RefBoard v2.1.5

Draw on your board, link your images

Write and highlight on top of anything, and connect images with links that follow them around.

New

• Brush and highlighter - Write, sketch, or highlight on top of images and notes without changing them. Boards with brush strokes need RefBoard 2.1.5 or later.
• Links between images - Drag an arrow from one image to another to link them. The link stays attached when you move either one.

Improved

• Clearer arrows - Arrows have a cleaner shape and an outline that keeps them visible on any image. Change their color, size, and heads from the selection bar.

Fixed

• Menus in Export images and Settings - The Format, Export order, and Naming menus open again, along with the menus in Settings.
• Double-clicking annotations - Double-clicking an arrow, or tapping twice with the brush, no longer jumps the view.

RefBoard v2.1.4

Clearer labels, smoother split view

Manage labels with clearer controls, move between split boards smoothly, and save without leftover backup files.

Improved

• Clearer label controls - Add labels explicitly, see which labels are shared by your selection, and apply or remove them with clear actions and Undo support.
• Smoother split view - Opening and closing split view keeps images at their original size, with one continuous movement as the top bar appears.
• Updated app runtime - RefBoard and its installer use an updated Electron runtime.

Fixed

• No leftover backups after successful saves - Successful saves no longer leave .bak files beside your boards. Recovery safeguards remain in place if a save is interrupted.
• Label colors stay with the board - Label colors return when you reopen a board or restore a session, without carrying colors over from another board.
• Safer interrupted saves - File handles are released after failed saves, and overlapping save and close requests preserve the correct board data.
• Installer launch retries - If RefBoard cannot launch after installation, the installer stays open and offers a retry.

RefBoard v2.1.3

Two boards, side by side

Open a second board beside the one you are already using. Both stay in step, and closing the split asks you to save.

New

• Split view - Use the control beside the minimap to open a second board in the same window. It slides in from the right and starts on Home, so you can pick a board. You cannot open the board that is already open on the left.
• Click to choose a side - Click a board to work in it. The other side darkens so you can see which one is active. Moving the mouse no longer switches sides.
• A close that asks to save - Closing split view asks you to save unsaved work on the right board. You can save, discard, or cancel, and you can try again if you cancel.

Improved

• One title bar - The title bar runs across both boards. Minimize, maximize, close, and pin stay at the top-right, and the pin menu opens where you can use it.
• Settings follow both boards - Theme, grid style, toolbar, and the rest of Settings apply to both panes. Each pane keeps its own minimap.
• Dialogs stay in their pane - Settings and other windows fit inside the side that opened them. The Saved notice stays in that pane as well.
• A visible split - A thin seam shows where the two boards meet, and you can drag it to resize them. The right tool tab stays on its icon until you open it.
• Steadier resizing - Images, icons, and the item count stay still while you drag the window edges. They no longer squash or jitter.

Fixed

• Split view closes reliably - After you change the right board, closing split view still asks to save. The close control keeps working if you cancel.
• The right tool tab stays put - Turning on Always on top no longer drops the right board's tool tab.

RefBoard v2.1.2

One file per board again

A board is a single .refboard file once more, and saving still writes only what changed. Boards saved by 2.1.2 open only in 2.1.2 or later.

Improved

• Boards are one file - Your images live inside the .refboard file again, so a board is one thing to move, share, or back up. Boards from 2.1.0 and 2.1.1 fold their .refboard.images file back in the next time you save them.
• Saves stay quick - A save adds only new or changed images to the file instead of rewriting everything, and a save interrupted by a crash leaves your previous board intact.

RefBoard v2.1.1

A clearer Home for your references

Browse larger previews in a redesigned Classic library, move smoothly through Focus Flow, and jump straight to a saved board's folder.

New

• Show a board in its folder - Use the folder icon beside a saved board's actions on Home to reveal its original file in Explorer. Available in both Classic Grid and Focus Flow.
• Switch layouts from Home - Move between Grid and Flow with the layout buttons in the header. Your search stays in place, and RefBoard remembers your choice.

Improved

• A redesigned Classic library - Larger, uncropped previews and clearer titles sit on a clean, neutral background. A compact header and simpler cards keep the attention on your boards.
• A lighter Focus Flow - Bigger landscape previews, titles beneath the cards, and a simpler thumbnail row make browsing easier. The boxed dock, extra scrubber bar, and redundant text are gone.
• Cards follow your drag - Large Flow cards track the pointer directly and settle smoothly. Wheel and keyboard browsing remain available, with motion reduced when your system requests it.

Fixed

• Steadier previews while browsing - Cards fade smoothly at the edge of Flow, and unchanged previews stay in place when Home refreshes. Card actions remain stable as you move between boards.
• A better fit in smaller windows - Home's header, card controls, and empty states adapt to compact windows without overlapping. Long board titles stay contained within their cards.

