The "Premium" Update

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.

Until next time!

Kyle