If you like visual arts like me, you may want to save artworks you find on the net. Enjoy an artwork? Just click on Save in Arcollect, it is saved along metadatas like the source, artist, tags and the rating. No longer right-click and save picture in a complicated folder structure. This personal project aim to fulfill my needs of artwork collection management and to ease it’s creation, browsing and growth. It's open-source because I think that's a nice piece of software I can give back to the artwork community. Arcollect is free of tracking, clutter, recommendation and any judgement, it just works and respect your privacy.
Arcollect design is minimalist and completely hides the interface when you stare at an artwork. It's up to you to bring life in Arcollect with the artworks you will save. On the internet you see well integrated Save in Arcollect buttons like if it was a built in feature of the website, a single click and if everything go fine the text turns to Saved without more disturbance.
Arcollect is written in C++20 with effective and pragmatic code that use a restricted set of high-quality libraries. Your only performance concern is huge artworks that may take long to show and consume large amount of memory, something Arcollect have to enhance currently.
Arcollect network interactions are carefully designed. Of course, the viewer doesn't access the internet. While browsing, there is zero network activity from Arcollect until you click on the Save in Arcollect button. Then the strict minimum of network activity is performed (not even DNS in most cases) with artworks transfer encrypted using strong TLS 1.2 at least and HTTP caching to don't redownload up-to-date artworks and icons you already have.
Currently these platforms are supported :
- ArtStation - You have
Save in Arcollectnext to the download button on artworks. Porfolios are not supported yet. - DeviantArt - You have a
Save in Arcollectbutton below the artwork. Support is limited. - e621/e926 - You have a
Save in Arcollectbutton below the artwork. - FurAffinity - You have a
Save in Arcollectbutton below the artwork. - KnowYourMeme - You have a
Save in Arcollectbutton below the meme artwork on image details. - Patreon - You have a
Save in Arcollectbutton below the artwork (you must be on the post page currently). - Pixiv - You have a
Save in Arcollectnext to the Nice! button (only illustrations are supported so far). - Tumbex - Click on the share menu (bottom-right) then
Save in Arcollect. - Twitter - Click on the photo you want to save and
Save in Arcollectbutton appear in the bottom. Support is slightly buggy. - xkcd - You have a
Save in Arcollectbutton on buttons bars.
Arcollect by itself does not collect any data or statistics, it is not a spyware. Only your artworks and settings are stored inside your personal folder and stay there.
When saving artworks, Arcollect download artworks politely to the server (explicit User-Agent, caching, ...) like your normal browser would do, plus with stricter encryption requirements.
The webextension require some permissions to works:
- Access your data for X website -- To extract artwork, metadata and insert the Save in Arcollect button.
- Exchange messages with programs other than Firefox (
nativeMessaging) -- This external program is thewebext-adderthat insert artworks into your collection. - Access browser activity during navigation (
webRequestBlocking) -- To listen for Twitter API activity. - The
dnsauthorization -- To use browser DNS resolver and cache and transmit entries to thewebext-adder. - The
cookiesauthorization -- To transmit required cookies to thewebext-adderon platforms where that is needed.
I am open to contributions but keep in mind that this is a personal project, not a community driven thing. Arcollect mostly have what I use and can do with time, but it is built with extensibility and platform agnostism in mind.
Your favorite platform is likely missing, with a content-script in webextension you can add support into Arcollect.
macOS support is also welcome.
Better Windows integration too, especially font rendering.
Some KDE integrations also.
Please, keep things simple and cross-patform, you have C++, a modern SDL and a bunch of dependencies, use them. Platform specific integrations are good while lightweight and simple. As an example, Arcollect is a GNOME search provider not using GNOME libs but FreeDesktop ones.
Only recent Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows with Mozilla Firefox are supported. Checkout releases that contain ready to use binary and source packages, that is highly recommended. Note that the Windows MSI is not signed and Microsoft SmartScreen filter incorrectly flag it as hazardous, you must insist to download the file, then open MSI file properties, check Unblock in the bottom and Ok. The MSI should now works.
If you really want to build Arcollect yourself. Arcollect is built using the Meson build-system, you will need the version 0.59.0 at least. Note that I actually use ArchLinux and Arcollect need many bleeding edge compilers and dependencies to build and run. During the configuration process, unmet dependencies are automatically downloaded, built and statically linked in the final executables (excluding very common ones and compilers/tools).
Build instructions are available in the packaging guide.
When upgrading, keep in sync the webextension and binary programs versions! Mismatching these is unsupported, it should works to some extents but lack of the latest features and bug fixes.
Some updates upgrades the database schema, this is a transparent operation but then you may not use an older Arcollect to open your database, this won't works and even though the database schema is robust, it may severely mess up with your personnal collection.
- On Linux systems the next step is to upgrade the Arcollect package.
- On Windows the next steps are to uninstall Arcollect in the Windows configuration panel and install the latest MSI. This operation will not erase your collection.
Arcollect have many tests and most notably fully automated "real-life" tests that start a program controlled web-browser. Tests requiring network access are not enabled by default. You can enable them with this set of meson options :
-Dtests_online=trueTo enable off-browser online tests.-Dtests_browser=trueTo enable in-browser online tests.-Dtests_nsfw=trueTo enable NSFW online tests with mature and adult content.
🔞️ Warning! In order to test the rating extraction system on real data, tests can access mature and adult oriented content if told to so with the -Dtests_nsfw=true option. Also files with -nsfw suffix link to and contain adult content. Using -Dtests_nsfw=true will download adult content on your system and for browser automated test will show you this content. By using -Dtests_nsfw=true you agree that you can legally download, view and are not offended by adult oriented content. Generally you must be 18 years old at least. Such content is carefully selected to avoid shocking general adult public. But this still is real NSFW.