You can now add and edit captions for anything on mood!
Thanks for everyone that sent in feedback asking for this. It was, like rearranging, something I was reticent to add into mood, but enough people asked for it that I did it anyways!
It's also the first new premium-only feature I've added since launching the premium update. Anyone that has already upgraded to premium has immediate access to this feature. Free users can upgrade their boards to get access to this (and everything else!) immediately!
Captions Guide
You can add a caption by clicking the yellow pencil icon that appears on when hovering an image in the gallery.
Clicking this will open the caption editor relative to the image you're editing. In the caption editor, you can add text into the caption field, then save it by clicking the green checkmark, or cancel by clicking the "X" (or pressing Escape).
Additionally, by clicking the blue "return" icon or using Cmd/Ctrl+Enter while entering text, you can save the caption you're editing and go to the "next" image in the gallery and start editing its caption. This makes it easy to edit captions for everything in your gallery without needing to constantly use the mouse to click save, edit, etc.
You can also edit captions in the list view by clicking "Click to edit caption...". The same Cmd/Ctrl+Enter shortcut works here as well, so you can quickly edit all the captions in a line.
Some Reflections
My original thinking around mood was that it was meant to be a more ephemeral space for sharing and collaborating on image galleries with people. The reticence I mentioned above stemmed mostly from that use case — "why spend time to caption images on a board you're going to toss away".
However, what I've learned from you all is that the sites you build with mood are (often) much longer lived. They act as a place you use where you collect things over time. You treat mood more like a Pinterest or Tumblr alternative, and less like a sketch on the back of a napkin.
It's a use case I didn't totally anticipate but am happy to help people out in pursuing. Mood still retains its core use and feature set for that "ephemeral" case, but with things like customization, rearranging, and now captions, I'm happy to build out more features in mood that make it feel more like a space you can curate and share, not just one to be forgotten.
If you have any other features or thoughts, feel free to reach out to me via the contact form on the site. Thanks to everyone who's been using mood! And especially to premium users, you help keep the site afloat!
Upcoming
I wasn't fully expecting to do captions so soon, but something came up that sort of forced my hand. The next feature I wanted to implement was the ability to seed a new board with images (so you don't have to find your own to start). My plan with this was to use Unsplash, but Unsplash has some strict requirements around API use, and as such meant I needed a way to show text on images. So I decided to build and push captions as a step along that path, but I'm hoping to have the "seeded gallery" feature live in the next few weeks.
And then there is still this list of features I expect to come up soon as well!
(Premium) Different default sorting methods (reverse chronological, random)
It's here: You can finally rearrange images in mood!
This feature is available on all boards, premium or not.
It's simple: click and drag images around on Desktop (no rearranging on mobile yet). As you drag them, you'll see a little indicator about what image that image will replace the position of when dropped. If you linger on the image, the gallery will update to show you a preview of where your image will be in gallery once placed (as well as what your gallery will look like). Drop the image to place it! Easy!
Now, some small caveats. mood's design and layout of images is reactive to screen size. This means your gallery will look different at different screen sizes (unless you buy premium and choose to disable this). This also means that re-arranged images don't "stick" in the exact position you put them in, and will shift around based on the size of the screen.
This means that re-arranging shouldn't be thought of as some very specific exact "placement" of images (or videos — if you have premium) in your gallery, but more of a suggestion about where you'd like an image to roughly be. This fact about mood has been the driving factor of my reticence to implement this, but enough people asked for it that I felt like I had to implement it.
Additionally, please report any bugs you find with this new feature (or any other part of mood)! If you're encountering something weird, it's likely others are seeing it too. You can contact me through the contact form on the site, accessed from the main menu.
Housekeeping
With rearranging out of the way, I'm looking at this list of features next
(Premium) Different default sorting methods (reverse chronological, random)
(Premium) Use images as board backgrounds
(Everyone) Link previews when sharing boards
Got other ideas? Feel free to reach out to me through the contact form on mood! Always happy to hear ideas and suggestions!
Also, wanted to share this nice milestone — thanks to everyone who's used mood and found value in it!
