Leave a Review VizRef
Great! Just needs a little more.
I’ve been using this app for years for my art references and I LOVE it! However it’s just missing a key feature that I think would take this app from great to perfect
-an option to write/draw onto the board. I think adding some kind of translucent ‘’sticky note’’ situation where we can slot it over the photos we drop in for notes or adjustments without drawing ontop of the actual reference would make it so easy to keep all the information on the board. I don’t wanna have to keep drawing/writing on a separate program just to drop it back in Vizref.
Thank you regardless for making this app for us artists and I hope you consider this suggestion!! 💕Show lessDoodleCraftie
Great app, getting slower
Update July 2024:
No updates for 3 years. I wish the developer would keep refining the app. I’ve just upgraded to an M4 iPad Pro, and the app still works, but gifs play back at double speed or more, making them harder to work with. Still hoping for the ability to flip and rotate gifs like we can with still images.
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I’ve been using VizRef since it came out, and it’s become integral to my art workflow. So well-designed and useful! Unfortunately I find that some of my reference galleries become slower and slower to work with over time, and can take up to 8 seconds to fully open and display. I thought the problem might be simply the volume of images (240) but then I exported all those images and added them to a new gallery, and the new gallery opened twice as fast. This procedure is not a good workaround, though, because it loses all the placement, scale, rotation, and cropping that I’ve done. It would be great if VizRef allowed the user to duplicate a gallery, which would make it easy to split up a big gallery into smaller galleries. I would also like to see support for copy-pasting multiple images at a time. Currently it will only paste one image at a time, which is impractical for moving photos between galleries. I’m hoping the developer can find more ways to optimize existing galleries, and/or make it easier to duplicate and move images between galleries, preserving settings! Also: still hoping for the ability to flip and rotate gifs…Show lessvnavone
Fantastic
This app is great! I’ve had it for years now and use it all the time as an artist gathering reference for projects and commissions. It’s a one time cost that’s absolutely worth it. There’s other apps that can do similar things like Freeform and Goodnotes where you can annotate and do more which can be nice but even with using those apps I still find myself coming back to VizRef for simple inspiration/reference collecting. It also cleanly split screens with pretty much every app but most importantly Procreate and Safari are what I use it with the most. Highly recommended!Show lessDanielle_S
VizRef < Freeform
*Pros:
-Supports dark mode
-Simple interface
*Cons:
-Compresses images, poor resolution
-Can’t sync across devices
-No organization features (i.e. moving between boards, tags, or captions)
-Can’t Copy+paste multiple images
**Comments & Suggestions**
I regretted paying for VizRef when I realized that it’s just a simpler version of Freeform. I’m continuing to use VizRef for now because I already put so much time into making the boards, but will switch to Freeform once it supports Dark mode.
To make this app more useful, PLEASE add some organizational features to allow easy movement of multiple images between boards within the app, or at least the ability to merge existing boards. I got this app to reduce clutter in my camera roll and files. I don’t want to have to export pics from a board just to import them into another and then have to take the extra step of deleting the files from wherever I exported them to.
Also, no matter what I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to get the images to maintain their resolution when importing. Some import methods are worse than others. This has been beyond frustrating, since I rely on image quality to see the fine details in my references.Show lessMari’s Phone
App needs some work
I would rate this higher if the app didn’t charge anything, but it’s nice that it’s not subscription-based! I liked this app initially, it helped clear out my photo album and the image quality isn’t affected much when uploaded. But, I noticed a huge problem w photos getting lost whenever I loaded a board, especially one w a lot of images on it. Sometimes they’d re-upload if I restarted the app, but then another group of images would get lost in their place. The app also crashes sometimes and loses images after, but it’s not very often.
