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What are the best websites/programs for creating mood boards / image collages / 'visual lists'?
Hullo! I'm very much a list person, but I'm also very much a visual person. So, I've found that simple grids of images work really well for me when I want to plan and organize information, aesthetics, etc. However, I've struggled to find my ideal website or program that allows me to do this.
My wants:
- To upload images with minimal clicks. (My workflow would likely be to find an image somewhere, get the image's URL, navigate to a page, and upload via URL, without necessarily needing to enter form fields or save an image locally first.)
- To display medium resolution images as clear thumbnails (e.g. anywhere from 200x200 to 500x500). Enough for detail, but not necessarily "HD".
- To offer the ability to crop (or even just display) images as square thumbnails (for the purposes of a neat and uniform grid) without me having to go through https://squareanimage.com (real website!) for every single image.
- To categorize images into groups (i.e. to display a set of images as a coherent little grid/gallery). I'm not picky about whether this is done via fixed category pages, or tags + filtering.
- To maybe add extra information attached to each image (e.g. descriptions, links, etc.) without necessarily cluttering the grid.
- As for whether the service is public or private, cloud-based or local, I don't really mind!
Some of the options I've tried:
- Wordpress: Really nice grid-based themes, but the "blog post"-based system feels cumbersome for what I'm trying to do (images only). So many clicks to add images and make new posts.
- Tumblr: Lovely for content discovery, the quick reblog feature saves a lot of clicks, and tagging is flexible. But, this has many of the same downsides as Wordpress (lots of clicks to upload your own images, post-based system), and Tumblr as a platform is so much more than what I'm looking for (don't want/need social features).
- Pinterest: 10/10 for content discovery -- their image similarity algorithms and image search are unmatched. Wonderful for quickly spinning up a collage of themed pictures. But, horrid for uploading new pictures, given that they'll become public pins with comments/links/etc. Too many clicks + unnecessary fields. I worry about attribution for artists with Pinterest specifically -- I don't want to perpetuate a lack of attribution with publicly re-shareable images. Also, the collages are very busy with ads and unnecessary text. Plus, it's kind of cumbersome to reorganize images between boards if you want to change your board scheme.
- Pinry: Open source, self-hosted version of Pinterest. Was a bit too rough around the edges the last time I tried to use it, but maybe it's good enough now?
- Are.na: A bit too... New York trendy? For my tastes. Also, the social elements aren't really my thing... Also, costly!!!
- Google Keep: Surprisingly good? Perhaps the best option I've tried? For image notes, it's very flexible with regards to grid-based layouts, tagging, adding optional details, adding multiple images to a single note, etc. My main criticisms are that uploading images and tagging notes does take quite a few clicks; the grid stops being aligned the moment your notes begin to differ (e.g. add images of varying size, add titles/details, etc.), so it can start to look a bit visually cluttered; the UI doesn't seem to be designed with many tags in mind; the default layout shows all notes (I never want this).
- Local files and folders: Dead simple, but with very few features. Thumbnail views in file explorers are really space inefficient compared to grid-based image galleries.
- Random photo organizing software: Largely geared towards actual photos taken with an actual camera (real life subjects, camera EXIF data, organizing by date taken, etc.). Too many unnecessary features for my needs, not enough features geared towards digital non-photo images (e.g. graphics).
- "Speed dial" new tab pages for browsers: Helps me organize bookmarks! I like being able to see the icons, like a desktop for webapps. I will use image grids for everything.
- Artwork grids in media libraries / tracking websites: Plex, MusicBee, Letterboxd, Goodreads, Anime-Planet... you are heaven to me.
Here is a gallery of screenshots for websites/services I have tried, to give you an idea of how I use these services. The first one (tumblr) is the closest to visually ideal (dense + uniform grid), but Keep is the closest to ideal feature-wise. Surely there is a website or service I'm missing that could be the best of both worlds!
Kinopio
Interesting app. Tried it, but found the usability and learning curve to be a big hinderance. Probably could do with a major redesign.