Since pushing the premium update a few months ago, I've been focused on a single goal:
Make mood fast.
With the update that went live today, I think I've come a long way and can safely say that it is indeed now pretty fast.
This breaks down into a couple of things, some technical and some not:
Image Optimization Optimizations
As some people have noticed, mood does compress your images when rendering them for you on your board. These compressions though do not affect the originals, and are just done to make loading faster.
These optimizations were always done with the source image size, so would still push large images to clients with smaller sizes, but that could still be large (like if you uploaded a 5000x6000 image, etc.).
Now however, mood generates different optimized sizes for images you upload, and will serve you the best option for the device you're on. You should generally see speed ups across all devices, but should especially see it on mobile!
As a reminder: When you click download on an image, you will download the source image! Additionally, don't forget you can press "L" to view "List Mode" and quickly see all your images, download individuals, or download all of them as a zip:
Large Boards Are Faster (and fixed)
If you had a board with a lot of images and checked it out after the premium update, you may have seen some strange behavior with images collapsing onto each other on loading. This has been fixed! Additionally, I got smarter about pagnination of images in general so your board should load much much faster.
UI/UX Enhancements
I also cleaned up a few things around the site!
New animated star icon on settings button to highlight new features (goes away after you click it!)
Legal pages added - Terms of Service and Privacy Policy accessible from settings or an empty board
Empty gallery message provides better feedback
Fixed shadow rendering on mobile settings button
Fixed mobile lightbox navigation (no more double taps!)
What's Next?
I'm thinking about tackling image rearranging as the big task, as well as some other smaller features:
Different default sorting methods (reverse chronological, random)
Link previews (for sharing boards)
Use images as board backgrounds
Got other ideas? Feel free to reach out to me through the contact form on mood! Always happy to hear ideas and suggestions!
mood.site turned 1 year old a few weeks ago, and to celebrate I've added in a ton of requested features, bugfixes, and performance improvements. I've also finally launched the option to upgrade a board to Premium to unlock lots of customization options.
Here's a quick rundown of the new features available as part of upgrading:
Video (mp4/webm) support
Single-colum "Feed" Layout
Fixed column count layout
Variable dynamic layouts
Customizable backgrounds
Add a board title
Change the URL Path
Hide/Change the Logo
Private Boards
Free boards get a small boost too and can now enjoy:
List View
Downloading images/full gallery
As I said above, this update adds A LOT. A year of the tool being out in the wild has led to steady, continued growth and I appreciate everyone who's spent time sending in their thoughts and feature requests. I read it all! Given that every user of mood up to this point has effectivelly been a "free" user, I wanted to talk about the plans for free boards going forward first, before diving into all the new stuff.
Free Boards
mood.site has, and will always, exist (as long as I can pay my service fees!) as a tool to serve a very specific, simple goal: an easy way to create and share galleries of images. Given that the tool is growing in use despite me doing basically nothing with it the past year, that core promise seems salient for people and I have no intention to disrupt that.
Before, if you had read my comments on Reddit or some of the other places on this site, I had made mention of free boards "expiring" or being locked after some time. I've decided to not do this. Additionally, I had thought about imposing a general upload limit on free boards and I've decided also to not do this. If it comes to it I MAY impose some global storage limit (like ~3GB or something?), but as of now I am not imposing any limits around this. The fact of the matter is that the large majority of users upload relatively few images to a board so I don't want those people to feel like they have to pre-emptively moderate how much they use the tool.
I also didn't want heavy users of the tool so far to check their board one day, try to add an image, and see that they had to pay.
The only thing changing about free is that I'm moving the ability to upload gifs (did you know you could upload gifs?) to paid. There are so few people that even knew about this that I hope this doesn't come as a major blow. However, as a small panacea, if you are someone that had created a board with gifs prior to this update being sent, reach out to me via the contact form with your board id and edit key in it and I'll give you premium for free.
This is all to say: Free boards are effectively unchanged. They still act the same, work the same, etc. They are even faster now, so they even get their own little boost.
