I kept alt-tabbing out of Blender to look at reference, so I tried building a board that lives inside it.
Zap Board turns any Image Editor into a free-form canvas. You drop a folder of images in, arrange them however you think, and the board saves inside the .blend, so it travels with the file. Nothing is added to your scene and nothing reaches your render.
The part I use most is dropping a card’s opacity over a render to check values and framing without leaving the app.
Honest about what it is: it’s a custom canvas layered on the Image Editor — a header override plus a dedicated tool, not a new editor type, because that isn’t possible from Python. In practice you switch an editor into it and get free pan/zoom/box-select. Free rotation and video references aren’t in yet.
Tested on Blender 4.5 LTS, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2. GPL, no bundled dependencies. It’s free: https://superhivemarket.com/products/zap-board
If you try it, I’d like to know what would make it part of your actual workflow — that’s what I’ll build next.
