Forum - Suggestions

I suggest adding an iOS app.

ljy26lee — Fri, 15 May 2026 09:04:25 +0200

I have been a long-time user of PureRef.

If it becomes available for use on large-screen tablets (Android, iOS) and iPads in the future, its usability would improve significantly.

Thank you very much to the developer. ^^

Re: Minimize to System tray on windows / Minimize to Menu bar on MacOS

HideOnFluff — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:57:54 +0200

Thank you so much! this is exactly what I wanted <3!

Add Function to Title Bar

BenLaps — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:11:22 +0200

Hi,
It would be great if we could add functions by customizing the title bar, e.g., Window / Resize to selection. If that’s possible, we could drag the function(s) into the bar. Or do it some other way without having to right-click.

Thanks,

Re: Minimize to System tray on windows / Minimize to Menu bar on MacOS

PureRef — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:30:21 +0200

Thank you for the suggestion! We tried to implement this mode a long time ago but never got any feedback on it so it is still not finished unfortunately. If you want to help and give it a try you can enable it by editing the settings file:

Add this line under the [General_Settings] section:
ShowInTray=true

And then restart PureRef.

Minimize to System tray on windows / Minimize to Menu bar on MacOS

HideOnFluff — Sat, 09 May 2026 16:58:59 +0200

Hey there!

I wanted to offer / promote the idea of adding the feature to minimize the app to the System tray on windows or Menu bar on MacOS. I find myself always having the app open so I can paste any references as I find them / work. However, I sometimes need to cmd+tab or alt+tab and the app starts being annoying / on the way if I just leave it open.

In order to solve this, I think it'd be great if I could choose to minimize the app to the system tray when I'm not using it. It'd get out of the way. And when I need it, it'd be right there waiting for me to open it up again.

I know, this is very silly, I could easily just close the app when not in use, but I think there are many other creatives out there who tend to keep apps open in the background and I'm probably not the only one who has run into this. And I don't see any downsides for regular users if this feature exists or not.

Re: Laso crop?

wjrd — Sat, 09 May 2026 05:20:58 +0200

I'd just like to second this suggestion. I was wanting to combine references for a character design and a lasso tool would make this extremely easy.

Please improve GIF performance

roaddogg — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:22:16 +0200

If you have lots of GIFs on a canvas (for animation reference, etc) the program struggles even on a decent CPU due to single thread limitation. I know it's probably difficult but I hope this can be improved.

Straight lines - from A to B

Jorgensen — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:55:55 +0200

MY MAIN TOOL
I use the draw tool a lot, in combination with DRAW + SHIFT to draw straight lines, thats very very usefull.

MY WISH
I wish that the tool could be extended to draw straight lines from A to B, when clicking the mouse at point A, while holding down the SHIFT key, then release the mouse, move to point B, and again click the mouse + SHIFT, to draw a straight line between A and B.

LINE TOOL
I know i could switch to the line tool, but while in meetings its distracting needing to switch tools.
The above method could in a way merge the Draw and Line tool into a intuitive tool.

Thanks :-)

Jorgensen

Re: Improvement for arrange optimal: tiling/masonry grid layout (PROGRAMMATIC STEPS INCLUDED)

2689081964 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:35:21 +0200

I think it would be better to optimize the automatic arrangement function instead of the current one. Add a custom column and row number option, for example, automatically wrapping to the next line if there are more than 6 images per row. Then, standardize the height as you suggested. At this point, you'll have many rows of 6 images each, and because the image height is uniform, each row will have very clear dividing lines. And with only 6 images per row, although their widths may vary, you can clearly distinguish where each row begins and ends.

To be honest, I don't think Pinterest's waterfall layout, which arranges everything into a rectangle, makes any sense; in fact, it looks very chaotic.

Because humans are accustomed to reading horizontally, arranging the images as I described allows you to clearly view them from left to right. By the sixth image, you'll know you've finished viewing this row and can switch to the next. I can even put related images, consecutive images, or images of the same scene from different angles in the same row for easy viewing.

