For the longest time, I’ve been guilty of looking for sources of inspiration or reference images for my projects online. I’ve kept a sort of mental library of where I’ve seen or saved all the things that might be of interest to me in current or future projects. This obviously isn’t the greatest approach and, with the way things are on the web these days, absolutely not a sustainable method. Websites go offline, people delete their profiles, or places end up overrun with AI garbage.
So, when some time last year some wonderful person on Mastodon (I can’t remember who right now, and I’m too sick to go digging through my profile) mentioned a neat little piece of software called Allusion, I began taking steps to remedy my terrible system.
With Allusion, you can save images to a folder or folders on your computer (in my case I keep them in a folder connected to my Dropbox) and it will give you a nice overview of every image you’ve saved. And once the images show up in your Allusion gallery you can also assign tags. So what you get is a nice and fast inspiration and reference gallery that won’t disappear as long as you keep your data safe.
According to the app’s GitHub page it hasn’t seen a major update in quite a few years, but I have yet to run into any issues with it. It runs nice and smooth on my Windows 11 machine. My library right now consists of only about 400 images, so I don’t know how well it’s going to run once that number gets quite a bit bigger.
If anyone happens to know of a software that serves a similar purpose, but is in more active development I’d be more than happy to try it out!