seenaburns / isolate

Lightweight image browser

Isolate

Isolate is a lightweight tool for viewing and organizing your art reference and inspiration with ease.

Isolate works off of your local file system: you get started by dragging and dropping a folder onto the application window. After that, you can browse, search, reorganize and view images in full res. Not having to go over the internet keeps things much faster than other tools like Pinterest.

Great things about Isolate

• Quick: Both in workflow and snappiness, Isolate is meant for the power users
• Manage your images how you like: Isolate just reflects your directory structure, you get to organize things how you see fit (even with nested folders)
• No BS: Isolate isn't a social tool. There's no sharing, notifications, discovery. It just does its job and stays out of your way.

Install

Download	macOS (app)	windows (unpacked .exe)	linux (.appImage)

See build/ for how to build from source.

Note: v3 is in development! Building from source (master) is less stable than the releases.

Screenshots

Usage

Isolate works off of a base folder, when you first start drag and drop a folder to browse it. You can always drag and drop another folder if you ever want to browse another folder.

Navigation

When hovering over the bottom toolbar, a drawer appears, containing subdirectories you can navigate too.

• n opens this drawer
• esc closes it
• Enter navigates to the first item in the list
• Typing filters the directories

Modal

Clicking on any image will open it, fitting to the window.

• z zooms in and out, between fitted and the image's original size
• ESC closes the window
• Left and Right arrow keys navigate between images

Right clicking on the image shows you

• CmdOrCtrl + Shift + C copies the image to your clipboard
• CmdOrCtrl + Shift + O opens the image in your native file manager

Toolbar

Additionally in the toolbar lets you zoom the image grid, search across directories and more options under the popup menu.

• CmdOrCtrl + zooms in
• CmdOrCtrl - zooms out
• CmdOrCtrl n toggles night/day mode
• Shuffle toggles the order of your images. When changing folders, they are sorted by filename, but shuffle will randomly sort them.
• Hovering over More shows you more options

Moving

Selecting Move in the popup menu under More lets you select images and move them to other folders. A gold tint shows the selected images.

• Select/Unselect images by clicking them
• e activates selection
• m opens the directory drawer to move images
• ESC exits back to normal mode

Searching

A search bar in the top right will search for any files with the term in their path. For example 2d would match anything in my inspo/2d/ folder.

isolate's Issues

Images captured from windows snipping tool doesn't show up..

first and foremost thank you for this awesome viewer. I mostly use it when i want to see gifs and images together, larger than the windows 'extra large icons' size.
I encountered an issue that its not showing the images captured from snipping tools. i also tried resaving those pictures but still ISOLATE goes blank as soon as i drag n drop or navigate to folder which has them.

Is it just me or snipping tool is doing something wrong here??

Save window size after quit

When I set my isolate window size, I want it to be saved, so that when I open it again, I don't have to re set it

Pressing "z" results in blank view

Isolate v2

When the nav bar is closed and I press z I get a blank screen and am unable to exit or navigate away. Quitting and reopening fixes the problem.

Default image order matching folder setting

Hi Seena, thanks for building this great tool. I've been using it for a while and love it.
I was wondering what is the default order that images display (before you click Shuffle)? It seems random but I noticed it's always the same for me. I always look more at the latest stuff I saved so it would be cool if it defaulted on my folder view setting (date modified) or if there was a setting to display chronologically. Cheers!

Support for .exr ?

Add nice app icon

Default Electron icon is not good :)

Drag+Drop folder broken on MacOS (v2.0.1)

2fa290f might fix, but for now it appears like dragging and dropping does not invoke the handler correctly, or fails to read the folder

At some point the userData field for root gets set to an empty string, and Isolate throws and error. Since it throws an error early, it seems event handlers are not set to process further drags/drops

Randomization Request

Hello Seena, thank you for this awesome tool. One request I have is for a way to randomize the results of a search. I often will view my gallery for inspiration and I find that continually seeing the images in the same order is less inspiring. Perhaps using a key command would keep the UI clean. Thank you for your consideration.