Premium Boards
There is now the option to pay $7 to upgrade a board to "Premium". This gets you everything new as part of this update, and any updates to premium moving forward.
Any new capability I'm adding to mood will likely be limited to only Premium boards, so this is your ticket to get access to all those goodies. If you want to see things I'm thinking about moving forward, check out the Kinopio board here.
Note that this does mean Premium is "a la carte" — it's per-board. My own intuition is that most people that use mood only use it for a few boards here and there, and maybe only 1-2 of those boards they care enough about to upgrade.
However, if you are someone that is making and using a mood a lot and are making a lot of premium boards (like 5-10+) every month , reach out to me via the contact form. I'm considering adding a sort of "elevated" tier to mood ("Professional"?) for users where it doesn't make sense to pay per-board. I'm not sure what this looks like yet, so reach out and let's talk!
Video Support
With that out of the way, let's start talking about the NEW stuff. The first major thing is that mood now supports videos! You can see them in action here: https://mood.site/N3kHLWkJ
Video support is a premium feature, so you'll need to upgrade to be able to upload them. You can upload videos in either webm or mp4 format. There is still a 5MB upload limit for all media, so webm would definitely be the preferred option here as videos can be much smaller.
Videos will autoplay in the gallery, and do not have sound.
GIFs are also supported as an option for premium boards, but webm is usually better as they are smallers and higher quality.
List View/Downloading Images
If you are viewing a board with a valid edit key, you can press L to open "List View"
This view gives you a quick rundown of all the files you have in a given board, as well as the ability to quickly delete them or download them individually. You can also click "Download All" in the top right to download the high-resolution versions of all the media on the board.
The Side Panel
The next major thing first you'll notice is that, when clicking the cow button in the bottom left, the menu has evolved! Given all the new bits that are now possible, the three button menu from had to evolve into something more robust. There's now a side panel menu that lays all this out better for you.
The top two items, "new board" and "how to", function similar to how they used to. Clicking "new board" will open up a new board for you, and "how to" acts as a quick overview of how to work with mood. I think in the future I'd like to write some actual documentation that I can point to, otherwise people will have to read all the release notes to figure stuff out, but for now we've got this panel!
Updates
Speaking of.. clicking the Updates button will take you to a panel where you can enter your email to receive updates to your inbox when I write them (this update you're reading now is one of them!). Below that is a live feed of updates, pulled from this same site. Clicking any of the updates there will take you to the "full" post, aka what you're reading now!
Right now we've only got a single update so it isn't that exciting, but hoping over time it becomes full of good stuff.
Additionally, I've started sketching our ideas for mood moving forward on Kinopio [here](https://kinopio.club/mood-site-bZ4PksIskA3StbYrv9Hag) and linked to it on this page. If you're interested in where my head is at with mood, check out that link both here and on the updates panel! It's open for comment as well, so if you want to add your own thoughts there, go ahead!
Recent Boards
Heading back to the side panel (you can use the new "Back" button!), we can now see the "recent" tab. Clicking this will open up a list of mood.site boards you've visited. It's been a bit of a requested feature from people to have ways to access boards they've created or visited before, so here's a way that locally tracks your visited boards! Note that these are all saved as part of your browser's localstorage, so if you ever delete that you'll also no longer see them in this panel (until you visit again).
Contact Page
I've added in a little contact panel to replace the old Airtable feedback form. Thanks to everyone that sent in feedback from the old form, it's been helpful in crafting this new version of mood! I've added in basically every feature I had mentioned there and tried to price the premium upgrade around the average price people had suggested, so thank you!
You can use this to reach out about anything regarding mood — bugs, ideas, notes, thank yous, etc.! Looking forward to hearing what you all have to say.
Settings
This is the big one. There's a lot to talk about here, so I'll break down the inner bits one by one. It's also a big enough deal that we now have a dedicated button (if viewing a board in edit mode) next to the logo in the bottom left to directly open up this panel!
The major thing to say here is that, if you're on a free board, you can still preview a lot of what's possible in the settings panel, but you won't be able to actually save your settings unless you upgrade to Premium.
