1. What is Eagle?

Eagle is a library - not just for images, but also videos, vectors, 3D objects, assets, HDRIs, documents, inspiration, and all else. It is my everyday driver to store inspiring images, to grab and look for textures and references when I’m working, and even to save some tips and tricks about programs I use, in the form of screen recordings or even c4d files. If you want to dive in right away, here's a link to their site:

Eagle - Organize all your reference images in one place

Unify your creative inspiration in one place. Store anything - inspiring images, design mockups, illustrations, screenshots and more.

en.eagle.cool

a. How does it work?

Eagle will create a library folder in the location of your choosing. Inside this library folder, it will store all the images, videos and files you throw at it. When you open the app, you will see a sidebar to the left where you can create folders, subfolders, smart folders, quick access folders and some categories.

Every file can have its own set of tags and category which will help you organize, find, and assign to different smart folders.

This information is stored in .json files next to the actual files. The great thing about this is that you can synchronize your entire Eagle library through say, Dropbox, and have it available in multiple devices seamlessly with all the tags, folders and categories synchronized with it.

When I work on-site, I always bring my library in a USB drive and it makes a world of difference.

Once your files are inside the library, you can browse through the thumbnails, and filter through a variety of ways.

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The files that you put in the Eagle library are copied to it. I hear a lot of mixed opinions about this, but personally I find this to have more pro’s than con’s. I virtually never need access to my textures through the Windows Explorer, and if I do need a texture I can just drag it out of Eagle and onto whichever folder I need it in. I also found this list on their site which highlights some of the great advantages of this system:

Why does Eagle use a library instead of an actual folder to store data?

It's undeniable that saving files under traditional folders grants the most convenience and flexibility, however, saving files this way may also have limitations. For the following considerations, Eagle uses the "Library" structure to save software data. Reduce hard disk reading and writing frequencies.

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Furthermore, the app will automatically detect when you’ve added an image twice, and will prompt you with a warning. This is IDEAL if you’re dealing with thousands of textures and don’t want to keep track of which ones you have, or if you’re storing textures that you’re using in multiple projects:

b. What can it do?

On its most simple terms, think of it as a super-powered finder/explorer for your images and media. It is incredibly snappy and you can browse through hundreds and thousands of images without breaking a sweat. Preview, check metadata, copy, duplicate, delete and manage an entire library. Where Eagle shines its brightest is in the filtering and categorising of images:

When it comes to previewing media, it has very good compatibility with most types of files, and some surprising ones.

Tags are super important! Assigning tags to your files will let you browse them by using specific keywords, or automatically appear in dedicated smart folders. For people like me who aren’t very consistent with applying tags, Eagle does a good job assigning some automatic tags to files based on metadata too, and you can create "Quick Actions" to assign multiple tags to many files at the same time.

Each file has its own data, rating, tags, description and some extra info. It will even display an approximate color palette from the image or video. If you’ve saved it using the Eagle extension for your browser, it will also save the URL where you got it from, so you can always go back and reference where you got that image. Like I just did! 😅 Thank you to Agata Karelus for these amazing characters made with affinity. Check her project here.

c. How can I customize it?

There are plenty of options for customizing Eagle. From appearance, to theme, to how much info you want to display for each item in the thumbnail view. Here are three screenshots of Eagle:

My preferred view is no info & justified with black background. Then I toggle the inspector and information bar using a keyboard shortcut.

2. How I use Eagle as a 3D artist.

a. For inspiration

As I mentioned before, I use Eagle on a daily basis. Starting with the extension for browsers, I can easily click and drag any image while I am browsing Instagram, Behance, or whichever website, and the Eagle prompt will show up, asking me if I want to drop the image into any particular folder. Like we saw earlier, this will save the URL and some basic tags already to easily categorize the image.

Any other image that I get I can just place manually in one of the folders by clicking and dragging it inside the app.