RefBoard v2.1.0

Faster on big boards, and saves that only write what changed

Boards with hundreds of images stay sharp and feel lighter, saving is quick even for large boards, and undo is instant. Boards saved by 2.1.0 open only in 2.1.0 or later.

New

• Boards are now two files - Next to your board file sits Name.refboard.images, which holds your original images. Saving writes only what you added or changed, so a save on a large board takes a moment instead of rewriting everything. Keep the two files together when you move or back up a board. Older boards open as before and switch over the next time you save.

Improved

• Smoother with hundreds of images - Hovering, selecting, dragging a marquee, panning and zooming do far less work per frame on large boards.
• Instant undo - Undo and redo now touch only what the step changed, so they are instant on any board and use almost no memory.
• Lighter autosaves - An autosave writes the file once, and moving around the board no longer triggers a full save.
• Quicker Explorer previews - The preview stored with the board comes from images already on screen, so a save no longer re-reads every original.

Fixed

• Images no longer flicker between sharp and blurry - On boards with many images, some images popped soft and sharp while you were not moving. Fixed at the source.
• Failed saves no longer leave junk - A save that fails (disk full, a locked file) now keeps your previous file intact and leaves no temporary file behind.
• Closing one window no longer skips the unsaved prompt in others - Every window asks about unsaved work, including when you restart to update.
• Opening a second window kept its undo history - Opening another board window no longer clears the first window's undo for paint and crop edits.
• Small crashes and slips - Pressing Enter with nothing selected, undoing in the middle of a drag, and a rare case where a crash could empty your recent boards list.

RefBoard v2.0.12

The startup crash in 2.0.11 is fixed

RefBoard 2.0.11 was packaged without one of the files the app loads at startup, so it closed with an error before a window ever appeared. That file ships now. Everything 2.0.11 added is here and working.

Fixed

• RefBoard starts again - 2.0.11 went out without scripts/recent-works.js - the module the pinned-boards work keeps its retention rules in. The app loads it in the first moments of startup, so 2.0.11 died with "Cannot find module './scripts/recent-works'" before any window opened, on every launch, with no way to get past it. The file is in the package now. The check that exists to catch exactly this was reading the page's imports and nothing else, so it never saw what the app itself loads and reported everything as fine on a build that could not open; it now reads all three entry points and understands both ways of loading a file.

RefBoard v2.0.10

Every board on a dock, lit under your cursor

The carousel's progress bar is now a dock with one chip per board - the row lights up under the pointer, and a click on any chip goes straight to that board. On a short window, a card no longer prints across the counter beneath it.

New

• Jump to any board from the dock - Under the carousel there is now one chip per board instead of a progress bar. Move the pointer along the row and the chips rise to meet it - the one beneath the cursor fully, its neighbours less, the rest of the row still - with a pool of light following underneath. Clicking a chip goes straight to that board, which previously meant stepping through everything in between. The board you are on stands proud of the row whether or not the pointer is anywhere near it, so a glance tells you where you are.

Fixed

• A card no longer prints over the counter on a short window - On a window around 700 pixels tall or less, the centred card kept the height its width implied and overflowed the space it was given, printing across the position counter and the hint below it - a 46 pixel overlap on a 560 pixel tall window. The card is now capped by the room actually available and the thumbnail gives up the difference, so the board title, the counter and the hint stay readable however short the window gets. A normal sized window is unchanged.

RefBoard v2.0.9

Drag images out, and a copy that keeps up

Images can now leave RefBoard by being dragged straight into another application. Copying is around eleven times faster than it was, and a cropped export no longer quietly costs you a generation of JPEG quality.

New

• Drag images out into another app - A grip in the selection bar drags the selected images out as real files - into Photoshop, Explorer, a browser upload field, anywhere that accepts a drop. An image you have not cropped or altered hands over its original file untouched; a cropped, rotated or painted one is written out to match what the board shows. Several selected images become several files, and two references that share a filename arrive as two files instead of one overwriting the other.

Improved

• Copying is about eleven times faster - Copying one 4000×3000 photo took 1.45 seconds, and twenty-four references took 1.33; both now take roughly a tenth of a second. Nearly all of that time went on rendering and PNG-encoding the whole selection at up to 8192 pixels before copy would say anything at all. The flattened image placed on the clipboard is now capped at 1024 pixels. Pasting back into RefBoard is unaffected - it rebuilds the real images at their full size - and dragging an image out still hands over the untouched original.
• A cropped export keeps every pixel - Cropping forces an image to be encoded again, and a cropped JPEG used to be written back out as a JPEG, quietly costing a second generation of compression on pixels you asked to keep. It now comes out as a PNG, so the result is identical to the crop. A cropped WebP stays WebP, encoded losslessly, which is both exact and smaller than the same image as a PNG. Choosing JPEG or WebP yourself in the export dialog still gives you that format. The dialog now says when a JPEG is about to become a PNG, and the filename preview shows the extension you will actually get.

