Packuro : Collect Everything

(NOTE: Packuro is still in private beta and is not yet released for the public)

Creatives like myself have a huge challenge in the creative process: how do you store and organize inspiration and reference material? Most people turn to places like Pinterest, Evernote or their computer’s file browser, but none of them allow you to gather everything in one spot and view it from a single program. You end up with pictures, videos, links and more scattered haphazardly across your computer and the web.

And that’s where Packuro steps in.

The Problem

File browsers only let you collect files, not links, and you can’t add notes to anything. Collection sites like Pinterest don’t work with straight text, website bookmarks and files. And any online service has the distinct possibility of either removing your content for copyright strikes or potentially shutting down forever, rendering your whole collection dead.

I wanted artists and creatives to have a place to collect literally everything, organize it, and store it on their local machine. It needed to be a desktop app so no internet was required and no outside company could delete your data. And adding items needed to be as easy as dragging and dropping.

The Research

I discovered that one of the biggest fears with artists is that their favorite sources of inspiration are going to disappear. Between DCMA takedowns, services being bought and shuttered, and paywalls limiting previously free options, many creatives are hesitant to use anything outside literal folders on their computer to save things.

Artists also complain about having to bend whatever program or website they’re using to try and fit their workflow because most of them are designed for saving a specific kind of thing. Note apps don’t let you organize grouped files, online aggregators like Pinterest don’t let you directly upload things, and file systems don’t work with individual web links. Creatives are left with mashing several tools together to accomplish their goals.

The App

Packuro itself is a desktop app (built with Electron, Node and React). That means an installable application not dependent on outside servers to function. It has a file system style browser that lets you organize nearly anything in self-contained Packs. Images, video, audio, text, links, files… simply drag them into the program and they appear as a unique item that can be renamed, moved, commented on, and sorted into folders.

You can preview most items right there in Packuro, including web pages. Anything not supported will open in its native program on your computer.

The experience of dragging and dropping literally anything into a Pack and having it show up is actually kind of magical.

Since data permanence ranked so high in my research results, I made sure Packs weren’t locked into Packuro. They can be exported in a self-contained file and backed up or shared. Packuro doesn’t use any proprietary compression or encoding techniques, so anyone could build a tool to read and edit Packs if they wanted.

And when it comes to speed of navigation within Packuro, the program supports numerous keyboard shortcuts for a truly native experience.

ImageBreaker

I’ve been collecting inspiration images for almost two decades now, and I would commonly run into websites that would try and prevent you from saving images. Invisible DIVs, mouse event intercepting Javascript, and several other nefarious code patterns meant I was stuck taking and cropping screen shots. In particular, there was a certain interior design website that was very adamant about keeping you from saving anything outside using an account with them.

As any good hacker would, I said, “like hell you’re going to stop me from saving these” and proceeded to write ImageBreaker. It’s a minimal Javascript bookmarklet that, when clicked, crawls the whole page and identifies the images and videos. It then creates an HTML overlay and puts every image inside it for you to easily browse and save what you want.

So, of course, ImageBreaker and Packuro are a match made in heaven. It’s due for a rewrite soon though, as there has been some changes to best practices around images and several new HTML5 ways of displaying media that the code doesn’t currently know how to parse.

In the meantime, if you want to try it out, click the link below. If you want to use it yourself, simply drag the link onto your bookmark bar.

Disclaimer: I’m not responsible for what you decide to do with ImageBreaker. Respect other people’s hard work, don’t steal content for your own selfish gain, and always use ImageBreaker for good.

In Conclusion

Packuro is admittedly a fairly niche product, but removing friction in the creative process has been a lifelong interest of mine and makes it worth the time investment. I’m hoping for an official release later this year as donationware, since my goal is primarily to help other creatives and give back to the community that’s inspired me so much.