I like to organize my inspiration folders by medium. Sometimes it’s very nice to look at other things people have made in 3D, but it’s also refreshing and a great exercise to just look at other mediums like photography, film, and 2D illustration to find new sources for inspiration and ideas. More often than not, these are just folders for me to go through and remember how pretty things can be, so that I can look back at my work and cry take things up a notch.

b. While working

When I’m working, Eagle is usually open on my second monitor. Whether it is to put up references for the frames I’m working on, to review renders I’ve already made, or to actively browse textures and materials for my ongoing render. For instance, I keep some materials (those with more than 1 texture channel) in the same subfolder. This way I can keep the textures tidy, and also reference them through the thumbnails before looking on each folder. This is especially the case for some of the Quixel materials I’ve gathered over time.

Other times I just want to look at different types of the same material. You can choose which particular image you want to have as the “subfolder thumbnail” so that you’ll always know which material you’re browsing at on a first look.

Then all the different channels are inside the subfolder, so you can just grab them and drag them into your node manager.

When it comes to other textures like surface imperfections, displacements, dust, dirt, etc... Having a visual aid when choosing between 200 seemingly identical textures just gives you that extra level of information that can really help nail your first pick vs. picking always the ‘same, safe one’, double clicking each and every one, or just “I’m feeling Lucky”-ing it.

c. For cataloguing

Recently, I’ve started using Eagle not just for before and during my process, but also for afterwards. Cataloguing and rating my renders helps me a great deal later when I want to use them for my website, to showcase, or just to share with people / post later. Before Eagle, I kept all my renders inside folders, inside projects. Now, I just make a subfolder per project that consists only of the renders and videos that I want to keep. As a plus, these are copied over to the Eagle Library, so I don’t need to modify the main folder project.

3. Other tips & tricks in Eagle

Here are some other cool things that Eagle allows you to do, in no particular order:

• Hovering over a video will display a bar at the bottom. Dragging your mouse left or right will scrub through the video for a quick glance.

• There are some handy tools for editing images, like cropping, flipping horizontal, rotation, 1:1 scale and fit to window.

• Eagle also allows you to drop down comments on specific parts of an image, for note-taking, feedback or simply as a reminder. These will be saved as comments next to the image. When looking at videos, these will also mark the timestamp at which the note was written.

• On top of the extension, Eagle also has its own screen capture utility that you can bring up with a shortcut. It will let you either capture a region of your choosing, or an entire window. You can also then write, draw and scribble on it with some extra tools. Once you’re done, you can choose to copy it to clipboard, save it to a folder, or directly save it in a folder inside Eagle.

• Amazing for visualizing fonts

• There is a Reverse Image Search button right inside the app. You just right click and choose your engine. Wild, no?

• Eagle has a Greyscale mode you can enable to turn everything B&W. Useful if you’re looking for contrast or composition in images and want to avoid colorful distractions

• There are pretty cool options to export files from inside Eagle, in case you need a specific file type or size. Your original always lives inside the app.

• You can ‘Copy Link’ for specific files, which means, if you’re sharing an Eagle library amongst a team, studio or group of friends, you can just send each other what is essentially a clickable shortcut that will open the Eagle window and take you directly to the file.

• You can also have multiple libraries! And switch between them effortlessly.

• You can merge two or more images into one simply with the click of a button.

There are several more tips and tricks, but I think I’ve gone on for way too long now, so I’ll leave the last few secrets for you to explore, if you’re interested. If you’ve made it all the way here, I assume you’re at least intrigued.

4. How to get Eagle

Eagle App is $29.95 for a license on two different devices and is available for Windows and Mac. There is a 30-day trial version available so I recommend getting that first and having a look around. You can download it from their cool site here:

Eagle - Organize all your reference images in one place

Unify your creative inspiration in one place. Store anything - inspiring images, design mockups, illustrations, screenshots and more.

en.eagle.cool

Thank you for reading this and I hope you find this as useful as I do! Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or are still on the fence about it.