BeeRef icon
BeeRef icon

BeeRef

BeeRef lets you quickly arrange your reference images and view them while you create. Its minimal interface is designed not to get in the way of your creative process.

BeeRef screenshot 1

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  • Mac
  • Windows
  • Linux
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  • TBayAreaPat liked BeeRef
  • leo-kadieff added BeeRef as alternative to FrameThrower
  • cntchngusrnme liked BeeRef
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    isoke added BeeRef as alternative to ArtDeck
  • fyreink liked BeeRef
  • diagnoses1824 liked BeeRef
  • AlternativeOfTheUsername liked BeeRef
  • seki-ryu replied to a comment / review on BeeRef
  • hced replied to a comment / review on BeeRef
  • foteja7230 replied to a comment / review on BeeRef

Comments and Reviews

   
Top Positive Comment
ddnn
0

Works pretty much exactly like PureRef. Glad I decided to see if there are alternatives. This is the only one I found that is comparable while also being open-source.

astrarrow
0

great and they got a new update

hced
1
3D Artist

I hope to bump my review up to 5 stars once a few things have been ironed out:

  • Can't drag and drop images from web browser (but copy/pasting works).
  • No questions asked when hitting CTR-N for New Scene (What even is a Scene? And how do you switch between them?). If you haven't saved the scene prior to this shortcut/command, it's gone without confirmation.
  • No questions asked when closing! Same thing: hit the X and your collection is gone without confirmation.
  • Versioned executable, which is not ideal: Makes linking in the filesystem problematic.
  • No Custom Shortcuts. Personally I'd like to remap Shift-commands to same but without Shift, e.g. A for Select All, O for Optimize, etc. (Akin to Blender's keymaps.) Now I'd have to use something like AutoHotkey (Windows) for that, which is not ideal.

Some of the pluses are:

  • Free/opensource
  • Lightweight
  • Stable
  • Easy to use
  • Quick startup tim
  • Native UI! You can choose to show elements like title bar, window frame or not, etc. which is great.

Will update my review if things improve. For now, I'm staying with PureRef. (Jan 2023.)

foteja7230
Replying to @hced

Well it is Open-Source, just make the changes yourself. Those are rather trivial (nit-picky) requests.

hced
3D Artist

Are you in the right forum? This is a review board for software users, not necessarily a place where everyone is a programmer capable of developing better software, let alone a single Hello World.

You'd be right to call me out if my review wasn't polite and well intended.

seki-ryu
Replying to @hced

Not sure if this was present in 2023, but you can rebind keys by editing a KeyboardSettings.ini file. Not up to the user friendliness standards of popular commercial software for sure but doable for a motivated average person. You can find it under right-click Settings Open Settings Folder

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Install from the command line

  • flatpak install flathub org.beeref.BeeRef

Be careful what you paste into a terminal. Check what a command installs before running it.

What is BeeRef?

BeeRef lets you quickly arrange your reference images and view them while you create. Its minimal interface is designed not to get in the way of your creative process.

Features

  • Move, scale, rotate and flip images
  • Mass-scale images to the same width, height or size
  • Mass-arrange images vertically, horizontally or for optimal usage of space
  • Enable alaways-on-top-mode and disable the title bar to let the BeeRef window unobtrusively float above your art program

The main GitHub is pretty much abandoned, but a fork is going: https://github.com/mini-ninja-64/beeref

BeeRef information

AlternativeTo Categories

Education & Reference, Photos & Graphics

GitHub repository

  •  812 Stars
  •  73 Forks
  •  44 Open Issues
  •   Updated  
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Our users have written 3 comments and reviews about BeeRef, and it has gotten 30 likes

BeeRef was added to AlternativeTo by amenthes on and this page was last updated .