In Pinterest's layout, you often notice that the images are arranged at varying heights. This means that within the same horizontal line, one column might have three images, another one, and yet another only two. This makes it impossible to discern the beginning and end of a row, causing you to miss some references. Similarly, it makes it difficult to identify which images form a series of reference images.

Media File Size in PureRef File at Disk Display

TornadOculus — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:07:13 +0200

After me collecting quite an arguably large amount of references. . . I found myself with almost 1GB of PureRef files. . . and I don't have an idea which files would I need to downscale even. . . It would be nice to be able to select an image then see how much storage space it takes up or contributes, OR a right click>View menu that toggles a display of file sizes at the top right corner or some other corner of every images present in the screen. And I really would need to keep it small as I have limited cloud storage :'D and I want redundancy in my files so I keep them at cloud. . just wish I could have a way to see and control them via seeing how much space they take. . . Thank you~

Re: Ability to blur images

GZ96 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:02:38 +0200

I don’t quite agree. The point isn’t to turn PureRef into a full image editor, but to add a small, convenient tool within an existing workflow.

Right now, if you just want to hide a part of a screenshot, you have to switch to another app like Snipaste, edit it, save it, and come back. That breaks the flow and adds unnecessary steps.

A simple blur or pixelation option in the Draw panel wouldn’t “clutter” the app — it would actually improve the user experience by saving time.

And if you don’t need it, that’s totally fine. But that doesn’t mean the feature is useless. Tools like this usually become valuable exactly when you start working with screenshots more often.

.

... — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:53:53 +0200

ui scaling will be great!

herbap — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:46:48 +0200

ui scaling will be great! (like blender)

simple blending types for images (like photoshop or photopea)

herbap — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 22:31:38 +0200

I use the PureRef program primarily for comparing images and adding notes to them. However, it would be so much better if there were simple blending modes for images like in Photoshop or PhotoPea when comparing images (screen, multiply, overlay, etc., but especially difference).

Feature suggestion: lock the image order

v_e — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:53:21 +0200

The current version includes chart functionality as well as image layering (bring forward/send backward), allowing users to quickly place an image onto a chart. However, when the chart is clicked for editing, it automatically returns to the top layer and ends up covering the image.

Suggestion:
Add a layering control feature that allows users to fix an object’s position—either always at the bottom layer or always at the top layer. For more flexibility, users could also define custom layer orders, such as assigning certain images to layer 1, others to layer 2, and so on.

Thanks

Re: Ability to blur images

GZ96 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:07:47 +0200

It would be really great to have a blur or pixelation feature in PureRef, similar to what Snipaste offers.

When you're collecting references or just gathering a lot of screenshots in one place, there's often a need to hide unnecessary elements — personal data, notifications, ads, or random UI details. Right now, you have to switch to external editors for that, which breaks the whole fast and seamless workflow.

If there was a way to quickly blur or pixelate parts of an image directly inside PureRef, it would make the process much smoother. Especially when working with screenshots from websites, where there's almost always something you want to hide.

It’s a small feature, but it would significantly improve usability and make PureRef an even more complete tool.

Adding a stroke/outline to an image

chippy — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:21:02 +0200

I understand this may not be in PureRef's focus but I'd really enjoy this feature.

My use case currently is sticker making, and while I export the art in PNG to then add the outline in Illustrator, I'd enjoy to preview the scale off all the stickers, including the stroke size, on PureRef since it's way faster than illustrator for comparing many images to each other.
Something like the group background color picker menu would be cool as well to choose the stroke color.

Anyway, I hope the idea is useful for other use cases as well! Thanks again to y'all for such a cool program :')

Re: Adding Colour Pallette options

chippy — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:09:02 +0200

To add to this, I feel like a cool way to implement this would be a regex pattern like "/^#(?:(?:[\da-f]{3}){1,2}|(?:[\da-f]{4}){1,2})$/i" to detect a hex color and render it as a color block when a match is detected.

also, remember that holding down the S key activates the included color picker, which outputs a hex color by default.

