A portfolio review that fits in one file
A portfolio review starts as a mess of tabs. Someone sends their work and it arrives as a Behance link here, a PDF there, three video files in a shared drive, a personal site that opens two more tabs of its own. To give useful feedback I either make the person sign up for some shared document, or I take screenshots and mail them back with numbers in the subject line. By the third round nobody can tell which comment goes with which image. Folium is the tool I built so that stops happening.
The review now runs on one board. I duplicate the Portfolio Review template, one copy per person, and drag their images and videos straight onto an infinite canvas. Everything sits in front of me at once instead of behind twelve tabs. I zoom in on a frame, drop a numbered comment pin next to it, and keep going. The pins carry the numbers, so “point 4” means the same thing to both of us later.
When the pass is done I hit Export and share the whole board as a single HTML file. Images are inlined, the comment pins stay put, any nested sub-boards are still navigable, and print-to-PDF is built in if they want it flat. I send that one file over chat. No account for them to make, no link that expires, nothing they have to be granted access to. They double-click it and see exactly the board I saw.
When the file wakes up
The part I like most is what happens when they’re online. I start a live session, which hands me a code. They open the same exported HTML wherever they are, click “Join live session,” type the code, and their comments and image pins land on my board in real time. So the file I sent as a frozen snapshot is also a live channel into my board, depending only on whether we’re both awake. I didn’t want two share formats, one for “here’s a copy” and one for “let’s talk.” One file does both.
The session runs over an encrypted peer-to-peer connection with no accounts, and it is comment-only, so the reviewee can annotate my board but not move my furniture. I looked at doing this with files or clipboard round-trips first and threw it out. Asking someone to export a file every time they want to say “this crop is tight” is more friction than the feedback is worth.
None of this touches a server. The board lives in my browser’s IndexedDB. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, there is no backend to breach or bill me. The peer-to-peer session is the one time anything leaves my machine, and only while I have chosen to keep it open, straight to the person I handed the code. If I want the same workspace on another machine I point the sync at a folder I already keep in OneDrive or Dropbox, last save wins; unlinked, the local copy is the whole thing.
Folium is Latin for a leaf, a single sheet of paper, which is roughly what an exported board is once it is a file in your hand. It sits with Tessera, Perpetūra and Ariadne on the shelf of things I built because renting the workflow annoyed me more than writing it did.