memory of the future

this is not a paid post. but it could be, eagle dot cool team, if you're reading this. hit me up. hello. wink wonk.

so Pinterest did a big fucky-wucky earlier this year, which seems to be ongoing, and i didn't really like using it for my reference boards anyway. it was the best thing i had but i am always antsy about anything that depends on Being Online or Being Beholden To Someone Else's TOS. it's a sandcastle on someone else's beach. refern was a nice alternative that i tried out, but a major UI change 2 weeks into using it put me off, and then uh, it died. which is a tragedy-- it was really nice even if i didn't love the update.

cool stuff you can do with eagle
what i've always wanted is basically a local booru system, a la Zerochan and its bretheren. that is pretty much what eagle.cool is. you drop in your files and you can create a tag system basically any way you like. and in addition to images it can organize:

• videos
• fonts
• sound files
• svgs
• 3d objects

when i found out i could organize sounds and music in it i screamed, because that would have been so useful when i was working on Potion Stand Story. but it will save my ass for Iron Company.
some of these things require you to download some of its extensions, which is done in-app and is super easy.

you can create individual reference libraries for different subjects. you can folder and subfolder. you can organize your tags by folders and color-code them. you can search by color (and all sorts of other things). you can even import your pinterest straight into it, which would have been nice if i'd noticed up-front because i did that the wfdownloader way and it was a lot messier LMAO.

it also comes with a browser extension so you can right-click and save things directly to Eagle, AND easily mass-yoink images from a page. and it saves sources automatically. S'BEAUTIFUL.

it is not free software, but it is a one time purchase, a rare and beautiful and reasonably priced thing these days. (free alternative later in this post.) it is probably the best 35 bucks i've spent this year. i've put a lot of hours into organizing and tagging my collection of reference images and stock photos and so on and it's so nice. it's so nice to be able to put custom thumbnails on fonts and actually be able to see them in their natural environment instead of squint at Windows' font viewer and try to mentally project how something will look in CSP. it's SOOOOOOOO nice to be struggling with drawing a thing and then search my tag for that thing and find the ref image i need without a bunch of hunt-and-peck through my old reference folders (which windows refuses to generate thumbnails for lmfao GOD).

at this point im pretty much using Eagle exclusively as the way that i access images on my hard drive. windows photo viewer? isn't that the bitch who sometimes takes entire minutes to open a single image for no reason? yeah haha i don't really know her. file explorer? more like file exploder. exploding with farts. because it's ass. in comparison to Eagle.

potential caveats...

• technically there are "AI tools" (🙄🖕) but they are plug-ins/add-ons that are not preinstalled and that you do not have to use. the software will never pester you about AI crap; you don't even have to have it visible in your GUI. on the grand scale of software companies participating in The Great Shill, they are, frankly, doing a pretty poor job of shilling given that i didn't notice they were there until after purchase LOL. they'll be fine when the bubble pops.
• Eagle makes its own library in its own folder, so it does store an extra copy of everything. BUT: you can export things again really easily. so if you end up having to delete the original folders to save space, it's relatively simple to just have Eagle spit all that stuff back out if you need to. also, syncing Eagle across devices with a cloud service works like a charm.
• no mobile option as far as i can tell. desktop only. idc, im old
• now when i do actually have to "open a folder" and "locate a file" in file explorer i feel like i have been teleported back to the middle ages and i am stepping around horse poop in the street

and a free alternative!
Allusion is a visual library manager that integrates with my beloved PureRef. it doesn't have as many features, but it does allow you to create a tagged, browse-able image library. it also pulls things from the folders on your hard drive rather than creating its own separate library with copies.