot of neat feature for that…
Also I tested and used Beeref which is good too, if you are annoyed by the fact that puref is proprietary and non-commercial. Beeref is kind of an older version of puref, a bit limited but at least the main features are there…
I don’t know most of that yet… Will be able to answer probably in half a year or so, after I use it for a while. I’m not to keen on switching tools mid-projects.
This I know already. No embedding of images at all. It saves it along side your ref boards (so you can “extract” them, as they are just files in your vault). It’s configurable how it behaves (for me it throws all images I paste there to img/ folder).
Well, then it obviously goes down to how you where using pureref,
but it’s really well though, do you know that you can copy / paste a group of image right into your painting app , like so :
Anyway, I should definitively look into obsidian as it looks pretty powerful, but I’m not convinced yet as it can replace pureref at least for the way I use it…
So just a small update in case of anyone wonders about it at some point. I’ve used obsidian for a bit for this. It’s cool, but only for smaller references board. With bigger one it has performance issues. You can work around somewhat, but it was just not made for this.
yes Pureref outweights Obsidian with many features. For the above mentioned feature Windows has Powertoys with Always on Top toggle for any selected window.
Linux has that feature by default in Gnome Fedora.
“Always on top” is a feature “in Linux” which is offered by most of the window managers…
( I for example use openbox… with LXDE within Debian. )
There is also the possibility to use an image viewer with multiple windows and a feature like in pqiv
-c, --transparent-background
Draw pqiv's window borderless and transparent. In window mode, a mouse click activates and deactivates window decorations.
But i like to have some references simply collected in a folder and use the image preview of my file explorer ( pcmanfm ) which can display small and bigger thumbnails (two different settings; both adjustable in size). And for a “more deeper” look i simply double-click the image to view in any “simple” image viewer… and so also using multiple image windows and so resizeable and movable…
I’ve been looking for alternatives to Pureref because it doesn’t seem to have any higher level organization of pur files. I would like there to be some sort of browser where I can categorize and favorite my pureref boards. I don’t like chasing files around my hard drive that much…
Yeah maybe in that case you’re looking for a software that allows to organize photos. And from that you build a reference board for a particular project.
Pureref or Beeref is more project specific where it make sense to have everything at the same level.
However, you might also look into Miro, which is similar to pureref but might work better for bigger projects. I’ve seen it used on feature films where multiple boards are needed per departments…
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