The Ref Board canvas, as a desktop application. This is BeeRef 0.3.3, the open-source counterpart to PureRef, mirrored here byte-for-byte from the author's own release so nobody has to fight GitHub over a 120 MB download. Nothing here is rebuilt or repackaged: these are the upstream files, unmodified.
The web Ref Board is the easy way in — it opens in a tab, and boards save on the family cluster. But a browser can only display the image formats the browser itself understands. PSD, EXR, HEIC and camera RAW files (CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, DNG, RAF, ORF) are not among them: the web canvas shows nothing, or a broken thumbnail, for exactly the files an artist is most likely to be collecting.
BeeRef is a native application, so it reads those formats and lays them out on the same kind of infinite board — great for a pile of references, a moodboard, or an over-paint reference sheet you then export as a single image. Use the desktop build for heavy source formats and local work; use the web Ref Board when you want the board on the family cluster and available from any device.
A single self-contained installer — no Python, no dependencies, no admin rights in the usual case.
BeeRef-0.3.3.exe 42.1 MB download →.exe and follow the wizard; it installs per-user and adds a Start-menu entry.The AppImage is a portable executable: nothing is installed, and it runs on any reasonably current 64-bit distribution with a desktop environment.
BeeRef-0.3.3.appimage 120.7 MB download → beeref.desktop 342 bytes menu entry, optional →chmod +x BeeRef-0.3.3.appimage./BeeRef-0.3.3.appimagebeeref.desktop file, replace the two
placeholder paths in it with the real location of the AppImage and its icon, and drop it in
~/.local/share/applications/.Three separate builds. Take the newest one your Mac can run: a build made on a given macOS release
does not start on anything older, so an older Mac needs the older download. Unzip, then drag
BeeRef.app into Applications.
Sizes and SHA256 digests for all six files are in the checksum list beside them. On Linux or macOS:
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt in the folder you downloaded to (use
shasum -a 256 on a Mac), or compare by eye. These digests are the mirror's own record of the
downloaded bytes — upstream publishes no checksum file for this release.
BeeRef is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPL-3.0). It is published by rbreu/beeref on GitHub, where the full source and the licence text live; this mirror redistributes the released binaries unchanged, and the GPL-3.0 obligations are met by shipping the licence and the corresponding source at that upstream address. No fee is charged for any of these files.
Unmaintained since May 2024. v0.3.3, published 5 May 2024, is the latest release and no work has happened upstream since — so treat it as finished, working software rather than something that will be patched. There will be no further bug fixes, format support or security updates; what is here is what exists. It remains the best open-source desktop equivalent of PureRef, which is why it is mirrored.