The hardest library to start is an empty one. You install the extension, you understand exactly how it works, and then you sit looking at a grid with nothing in it, trying to remember a single website.

So we made a list: Wells, 83 places worth drawing on.

What is on it#

Space archives that release everything at full resolution. Museums with real open-access programmes — the Met, the Rijksmuseum, the Getty, the Smithsonian. Natural history plates scanned out of century-old books. Game art, asset libraries and fifteen thousand screens of game interface. Type specimens written like essays. The feeds where visual work turns up before it is anywhere else.

Every entry is a site we save out of ourselves. Nobody paid to be on it, and there is no affiliate link anywhere on the page — if that ever changes, the page will say so.

Filtering it#

The box at the top filters as you type across the name, the address, the subject and the description. Every word has to match, so two words narrow rather than widen: game-dev ui gives you the sites that are both.

Under it are the sixteen subjects that recur most across the list — not a list we typed out, but the tags the entries actually carry, counted. When the list changes, so do the buttons.

Tell us what is missing#

It is curated by hand, which is the only reason it is short enough to read, and it is certainly missing things you know about. Send them over.

People who try JayBoard have often tried Karakeep first, and the question that follows is fair: they both save things off the web, so what is the difference?

The short answer is what happens after the save. Karakeep gives you a library you read. JayBoard gives you one you look at.

What Karakeep is#

Karakeep — formerly Hoarder — calls itself "a self-hostable bookmark-everything app with a touch of AI for the data hoarders out there". It saves links, notes, images and PDFs, archives the page so the bookmark outlives the site, tags everything with an LLM, and puts it all behind a very good search. It is open source, it runs on your own machine with Docker, and it is built around reading: a reader view, highlights, feeds, a phone in your pocket.

What JayBoard is#

JayBoard is a private visual library. What you keep in it is media and bookmarks — images, videos, links and whole pages saved offline — and the assumption is that you will want to look at them again rather than work through them as a queue. It is built to be quick at every step of that: the capture, what gets stored, how fast the grid comes back, and what you can arrange out of it afterwards.

That assumption changes the shape of the app. Capture is an overlay you aim at a page: AltShiftS to pick several images at once, AltShiftD to send whatever you click straight to a project with no form in the way. Clicking five images on a page should not be five forms, and in JayBoard it is five clicks.

The AI pass then writes tags and a description of the thing itself — what the image shows, what the video is, what the page says — so a screenshot of a dark navigation bar comes back for the words you would actually think of a month later, not for whatever the page it came from happened to be called.

And the library has a second half that a bookmark manager has no reason to have: infinite moodboards, where the things you saved become cards you can drag around, group into frames, annotate and connect, then export as PNG or SVG. That is the dividing line. Lists and tags are the right structure for a queue of things to read. For a pile of references they are not enough — the pile only becomes useful once you can lay it out next to itself.

Side by side#

Which one#

Take Karakeep if you want to run it yourself, on your own disk under your own domain — JayBoard is hosted, and if that is the deciding factor there is nothing more to weigh. Take it too if you read on a phone, or if most of what you keep is prose.

Take JayBoard if what fills your saves is images and video, if you want them on a board rather than in a list, and if the part that has beaten you before is the saving itself.

Everything above about Karakeep was checked against its own site and README when this was written. It is an actively developed project and this will go out of date; if we have got something wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

JayBoard is live at jayboard.com. This is what it is and why it exists.

The thing that keeps happening#

You find a picture worth keeping — a layout, a colour, a piece of type, a frame from a video — and you save it. Into a bookmark folder you will never open, a tab you will lose, a screenshot on the desktop named Screenshot 2026-08-19 at 14.03.11.png. Six weeks later you know you have seen the thing. You cannot find it.

The tools that handle this well handle articles. They save the words, make them searchable, and give you them back to read. That is the right design for a queue of things to read, and it is the wrong one for a pile of pictures, because the thing you remember about a picture is never the words on the page it came from.

JayBoard is built for the pile of pictures.

Saving is a click#

Capture is an overlay you aim at the page. AltShiftS brings it up, you click the images you want, and one form at the end says where they go. Or AltShiftD, where each click sends what is under it straight to your active project with no form at all.

That is the part that has to be cheap. Clicking five images on a page should not be five dialogs, and if saving costs you a decision every time, you stop saving.

The extension also takes a video, a link, or a whole page — saved as one self-contained file, so it still opens after the site behind it is gone.

Then it describes what it saved#

Everything that arrives can be annotated: tags, a description, or both, written from the picture rather than from the page it came from. A screenshot of a dark navigation bar gets described as a dark navigation bar, so it comes back a month later for the words you would actually think of.

Search then runs in full text across titles, tags, those descriptions, your own notes, addresses, filenames, and the whole text of any page you saved offline.

And then you can lay it out#

The half that makes it a visual library rather than a tidy folder: every board is an infinite canvas. Drag things out of the library onto it, group them into frames, write on them, connect them, and export the result as PNG or SVG.

A pile of references is not useful until you can see it next to itself. That is what a canvas is for, and it is why a list of links was never going to be enough.

What it is not#

There is no feed. There is no algorithm, nothing recommended, and nobody else's material in your library. Every account gets its own store, and that separation is structural rather than a filter we remember to apply.

It is a hosted product with a Chrome extension, which means there is nothing to run and nothing to maintain — and it means it is not self-hosted. If that is a dealbreaker, it is an honest one.

Try it#

There is a live demo that needs no account: a read-only library with a moodboard in it, which is the fastest way to tell whether this is the thing you have been missing. The documentation covers the rest, and the changelog is where everything new shows up.