Color Picker

The color picker is a focused colour chooser with a large preview and a running row of the colors you have used recently, remembered in the browser between visits.

What is Color Picker?

The color picker is a deliberately small tool: choose a colour, see it, and get back to it. The left panel holds the chooser along with a large block filled with the current value, so you can judge the colour at a useful size rather than in a tiny input. The right panel is a grid called Recent, which fills with the colours you have settled on. It is the plainest of the picking tools, and most of its value sits in that Recent row rather than in the chooser itself, which is the part every colour picker has.

The history behaviour is worth describing precisely, because it is the one feature here that is not obvious:

• Every colour you select is moved to the front of the list, and a value already in the list is repositioned rather than duplicated, so nothing appears twice.
• The list is capped at twelve entries, and the oldest falls off the end as new ones arrive.
• Clicking any swatch in the row loads it back into the chooser, which turns the row into a set of shortcuts rather than just a record.

That record persists between visits. The list is written to the browser's own local storage under a fixed key, and it is read back when the page loads. One small ordering detail protects the stored data: the component reads the saved list once on mount and only begins saving after that read has landed, so the initial default colour never overwrites history that was about to be restored. It is the kind of detail that is invisible when it is right and infuriating when it is wrong.

The practical case for the tool is iteration. When you are sampling and adjusting, the colour you want is very often the one you had thirty seconds ago, before you wandered two steps away from it. Having the last dozen candidates one click away removes a great deal of going backwards. It is equally useful when a colleague sends a value to try: set it, judge it, and it stays available in the row while you compare it against what came before.

There are limits, and they follow from how the storage works:

• The history lives in one browser on one device, so it does not follow you to another machine or another browser, and clearing site data removes it.
• There is no way to pin a colour permanently, because a twelve-item history is a working memory rather than a favourites list.
• This picker cannot sample from anything: it has no eyedropper, no screen sampling and no image input, since those need their own tools.

Keep it as a hex color picker with a short memory and it does its job well. Reach for the image colour picker when the value you want already exists in a picture, and the interactive wheel when you would rather explore harmonies than set one value. When what you need is simply to pick a color online, look at it large, and keep it close at hand, this is the one to open. It is a color picker with recent colors and nothing else, and that narrow promise is precisely why it stays out of the way.

How to use Color Picker

1. Set a colour with the chooser; the large block fills with the current value at a size you can judge.
2. Watch the Recent grid: each colour you settle on moves to the front, and the twelfth-oldest falls off the end.
3. Click any swatch in the row to load that colour back into the chooser.
4. Copy the hex value from the field when you are ready to use it.

When to use Color Picker vs related tools

Use this picker when you are choosing and comparing individual colors and want the last few close to hand. Use the image color picker to sample from a picture, or the interactive wheel to explore relationships. Use the image color picker when the value already exists in a picture, the screen color picker when it is on screen rather than in a file, and the favorites picker when the set should be curated rather than merely recent.

Privacy & Security

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.

Frequently asked questions about Color Picker