Description
See a colour you love? Save it. Use it again.
RobArt Colour Collector gives you a personal colour library inside WordPress. Pick colours while working in the admin area or browsing your site’s front end, organise them into named swatches, and copy the HEX code with a click.
No more hunting through old designs, screenshots or notes for that perfect shade. Whether you’re building pages, matching brand colours or refining a site’s design, your favourites stay close at hand in a floating collector dock.
Sample. Organise. Reuse.
Capture colours as you work
- Floating colour picker: Collect colours from WordPress editing screens and, when enabled, your site’s front end while logged in.
- Screen eyedropper: Chrome and Edge support picking pixels from the screen using the browser’s EyeDropper API. Other browsers, including Safari, use the system colour picker instead.
- Keep picking: The eyedropper re-arms after each selection for quick colour gathering. Press Esc or click the tool again to stop.
- Add by HEX: Enter an exact colour value or choose one with the system picker, with a live preview.
- Automatic colour names: Captured colours receive descriptive names from a built-in library; edit names whenever you like.
Build a colour library that’s yours
- Custom swatches: Group colours by client, project, brand, mood or purpose.
- Unlimited swatch groups: Start with a pinned Main swatch and create additional groups as needed. Each group holds up to 60 colours by default.
- Swatch notes and management: Rename, annotate, merge or remove swatches, and move colours between them.
- Floating dock and full library page: Work from the compact on-screen tray or manage colours in the dedicated Swatches admin screen.
- Personal collections: Saved colours belong to your WordPress user account and remain on your own site.
Reuse a colour in one click
Click a saved colour to copy its HEX value. Paste it into a block-editor colour field, a theme or plugin setting, or a CSS rule. You can also edit, print and manage your saved entries from the Swatches screen.
Ideal for
- Website designers keeping brand and project palettes at their fingertips.
- Site owners collecting colours from their existing pages and imagery.
- Content editors who regularly need consistent colours across pages.
- Developers copying HEX values into CSS and design settings.
- Illustrators and other creatives gathering colour inspiration.
What do you get for free?
The complete everyday workflow is free: floating dock, eyedropper or system colour picker, manual HEX entry, automatic names, unlimited swatch groups, notes, swatch management and click-to-copy HEX values.
RobArt Colour Collector Pro adds optional tools for larger or more specialised libraries:
- Image colour scanning: Extract dominant colours from eligible images on your site, or use the dedicated Scan an Image screen to drop, choose or paste an image. Analysis runs in your browser; the image isn’t uploaded by the scanning tool.
- Instant search: Filter saved colours by name or HEX value.
- Manual ordering: Alt-drag to arrange colours and swatches.
- Additional export tools: Pro includes extra swatch export functionality; consult the current Pro documentation for supported formats.
Free functionality does not require Pro or a licence key. The Pro add-on is a separate purchase, offered as a one-time licence with updates throughout version 1.x.
Privacy first
Your swatches and colour values are stored in your WordPress site’s database for your user account. The free plugin makes no external service requests. Pro licence validation, if you separately install and activate the Pro add-on, is explained under External Services below.
External Services
The free plugin makes no external requests and stores saved colour data on your own site’s database.
The separately installed paid RobArt Colour Collector Pro add-on uses the author’s licence server at robart-illustration.eu, which verifies licensing through Lemon Squeezy.
- Information sent: licence key and site URL; no collected colours are sent.
- When: licence activation, deactivation and periodic validation of an active Pro licence.
- Purpose: confirm the licence is valid for the site and enable licensed Pro updates.
- Terms and privacy: https://robart-illustration.eu/ and https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/privacy and https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/terms .
Support
For questions, bug reports and feature requests, use this plugin’s WordPress.org support forum. Documentation and guides: https://robart-illustration.eu/plugins-wordpress-development/ .
Uninstall
Deactivating the plugin preserves saved colours and settings. Deleting the plugin removes its dedicated colour and swatch tables, settings, associated transients and user references as described in the included documentation.
Screenshots
Installation
- Install RobArt Colour Collector from the Plugins screen, or upload the plugin ZIP.
- Activate the plugin.
- Open Colour Collector Dashboard or look for the floating collector dock on your editing screen.
- Open the dock, select the eyedropper and pick a colour, or add a HEX value manually.
- Open Colour Collector Swatches to organise your collection. Administrators can enable front-end access under Settings.
FAQ
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Can I collect colours from both the front end and the admin area?
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Yes. The floating dock is available in WordPress editing screens, and administrators can enable it on the site’s front end. Front-end access is for logged-in users with content-editing permission, not public visitors.
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Can I sample any pixel on my screen?
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Chrome and Edge support the browser EyeDropper API, which can sample pixels on screen, including outside the browser window. Safari, Firefox and browsers without this API use the operating system’s colour picker instead. Actual screen-sampling controls depend on that operating system.
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Can I enter an exact HEX code instead?
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Yes. Add a colour by typing its HEX value, using the system picker or editing an existing saved colour. The preview stays in sync with the value.
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Are my colours visible to other users?
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No. Each editor has a personal colour library associated with their WordPress user account, stored on your site’s database.