The app hasn’t been updated for 2 yrs still, but I’d rly love to see these in the app as well: multi-selection w/in a board would be great to help better organize different references, text box/ sticky notes option, greater range for image rotation, basic drawing pen feature similar to the annotation option in the iPhone photos/ notes app. Any other features that could help enhance mind-mapping in the app would be perfect.Show less$up ppl
Indispensable
Taking a minute out of a busy work schedule with a tight deadline to mention how indispensable this app is for my workflow on the iPad Pro. Just amazing how I can lay out all my reference in one place and pin it to the side in Split View or flip back and forth to it with Command-Tab on my keyboard. I had been doing this with Preview on MacOS for years but that only arranged them vertically; Vizref gives so much more flexibility. Also great for pausing gifs and stepping through them for accurate poses. Only thing I would add is the ability to slow down gif playback; when I upgraded to the M2 iPad the faster processor made my gifs comically fast! Otherwise loving VizRef and hope it stays around for a while. Would love a desktop version!Show lessSketcherazzi
Must Have App; One Stage Manager Question/Suggestion
I use this app for visual reference and thumbnail layout when working on comics and commissions. I couldn't imagine using the iPad as an art device without it. I like the added feature of being able to export moodboards as images / PDFs, especially when going from the iPad to a Windows computer.
My only question/suggestion is that I cannot zoom or pan when using VizRef on a separate monitor + mouse/trackpad with Stage Manager. I might be missing something, though. If this is a bug with Stage Manager, I wonder if it would be possible to put zoom and pan gizmos in a corner [similar to Blender's zoom and pan gizmos] in order to make this somewhat possible when using a separate monitor + mouse/trackpad.Show lessMax Banshees
A Little Frustrating
Since there haven’t been updates in 2 years, I’m not sure we’ll get any improvements. Which is a shame, because you never want an app experience to be “frustrating” or “tedious.”
It lacks a lot of very basic functionality that doesn’t quite make it PureRef for iPadOS. There’s no way to import multiple images other than from camera roll and I don’t really get why there’s an auto-arrangement button because you can’t select multiple images on your board to arrange them. So you, generally, have to import images one at a time and move them, one at a time, to arrange them manually. You can group them, more or less, as long as you keep importing them one after another with the first one selected, but as soon as you deselect or tap off an image, you’re stuck.
So, sitting here, spending another 20ish minutes tediously arranging a board one image at a time, I asked myself, “Why did I spend money on this app when I could have just imported them to Concepts or Procreate or Krita or Clip Studio?” Any other image app that I’m not using and put that in split screen, you know?
I just feel like I was sold on a PureRef alternative and got a kid’s versions that hinders my workflow and eats up my time. So, I’m feeling the remorse big time.Show lessfravjkghkofcbko
ADORE this, but no suggestion address = posting this.
Love this app, especially as an art student enjoying apps like Procreate. The ability to organize and sort ideas, and to additionally crop/resize as needed, has been a massive help. Would really appreciate some additional features in the future though. Perhaps a text feature (maybe via the text being made an image, I can deal with retyping to remove errors if it means I can keep notes), and a ‘snap/magnetic’ mode would be awesome. It’d help me keep track of ideas, but snapping would be awesome just for the simple easy of moving things around cleanly. Thank you for making this!!Show lessAbbiMeni
Love it but one big setback
Its a huge help and streamlines my process by a ton, its a simple tool but saves the clutter from my actual canvas. I love how it lets you scroll through gifs for animation studies, and being able to move the images around freely feels easier than scrolling up and down a pinterest board.
The only frustrating thing is sometimes my boards will crash and theres no way to recover lost images (as far as I can tell) It doesnt matter if theres a 100 images or 10 on a board it just Happens randomly and deletes pictures. I had to knock my rating down because I had just had a board crash and lose half the pictures, re-add in as many as I could find in my camera roll, only for it to crash again 10 minutes later and lose even more refs. I've also noticed the crashes happen when I try to export selected images. But yea this app gets the job done, I just hope the crash + erasing refs problem gets fixedShow lesskk31kr