Adding Colour Pallette options

NotAFreak — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:34:32 +0200

What would be absolutely amazing for me is a way for me to visually add and remove splotches of colour to the canvas, and then have utilities to quickly copy and paste those colours. Each colour could be represented by a square, a circle, or any shape filled in with it's colour. Then, you can click them and automatically copy their hex code to the clipboard, or any other colour format indicated through options and such. This would be amazing for me, It means i wouldn't have to have weird .txt files or bits of text with my colours lumped in with the rest of my reference and mood boards, and I'd actually be able to quickly tell what colours those hexes really are without having to copy and paste them into other programs first before actually using them. AND, I'd be able to use the existing groups to organise the different colours.

Improvement for arrange optimal: tiling/masonry grid layout (PROGRAMMATIC STEPS INCLUDED)

OneAndOnlyMobi — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 23:33:52 +0200

Hi, just wanted to share an layout technique I've been using for my images, which I think could be an improvement upon arrange > optimal. Currently it's a bit of a manual process, so I think It'd be a nice idea to add an automatic feature. It creates a masonry grid, somewhat similar to what pinterest uses.

Steps are as follows:
1. Normalize image areas to average area
(Select images, Normalize > Average Area)
This is done to ensure the images don't vary too much from each other in the following steps. Not sure this is entirely necessary, but I'd rather not have extreme images influence the following steps too much.

2. Normalize widths
(Select Images, Normalize > Average/Width)
Set all images to equal width. We're going to make columns of images out of these. This will change later, but this is the starting point for step 3.

3. Put images into columns of roughly equal column height.
(Moving images)
I sort of eyeball this and try to make each column of roughly equal column height, but if you're doing this programmatically, I'd recommend setting some sort of preferred height and using the Knuth-Plass algorithm to determine an optimal distribution. In this case the images are the "words" and the column height would be the line-width in the algorithm. If you use a greedy algorithm you might end up with very unbalanced columns and that would ruin the next step, so this is important to get right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%E2%80%93Plass_line-breaking_algorithm
(Ask your favorite LLM about it.)

4. Normalize the height of the *columns* by scaling each column individually to match the preferred height.
(Because I'm a human I scale each column to the height of the first column or the longest column instead of preferred height)
The columns are of equal width, but not of equal height, because the the chance is very small that every column adds up to the same number.
Solution, scale each of the columns up or down until they reach the preferred height set in step 3. Because we got very close using human eyeballing/algorithm, the scale won't have to change that much. The columns will therefore all still be _roughly_ the same width, but the heights are now all equal.

5. Align the columns at the left and top
(ctrl + left, ctrl + up)

You now have a super nice image grid that is basically a rectangle, with all images inside laid out in columns that are almost the same width too. (Exactly the same width would be impossible.)
I hope whoever is programming pureref is able to follow what I'm trying to communicate. Sorry if it's hard to follow, it's 11pm and I just wanted to get this idea out there.

Command to copy Selected Image Path/URL to Clipboard

netmano90 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:14:50 +0200

I'd like to request a simple feature: copy the file path or URL of selected images to the clipboard, one per line.

Before posting I checked whether this was already achievable via the clipboard. Using Nirsoft's InsideClipboard I confirmed that PureRef only writes its own pureref/binary format on copy — no CF_HDROP or text path format is present, so there is currently no way to extract source paths from the clipboard.
This is a well established pattern elsewhere. File Explorer places a plain text path list on the clipboard alongside file data on Ctrl+C, and also has an explicit Copy as Path command. Directory Opus and most serious file managers do the same.