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Is there a limit to the number of saved colours?
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You can create as many swatches as you need. Each swatch holds up to 60 colours by default; developers can customise the caps with the
racc_colours_per_swatch_capandracc_swatches_capfilters. -
Does Colour Collector change my theme’s colour palette?
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No. It is a personal swatch library, not a theme-wide palette editor. Copy saved HEX values into whichever design controls you use.
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Can I extract a palette from an image?
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Yes, with the optional Pro add-on. Pro can analyse eligible same-site images from the dock or images you choose, drop or paste into the dedicated Scan an Image screen. The analysis happens locally in your browser; the scanned image is not uploaded by the tool. Cross-origin images may be restricted by browser security.
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What is included in Pro?
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Pro adds image colour scanning, search and filtering, Alt-drag reordering and additional swatch export tools. The everyday sample, organise and copy workflow is fully available in Free.
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Where can I find the plugin settings?
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Open Colour Collector Settings. Editors with the
edit_postscapability can work with their swatches; only administrators can access plugin settings. -
What happens when I uninstall the plugin?
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Deactivation retains your data. Deleting the plugin triggers cleanup of its swatches, colours, settings and related plugin data. Export or record anything you want to keep before uninstalling.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“RobArt Colour Collector” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “RobArt Colour Collector” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
0.5.13
- Fixed (Pro): “Scan image for colours” now finds images inside a post you are editing. The Classic editor and the block editor show the post in a frame of their own, so those images had no Scan pill; only the featured image did.
- New readme: rewritten description and FAQ.
0.5.12
- Security: internal hardening.
0.5.11
- Security: internal hardening.
0.5.10
- Fixed: the floating collector dock could show its “Open Colour Collector” accessibility label as visible text on themes that do not provide the standard screen-reader-text utility. The dock now hides its own labels regardless of the active theme.
0.5.9
- Hardened the built-in documentation renderer: all text is now HTML-escaped before formatting and links are passed through esc_url(), so the bundled help docs cannot introduce unsafe markup. Defensive hardening — the renderer only ever processes the plugin’s own documentation.
- Fixed the plugin logo not appearing on the “Enjoying RobArt Colour Collector?” review reminder panel. Logo resolution is now resilient, so it will not silently disappear if an asset is renamed.
0.5.8
- Fixed a stray colour block appearing in the picker dock when the Iridys plugin was also active — the two plugins no longer interfere
- Confirmed compatible with the current version of WordPress
0.5.7
- Fixed: the floating dock now repositions correctly when you collapse or expand the WordPress admin menu — it previously stayed put and drifted out over the page content.
0.5.6
- New: collected colours are now automatically named from a library of over 31,000 colour names — capture a colour and it arrives already labelled (you can still rename it).
- Fixed: Pro customers can now always reach the licence key field on a fresh install (previously the entry form could be gated behind activation).
- Changed: after activation the plugin now opens on its Dashboard.
0.5.5
- Fixed: when the Text Collector and a media-library folder dock are also on screen, the Colour Collector dock now stacks cleanly above them instead of overlapping.
- Improved: in browsers without a built-in screen eyedropper (such as Safari), a short one-time note explains that your system colour picker will open.
- Tidied: the Settings cards now share consistent rounded corners.
0.5.4
- Hardened: swatch and colour table names are now resolved from a fixed internal list rather than assembled, so a database query can only ever address this plugin’s own two tables.
- Removed: a database check that inspected a table named by a filter — it now only ever looks at this plugin’s own table.
- Hardened: the settings form is cleaned in full the moment it arrives, before any part of the plugin reads it.
- Hardened: every action the plugin answers now re-checks your permission and the request’s origin in place, rather than relying only on a shared check.
0.5.3
- Removed: the swatch and colour ordering helpers, which were unreachable in this plugin — nothing here could ever call them. Manual ordering is provided in full by the separate Pro add-on, and this plugin now carries none of its code.
- Removed: the setup wizard’s Licence step. This plugin has no licence mechanism, so the step had nothing to do; the Pro add-on adds it when installed.
- Removed: the export-format and column preferences, which nothing in this plugin read — CSV and RTF export belong to the Pro add-on, which now stores its own preferences. Plain-text export is unchanged and still free.
- Fixed: the setup wizard header showed a placeholder icon instead of the Colour Collector mark.
0.5.2
- First public release.
- Sample a colour from anywhere on screen with the eyedropper, or add one by hex, and it lands in the floating dock.
- Organise colours into swatches with names, colour tags and notes; drag a colour onto another swatch to move it.
- Click any colour to copy its hex straight to the clipboard, ready for the block editor, a colour field or your CSS.
- Swatches page: one tab per swatch, with copy, edit-in-place, print and delete on every colour, and print, download and delete on the swatch itself.
- Dashboard with live stats and a Getting Started guide; a guided first-run welcome.
- Every colour is private to your own account.
- Pro adds: Scan an Image (pull the dominant colours out of a picture, entirely in your browser — the image is never uploaded or saved), search and filter, Alt-drag reordering, and CSS/CSV/RTF export.