Fixed

• Copying a JPEG never kept its original bytes - Copy tried to hand the clipboard the untouched JPEG file, which the clipboard has never accepted - PNG is the only image type it takes. Every JPEG copy therefore attempted a write that could not succeed, and then rendered the full-size PNG it had been trying to avoid, which is where most of the delay came from. Copy now goes straight to the render, and keeping the original bytes applies where it genuinely works: a single untouched PNG.
• Copy stopped encoding an image it then threw away - To keep its clipboard payload small, copy downscaled every large image to 2048 pixels, re-encoded it as a PNG, and kept that only if it came out smaller than the original. For a photograph it never does. On a 4000×3000 JPEG this was 336 milliseconds spent producing a 5.9 MB PNG that was discarded in favour of the 3.9 MB original. It is now only attempted for the source formats that can actually come out smaller.
• Help stopped claiming it was version 1.0.1 - The footer of the keyboard-shortcuts window had the version written into it by hand and was never updated, so it has read "RefBoard v1.0.1" through eight releases while Settings showed the real one. It now reads the running version, like Settings does.

RefBoard v2.0.8

Large boards stay sharp

On a board of a few hundred images, some images used to render visibly blurry while their neighbours stayed crisp - and which ones shifted as you moved around. Decoded image memory is now sized to your machine instead of to a fixed 31 MB, and adjustable. Image export, which 2.0.7 broke outright, works again.

New

• Decoded image memory setting - Settings → Performance gains a Decoded image memory control. Auto sizes it from your machine's RAM - 512 MB on 8 GB and up, 256 MB on smaller machines - and you can pin it to 256 MB, 512 MB, 1 GB or 2 GB instead. Raising it lets more images stay sharp at the same time on a large board. RefBoard only uses what the current view actually needs, so the number is a ceiling rather than a reservation.

Improved

• Sharpening follows what you are looking at - Pending image work is now started in order of how close each image sits to the middle of your view, and the queue holds eight times as much. Before, work ran strictly in the order it was requested, and an overfull queue threw away the oldest request - which was usually the image right in front of you.
• A missed budget costs sharpness, not legibility - An image that cannot be decoded at the resolution your current zoom wants now falls back to a 512px surface rather than the 256px preview, so it reads as slightly soft instead of plainly blurry. RefBoard also stops reclaiming a surface the instant it loses its place for a single frame, so panning back over an image no longer re-decodes it from nothing.

Fixed

• Images stop going blurry on boards of 200 or more - Decoded images were rationed by two fixed 31 MB budgets. Because an image smaller than the resolution it needs is decoded whole, an ordinary board of 600–900px references pushed nearly every visible image into one of those budgets, about a dozen fit, and everything else was drawn from a 256px preview. On a 240-image test board with 32 images on screen, 14 were being drawn from the preview at less than half the resolution they needed; now none are, and none are during a pan either.
• One oversized image no longer softens the whole screen - An image larger than the entire decode budget was accepted anyway whenever it happened to be nearest the pointer, which spent the whole budget on that one image and dropped every other image on screen to its preview in the same frame. It now waits until the budget would otherwise go unused, so it still sharpens on its own but never at the cost of its neighbours.
• The image under the cursor stops hogging priority - Scroll-zooming over an image gave it absolute priority for five seconds afterwards, holding the images around it on their previews long after you had moved on. That window is now 1.2 seconds - long enough to outlast the gesture, short enough that where the pointer came to rest stops mattering.
• Choosing an export folder works again - In 2.0.7 the Browse button in Export images did nothing at all. The main process had stopped answering the folder-picker request, so the click failed silently - and because the folder field is read-only, Browse was the only way to fill it. Exporting images was effectively unusable in the desktop app. The picker opens again, parented to the window you started it from, and a picker that cannot open now says so instead of failing quietly.
• One export, not one save dialog per image - With no folder set, Export fell back to saving each image as a separate browser download, which opened its own Save As dialog for every image - exporting twenty references meant dismissing twenty dialogs. RefBoard now writes the whole batch to the chosen folder in one step, and if the folder is empty it asks you to pick one instead of starting anything.
• Export starts in a real folder by default - The export folder no longer opens blank on a machine that has never exported. It defaults to Documents\RefBoard Exports again, and still remembers the last folder you chose.