Obsidian.md has a new Canvas mode that might be good. Notion can also work although its online only.
For moodboards, I've been using Apple's new Freeform app, or if you don't use their devices, I found Figma's FigJam whiteboarding tool to be very useful. All the neoliberal capitalist co-working nightmare stuff it comes with is easy enough to ignore, and you get a very competent web-based scrapbooking app.
What about this site? It's been posted around tildes a few times and might fit your needs: https://paper.mmm.dev/
It may not do all of the image cropping/layout you want. But you can build a page of content pretty quickly and easily.
It’s intriguing how few mature options exist in this space, with pretty much only Pinterest being somewhat polished. Grid-based mood boards don’t strike me as being particularly challenging from an engineering perspective which would lead one to expect to free up energy for fit and finish but that’s not proven true.
It is not much fixed grids images, but visual whiteboard/diagram tools might be a little different/unstructured way of approaching your boards. Based on your screenshots, I would start with Miro of these three.
I just saw this but wanted to pitch in just in case you haven't yet looked at Obsidian. The native feature, Canvas, is already pretty great and user-friendly. You can simply drag and drop images on there, then resize and rearrange, and the working area expands indefinitely as you put more images in. Zooming in and out is easy and the user experience is snappy and reliable because the entire system exists locally on your HD rather than on some cloud somewhere.
But if you want to get seriously creative, there's a plugin for Obsidian called Excalidraw. It will allow you to insert any type of file on the canvas, not just static images, and to extensively stylize the content. I couldn't possibly verbally do justice to how versatile of a tool it is so I recommend just looking up some YouTube tutorials on it. You'll quicky get a general idea of what it's like.
I use many types of image-based boards for my work and I've been able to painlessly create them all inside this one system for the first time in my life. I also need structured data entries with attached images that I need to be able to look at in a board form. For that I'm using the Kanban plugin. I even use Excalidraw for creating quick sketches without having to switch to an image processing tool and import the result.
I'm also using Are.na, but its functionality is too limited for most purposes, and it is indeed quite pricey for what it is. To compensate for the lacking functionality there, I was using Notion but found it seriously limited and even annoying when it comes to making free form image collages. I was able to achieve the look that I wanted, more or less, but it took immense patience and toil and way too much time. The user experience is far from frictionless although some text layout options (columns) are a bit easier to accomplish. I wasn't ever really fully content with Notion. Now that I've seen how much more malleable and versatile Obsidian is, I'll never go back.
The main downside of Obsidian is that it takes time to get it configured to fit your needs - precisely because there are so many possibilities. I spent about two weeks working on it multiple hours a day, which may sound like a lot, but in the end I have a system that runs all my most important life management stuff (daily routines, task lists - automated and not - calendar, journal, project management, even part of the content creation I do for work). What's more: the user interface looks exactly the way I want. That gives a non-insignificant productivity boost for an ADHD person like me whose attention gets easily hijacked by visual clutter. I've never been this happy with any system that I've used, including paid ones. And Obsidian, the way I use it, is completely free!
If you're planning to use it only for the image collages and if you're happy with one of the existing available themes, then even the onboarding will be quick and painless. You can basically just download and install it and immediately start using Canvas.
Edit:
I reread your requirements and I think the Kanban plugin gets closest to fulfilling them, out of the things that I've used. Kanban does not make the cards square though. You can choose the width you want and the height will be whatever is needed to display the entire image without cropping. But there may be other plugins that do the cropping, or if you know some CSS, you can try to modify Kanban to do that (I modified mine to have slightly different scroll behaviour).
Edit 2:
Actually, now that I think of it, Notion may have the best off-the-shelf functionality for your particular use case. It also has a Kanban board setup and it does crop the images automatically. You can also adjust which part of the image is inside the frame.
high learning curve but if you still haven't found something you're happy with I'd look into Figma!
"background" image to the new image you wanna display.