Layout Settings
First up is layout! One thing a lot of people asked for was more control in the actual gallery behavior, so this adds in a lot of control in that regard.
The first thing you'll see here is the option to switch between Gallery and Feed view. Gallery is the "standard" mood view that has been around, but Feed view is a new, single-column only view that makes mood look more like something like Tumblr.
Protip! You can press "G" if you're viewing a board with an edit key to switch between Gallery and Feed view! Your settings won't save automatically, so if you do this you will need to still navigate to settings to save.
In Feed mode, you can set the width of the feed in the settings, changing how big or small your posts are on a given screen. It's also worth noting that "Feed" view is the view we switch to on mobile devices by default (image galleries don't look great on mobile).
In Gallery view, there are now a few additional options. By default we have "Maintain Layout" off, which is what allows the images to maintain their size and move around to better tile on the screen based on the allowed space. With this slide off, you can also toggle the general "scale" of images, allowing you to increase or decrease the overall size of images in your gallery.
If you turn "Maintain Layout", resizing the screen window will not actually cause your images to move around. Instead, they will stay in the same location and get smaller in order to keep your gallery layout intact. Additionally, if this setting is on, you can set the effective "Column Count" of your gallery. This is the virtual "backing" column amount behind your gallery, and given that you can resize images to span multiple virtual columns, you should play around with the settings here to get the type of gallery you want!
Title Settings
You can now add a title to your board, that will both display at the top of your board as well as the name of the tab in a web browser. The title settings themselves are self-explanatory — you can set where the title is, the font settings, and the background settings for the element itself. I'll likely add more font options over time as well, so be sure to check back!
Background Settings
You can now change the background of your board! The backgrounds are tiling SVG images, and using the settings here you can adjust how any given background looks. You can zoom the patterns in and out, change their colors, change their opacity, etc. You can also opt to have no background at all by selecting the first pattern option with the red line through it. Be sure to click "Show More Patterns" to see all the options!
As a reminder, you won't be able to actual save these settings for your board so others can see it unless you upgrade to Premium.
Logo Settings
A much requested feature was the ability to hide or change the cow logo, and I'm happy to say that both are now possible! In the logo settings, you can toggle the logo off or upload a custom logo to use in place of the cow.
If you toggle the logo off, you'll still see it in edit mode for easy side-panel access, but in the public view links of your board you'll be able to bring up the side panel by pressing Shift+A.
Access Settings
Finally we have access settings. These are to better control who can view your board and how. By default, all boards created on mood are public — anyone with your board ID will be able to see the images on your board.
However, you can now (if you upgrade) opt to have your board be private and require a view key. View keys can be passed directly in the url to allow a user to view a board, like this: mood.site/myboardid?viewKey=myviewkey.
Alternatively, you can give someone the url with the board ID (mood.site/myboardid) and mood will prompt them to enter the view key for access:
Additionally, you can change the actual extension of your board to something more memorable. Instead of having the extension be random, like mood.site/kjasdkjbasd, you can change it to be something more memorable like mood.site/kitcheninspiration2025.
Whew! That wraps up the overview of all the new stuff! As a reminder, you can also see new things potentially coming down the pipe by looking at the Kinopio board here: https://kinopio.club/mood-site-bZ4PksIskA3StbYrv9Hag
Lastly, I wanted to comment on the MOST requested feature:
Rearranging Images
This has come up time and time again since I first released mood. I was resistant at first to pursue this as I felt it was against the spirit of mood, but as I now am giving you all lots more ways to customize your board, I think it makes sense to pursue adding it.
It's a non-trivial thing to add in, so I'm trying to figure out how to get it in a way that feels "natural". Ideally it's a drag and drop type type experience, and likely limited to desktop only to start.
If and when I add it, it will not be something only reserved for Premium boards. Free and Premium boards will be able to rearrange images.
And with that, I'm going to close out this monster of an update. If you have any feedback on any of the above, feel free to reach out for the contact form on the site! And again, thanks so much to everyone for helping mood get this far. It's been lovely seeing the tool get used and I'm so glad it's serving its intended purpose.
