OTLO

Bookmarking images and content from the web is not a new thing. Many apps exist that do exactly this job.

But I’ve found I want to do more with the things I save. I want to dig deeper and try to learn more about my design sensibilities and the creators who make the wonderful things I find.

I’m also increasingly finding I need an antidote to the AI slop, algorithms and general enshittification of the web. A means to find my way back to the wonderful human designers and artists whose work I’ve saved. A way to amplify their visibility.

So over recent weeks, I’ve been building OTLO (On The Look Out). At its core, it is a simple bookmarking app. But because I’ve designed and engineered it myself (with a bit of help from Cursor), I have the ability to take it in whatever direction I want.

It’s not a startup or business idea so much as a locally hosted scrapbook tool in SvelteKit I’m building to reflect my taste and interests back at myself. A way to organise and understand my sensibilities and to improve my craft as a designer and engineer.

And it turns out that designing and building for a user base of one is really refreshing too. I recommend it.

Demo recording

Below is a video walkthrough showing some of the core features (also listed out below) to show how it currently works.

The basics and beyond

For now I can do quite standard things you’d expect of a bookmarking app:

• Bookmark various media: images, videos, websites.
• Explore a random/recent feed of media.
• Create collections to group and organise media.
• Visit the source of media, through attribution/linking.
• Create a profile as a place for collections to live.

But I’ve also built a few slightly less standard things as I’ve realised I want them. Things like the ability to:

• Extract colour palettes from media.
• Automatically collect media from a given URL.
• Keep or reject auto collected media through a curation UI.
• Display media in a desktop screensaver.

The future

These things are all still pretty simple though. What I’m most excited about is the unknown shape it will take in future as I follow my needs and whims. Some ideas I already have and want to act on:

• Automate lookups for artists/designers, to add better attribution and bring creators’ stories and approach alongside their media.
• Use Ollama or similar to access local, open source LLMs to determine what is displayed in an image or video.
• Use that data to build search and discovery mechanisms and more fuzzy ways to categorise media.

Local ftw

There’s a few unexpected things I’ve discovered while running OTLO as a local app solely for my use:

• I can use it to power a beautiful, randomised screensaver with zero effort, because the corpus of media lives on my machine.
• I can access it from anywhere with the simple addition of Tailscale.
• I’ll be able to make use of local, open-source LLMs to power some of the features at no cost.
• I’ve been able to use new, more niche browser features like CSS grid-lanes↗ for layout.

Thanks for looking

If this is of interest to you, I’d be happy to chat about it. I’d also be curious (and really appreciative) to hear any interesting ideas for OTLO from like-minded people.

What do you wish an app like this could do? Guy Moorhouse