PROBLEM:
- I see a Cool Art online. I middle-click it to open it in a new tab. But Now What? Do I open this tab, Stare at the Cool Art for some requisite minimum amount of time, then close it? Do I visit the artist's page and perform a series of Vibe Checks to decide whether to Follow them? Or do I simply do none of these things, leave the tab sitting there, and amass thousands of languishing browser tabs over the course of months/years?
surprising no one, the answer is Tab Catastrophe
PROPOSED SOLUTIONS:
- I could just bookmark everything but this fails because there's no easy way to BROWSE bookmarks (no thumbnails etc), and more importantly, bookmarked links rot alarmingly quickly (even before the desecration of twitter, japanese artists have a baffling tendency to just Fucking Delete their own work seemingly at random)
- I could use some sort of visual scrapbooking service to collect the images themselves, hopefully with links back to the original source. Pinterest is designed for this, but unfortunately pinterest is ontologically evil.
- Self-Hosted Open-Source Pinterest Alternative. seventeen minutes of derisive laughter, coughing
THE ACTUAL SOLUTION:
Eagle
Somebody on twitter suggested this. It's mostly intended for collecting references/mood boards but it's actually PERFECT for my use case.
- It costs Thirty Dollars (in 2023 we have reached a point where "this software costs money" is a point in its FAVOR)
- There's a browser extension so I can just rightclick shit and save it directly. It grabs the image/video file AND saves the source URL in one click
- They have not stapled an LLM to it (YET) (the next version is supposed to have an ""ai"" upscaling plugin, which is.... still morally Tainted but as far as Taints go it's not the worst)
- It's designed like a Computer Program. The image database is just a directory, so if you want to access it from multiple computers you can just throw it in a dropbox folder or a NAS or whatever. No cloud shit
THIS ACTUALLY SOLVED MY TAB PROBLEM
I've been using it for six months. Now if I see a Cool Art I just go "huh that's cool" and rightclick->eagle it. I'm very deliberately setting the threshold at "huh that's cool". No weighing whether it's cool enough to Like or Fav or Bookmark, or if I should check out the artist's other work, or anything. Literally just snap judgement "do I like this y/n". Now browsing's super easy AND I've got a huge-ass folder full of Cool Stuff I Liked with a dedicated gallery viewer.
It rules!
This is like, the most positive interaction I've had with a piece of software in decades!
