This fork was created as the original project appears abandoned, with PRs oustanding for over a year, and I needed the application to support the storage of BeeRef's database on a Windows Network Drive.

The only changes made from the 0.3.0 version in the author's repo are:

• Fix to a bug introduced after V0.2.0 (latest released package) that prevented execution

  • Cursor hotspot arguments changed from float to int (int required)

• Fix to a bug introduced after V0.2.0 (latest released package) that prevented execution

  • Class naming clash with Python logging module - application class name and filename changed

• Change to fix error when opening/saving to network drive on Windows

  • This appears to be a bug in the pathlib library rather than this application. Windows requires the network location part in a UNC path to be preceded by two slashes, due to escaping in this context this becomes four preceeding slashes. The original implementation only provided three and caused the error
  • Change made to use four initial slashes if platform is detected as Windows, and path is a network location.

• Updated version to v0.3.0-dev-jg

Only packaged for Windows, but should be no reason why it would not function as before on other systems if built.

BeeRef lets you quickly arrange your reference images and view them while you create. Its minimal interface is designed not to get in the way of your creative process.

Get the file for your operating system (Windows, Linux, macOS) from the latest release.

Linux users need to give the file executable rights before running it. Optional: If you want to have BeeRef appear in the app menu, save the desktop file from the release section in ~/.local/share/applications, save the logo, and adjust the path names in the desktop file to match the location of your BeeRef installation.

MacOS X users, look at detailed instructions if you have problems running BeeRef.

Follow further releases via the atom feed.

To get the current development version, you need to have a working Python 3 environment. Run the following command to install the development version:

pip install git https://github.com/rbreu/beeref.git

Then run beeref or beeref filename.bee.

If there are issues starting the application, run it with the environment variable QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS set to 1, for example from a Linux shell:

QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1 beeref

This should tell you whether you need to install any additional libraries.

• Move, scale, rotate and flip images
• Mass-scale images to the same width, height or size
• Mass-arrange images vertically, horizontally or for optimal usage of space
• Add text notes
• Enable always-on-top-mode and disable the title bar to let the BeeRef window unobtrusively float above your art program:

Currently, all images are embedded into the bee file as png files. While png is a lossless format, it may also produce larger file sizes than compressed jpg files, so bee files may become bigger than the imported images on their own. More embedding options are to come later.

The bee file format is a sqlite database inside which the images are stored in an sqlar table—meaning they can be extracted with the sqlite command line program:

sqlite3 myfile.bee -Axv

Options for exporting from inside BeeRef are planned, but the above always works independently of BeeRef.

BeeRef is written in Python and PyQt6. For more info, see CONTRIBUTING.rst.