Llama For designers
Designers
Pull reference media in seconds, not screenshots.
You're a designer — brand, product, web, motion, packaging, or some combination of those depending on the week's brief. Reference gathering is half the job: the client sends a Pinterest board, the creative director links to seven Instagram posts, the brief includes "vibes from this TikTok," and the art directors expect everything pulled into Figma or Frame.io by Wednesday's review. The current workflow is right-click → save as → rename → drag into the project folder, twenty times in a row, except half of Instagram won't let you right-click anymore and half the videos play inline without a download path at all.
Llama Monkey ships LiftMonkey — a reference-media capture tool that turns "paste this URL" into "the photo/video is in my Google Drive folder, named, organized, and ready to drop into the project." It works against Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Pinterest, and a growing list of platforms where the content lives behind interaction barriers that make naive download tools choke.
What it isn't, and the "when this isn't your tool" section, is at the bottom — because the wrong fit for a designer is treating LiftMonkey as a Pinterest replacement. It is not. It is the layer that sits between "I found a reference" and "the reference is in my project folder."
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LiftMonkey
Read the LiftMonkey page →Paste a URL. Get your media. Done.
LiftMonkey exists because the designer workflow is one of the few places left where "right-click → save as" remains a load- bearing operation, and the platforms that host reference media have spent the last five years removing exactly that path. You paste a URL (Instagram post, TikTok video, YouTube short, Pinterest pin, Twitter/X post), pick the destination folder, and the media lands there — original quality where the platform allows it, with a sensible filename and the source URL embedded as metadata so you can find your way back. Authentication shares a single LMID account with the rest of the Llama Monkey lineup, so the Google Drive (or OneDrive, or Dropbox) OAuth you may have already completed for SnapMonkey carries over. The product is private beta today; the waitlist is the door in.
How designers actually use LiftMonkey in a project
The composite workflow:
Kickoff. Client shares a moodboard — Pinterest board, a Figma file full of pasted screenshots, an email with seven Instagram permalinks. You paste each link into LiftMonkey with a "Project / Client X / Inbound References" destination folder selected once for the session. The photos and videos land there in original quality, named with the post handle and timestamp, source URL embedded as metadata.
Working files. Figma's "place image" or Frame.io's upload pull straight from the destination Drive folder. No "downloads" purgatory, no second-guessing which of the seventeen "IMG_2347.jpg" files is the one the client loved.
Handoff. When the creative director asks "where did this reference come from," the source URL is one right-click away from the file itself. When the brief lands a round of feedback that says "more like that one Instagram post," you don't have to find the post again — it's already in the project folder.
Archive. Six months later when a similar project comes through, the references are still in the original Drive folder, still named, still linkable back to source. The reference library compounds across projects instead of evaporating with the contents of your Downloads folder.
When LiftMonkey isn't the right fit for designers
You need it in production today. LiftMonkey is private beta. There's a waitlist. If a brief is due this week, browser extensions, the platforms' native save features (when available), and yt-dlp cover overlapping ground today.
You're collecting references from a platform we don't handle yet. The supported-source list grows but it's not universal — niche or new platforms may not be in scope the first time you try. The waitlist intake form is where to flag the platform; we use that signal to prioritize.
You want a Pinterest replacement. LiftMonkey does not host or display media; it captures media into your own storage. The "browse and discover" surface is whatever you already use (Pinterest, Are.na, Cosmos, Eagle); the "get it into my project" step is what we automate.
You're scraping copyright-sensitive media at scale. LiftMonkey is built for designer-volume reference gathering — tens or low hundreds of items per project. If your use case is bulk-pulling thousands of assets from a platform you don't have rights to, this isn't the product, and we'd ask you to find another.
You're already on a creative-asset platform with capture built in. If Frame.io, Air, or Eagle already cover the capture path for the sources you use, adding LiftMonkey is friction. We're the tool for the designer whose capture story today is "right-click → save as ×20."
Last updated: 2026-05-19