A WORKFLOW WHERE THIS MATTERS DIRECTLY

PureRef's infinite canvas and fast navigation make it uniquely good at visually sorting large image batches — I can arrange hundreds of images into piles faster than any file manager or grid viewer. But the handoff back to a file manager or script is completely broken. There is no way to go from "I have these images selected in PureRef" to "I have their paths". Copy as path would make PureRef a first class citizen in an image sorting pipeline rather than a dead end.
WHAT I'M ASKING FOR

- A hotkey-bindable command that copies source paths or URLs of selected images
- One per line
- Graceful skip for embedded or unknown sources

Small addition, large practical payoff.

Re: Ability to blur images

Remy_B — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:06:58 +0200

I confim that, as a digital and traditional painter I'd love to be able to apply a gaussian blur to an image in the same way it's possible to greyscale them !

Re: Arrange by color composition

Krawww — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:09:30 +0200

Hello, I may be annoying haha but just in case you forgot, this would be a HUGE feature to add, being able to arrange by colors would be so usefull !

Have a nice day !

Re: Normalize crop / paste crop settings

PureRef — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 03:28:46 +0200

Thank you for the suggestion! We'll keep your suggestion in mind as we continue improving PureRef in the future. If we understand you correctly there might be some workarounds that could work in your case:

If it is mostly just that you want to keep the bounds the same between images, you could use Zoom cropping / Pan cropping to adjust the cropping within the existing image bounds.

If you want to retain the exact cropping between images with the same resolution you can use duplicate and then Replace image which should retain the cropping of the old image.

Normalize crop / paste crop settings

troxmo — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:41:20 +0100

There is a hidden feature to adjust the scale of an image via normalize.

I am missing something similar for cropping.

Often times, i have screenshots in identical resolutions from similar situations i want to crop identically, but i have not found a way to transfer a crop from one image to another, there only seems to be the manual approach (cropping each image individually), which always results in slightly different crops (until i am missing a feature).

In my head, the simplest approach would be to have a workflow where you just copy the cropped image with the desired crop, and instead of pasting the image after that, i can select the target image, rightclick on it and go paste--> paste crop settings only. (ideally with a shortcut like cmd+shift+V or something like that)

This approach could also be implemented for scale pasting, since i find a "normalize" menu entry not intuitive to understand (and apparently i am not the first one in the forum that missed the point of this feature earlier).

Re: scale in %

Kuberg — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 10:43:14 +0100

For the love of God, please just give us the option to have font sizes work like they do in literally any other software. It's genuinely the only blood boilling aspect of this lovely software.

Re: Random/Shuffle Next image

Rosalhymn — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:51:28 +0100

so basicly the order of the next/previous image would be defined by setting it in the slideshow?

That would be workable, but would necessitaye activating and deactivating slideshow each time to be able to change the setting

the benefit is that u dont need different shortcuts
The downside is needing to invoke the slideshow to be able to change it.....

wouldnt having a "random mode" based of selection be preferable?

However if u deem this way to be preferable i'd be happy to have it, as long as i just need to activate it in slideshow, and then just can select any number at will to get random order activated.

If none is selected, it would also be random of course. But when selecting some, random would refresh and start from there with a new random order.

also i'm confused as to your implementation of random in this case
.

there is true random where technically u could show the same image 3 times in a row, and simulated random where u show each images at least once.
I would advocate for the latter.

So if there are 10 image's, show each images in a random order, once, before looping. It is acceptable if the loop after has the same random order. Refreshes of random order see change upon changing the selection.

I hope you understand what i mean.

Create Thumbnail from current view in stead of the full canvas

Rosalhymn — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:33:42 +0100

I would very much appreciate that upon save, the current canvas focus becomes the thumbnail.

This would be preferred over the full canvas that becomes very small to look at in a file browser.

A more zoomed in on 1 or several images would be easier to parse than a full canvas with tiny images

Re: Change size/scale of image based on existing image(s)

PureRef — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:12:48 +0100

Glad to hear you found it! :)

Re: Change size/scale of image based on existing image(s)

DustyShinigami — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:49:59 +0100

Oh. Just noticed there's an option called From First under Normalise. That looks to have done the trick. :D