Bowrd started as a personal frustration — and a personal archive.
Pinterest is convenient but it owns your data, your collections, your taste. Accounts get suspended without warning. Boards disappear. Images vanish. And the feed is increasingly polluted with ads and algorithmic noise.
We wanted something simpler: a place to save images, organise them, and share them — without handing control to a commercial platform.
The name is a blend of bowerbird and board. The bowerbird is a remarkable creature: the male spends his life collecting objects — shells, feathers, bottle caps, scraps of blue plastic — and arranging them into an elaborate structure called a bower, purely to seduce a mate. He is, in essence, the world's most dedicated curator.
That felt right. Bowrd is for people who collect obsessively, arrange carefully, and share because beauty is worth sharing.
Bowrd is a visual bookmarking tool. You save images from any website into boards, browse them in a masonry gallery, and share your collections publicly if you want to. That's it. No algorithm. No ads. No dark patterns.
One thing Pinterest still can't do: a single pin with multiple images. On Bowrd, every pin supports a carousel — attach several images to one entry to document a full project, a look from multiple angles, or a photo series in a single card. Visitors swipe through them inline, in the gallery, without leaving the page.
It also connects to the Fediverse — the open, decentralised social network behind Mastodon and Pixelfed — so your collections can be discovered beyond Bowrd itself.
Bowrd is published under the AGPL-3.0 licence. The source code is available on Codeberg. You can read it, run it, modify it, self-host it. If you improve it, those improvements stay open.
We believe the tools you use to curate your digital life should be transparent, auditable and yours.
Bowrd is built and maintained by Mu, a small independent studio based in France. We build tools for the open web — things we'd want to use ourselves.
Questions, feedback, or just want to say hi? Reach us at contact@bowrd.org or on Mastodon at @atlza@mamot.fr.
Free to get started. Your data, your boards.
Bowrd