A mood board app that keeps your references

Most tools that call themselves mood board apps are general canvases with images allowed on them. The difference shows up about three weeks in, once you have collected enough that the board stops being something you look at and starts being something you search.

Four things decide whether a tool survives that. Getting images in has to be one gesture — drag a folder, paste a URL, done. Arranging has to be direct, so dragging and resizing feel like moving paper rather than editing a document. Finding has to work on how you actually remember an image, which is almost never its filename. And the board has to still be there in two years, in a form you can open, whatever happened to the company that made the app.

This is the one nearly everything gets wrong. You remember that an image was warm, dusty, rust-coloured. You do not remember its name, which folder it went in, or what you typed next to it — and keyword search needs one of those.

Gladeboard reads the palette of every image the moment it lands on the canvas, so colour is a thing you can search for. Ask for everything teal and you get it. It runs entirely on your device: nothing is uploaded, nothing is sent to a model, and it works with the connection off like the rest of the app. Searching by meaning — “find the brutalist ones” — is a different feature, it is on the roadmap, and it is not built.

A mood board is rarely only images. Gladeboard’s canvas takes notes, to-dos, images, video, links, colour swatches, headings, columns and nested boards — a board can hold another board, which is how one campaign stays one thing instead of six.

Links are not dead rectangles. Paste a YouTube, Vimeo or Loom URL and it plays in place; paste a CodePen or a GitHub gist and it renders with syntax highlighting. Swatches let a palette sit on the board as a first-class object rather than as a screenshot of a palette.

Every free mood board app has a meter somewhere. Some count cards across everything you have ever made, so one thorough board spends the lot. Some count boards. Some are free until you want to export, which is the one that stings, because it charges you at the exact moment you need the work out.

Gladeboard’s meter is boards: three of them, free forever, with no limit on what goes on each, no watermark and no trial clock. Sync across your devices is included on the free plan rather than sold back to you. Export is never gated. Cloud lifts the board limit at $8 a month and is the only paid plan you can buy today — and if you stop paying, nothing is deleted: you drop back to free, every board stays readable, editable and syncing.

A mood board is a slow accumulation. The value is not in any one image, it is in three years of them — which makes “where does this actually live” a more serious question for this kind of tool than for almost any other.

Gladeboard is local-first: the real copy of the board is on your device, and the network’s job is carrying changes to your other devices, not delivering the board to you. Every board exports as a plain file you can back up, drop in a project folder, or hand to a client. If we vanished tomorrow, you would still have your boards. That is a lower bar than most software clears and it should not be.

The demo opens the real canvas with no account and nothing to install. Drag in an actual folder of references — the test worth running is not whether the app looks nice but whether forty images at once still feel good to move around, and whether colour search finds the one you were thinking of.

It runs in any modern desktop browser today. Native Mac and Windows apps are in private testing, and because boards are just files, your work carries over the moment one lands.