Linux AppImage (2.0.2) problem

I've been using the 1.1.0 version for several months without problems in Manjaro 17 and Kubuntu 17.10.

But in the 2.0.2, I can't drag & drop folders or select pictures from the grid; I can drag & drop a folder for first time but I can't select the pictures from the grid and I can't drop another folder again.

I found a workaround for drop another folder, I do a search (selecting the search box using the TAB key, I can't select it directly), and then I can drop another folder, but the problem of not being able to select the pictures continues.

Not working under Mac OS Ventura

Unfortunately on startup isolate is just a blank white window under mac os ventura :(

Copy to clipboard shortcut does not work on Windows

Rewrite in BPF

Currently performs too slow, need to do everything in kernel space. Browse images at line rate plz

Copy/Paste

Would be nice to be able to select an image and copy it to the clipboard, e.g. for use in other applications like pure ref.

Will GIFs be supported in a later release?

Hi,

I do not want to directly request this. I was just interessted if there will be the possibility
to also browse *.gif files, either animated or just the first frame of each file.

Thank you for sharing this nice tool with the world!

Alex

Find more stable way of including bs-platform/lib/js/*

Problem

Isolate's startup time on Windows became abysmally slow (~30-60s) after adding React and Reason as dependencies.

Investigating, I found the app had high disk activity, and appeared to be creating a new directory under ~/AppData/Local/Temp/... that would contain the unpacked asar, with just 300mb of bs-platform. The exe was only 60mb, so I suspect on EVERY startup it was unpacking, compiling the bs-platform tooling, and then deleting it after the app closes, but I would need to do more investigation.

Unfortunately bs-platform does not expose the runtime libraries as a separate package, so the only way to include these dependencies (for example bs-platform/lib/js/array.js) is to include all of bs-platform

Workaround

505d159 includes a janky addition to build.sh which copies out bs-platform/lib/js/*.js and reason-react into local modules, includes them in the electron-builder build and replaces all references to the bs-platform module with local modules.

# From build.sh
replace_deps() {
    sed -i '' "s|require(\"$1|require(\"$2|g" $3;
}

if [ ! -d build/bs-stdlib ]; then
    mkdir -p build/bs-stdlib/lib/js
    cp -r node_modules/bs-platform/lib/js/* build/bs-stdlib/lib/js/
fi

if [ ! -d build/reason-react ]; then
    mkdir -p build/reason-react/src/
    cp -r node_modules/reason-react/src/*.js build/reason-react/src/
    for f in $(find build/reason-react -iname '*.js'); do
        replace_deps "bs-platform" "../../../build/bs-stdlib" $f
    done
fi

for f in $(find src -iname '*.bs.js'); do
    replace_deps "bs-platform" "../build/bs-stdlib" $f
    replace_deps "reason-react" "../build/reason-react" $f
done

Better solution

Ideally rescript-lang/rescript-compiler/pull/2171 or rescript-lang/rescript-compiler/issues/2127 will separate bs-platform's Javascript stdlib into a separate package. This would be preferable because the *.bs.js files and any other libraries (e.g. reason-react) reference bs-platform. Changing the compilation of these files seems more stable than hacking at the require references afterwards.

Short of that, maybe there's a more stable way of doing this in the build. Maybe replacing require references is what webpack is for, and could make vendoring these libraries easier.

Dark Mode

Context menu (right click) does not work on Windows

Image order in rows?

Are images ordered in columns not rows? Is that planned / expected?

//current
1 4 7
2 5 8
3 6 9

//what I would expect
1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

Antivirus false-flag?

Just downloaded the "isolate.1.0.0.exe" release & BitDefender flagged the download as infected by "Generic.Malware.FM!.8C4530F8", I'm guessing this is a false flag by the AV software, but might be others than me as well that have this issue.