Most reference tools treat a clip as a rectangle that plays

Drop a video onto almost any moodboard app and you get a thumbnail with a play button on it — sometimes an embed, sometimes a placement, never a thing the app actually knows anything about. It has no rating, it does not show up in a search for "the ones I liked," and it does not get a proxy, so a board made mostly of clips stutters while nine source files try to decode at once. For a still image that is invisible. For anyone collecting motion — animation timing, camera moves, how fabric falls on a walk cycle — it is most of the collection behaving like an afterthought.

The six tools below are the ones that treat a clip as more than a rectangle, in one direction or another: some professional, some closer to a moodboard, none of them pretending video is the same problem as a still. Checked against each vendor's own site on 5 September 2026.

What does not belong on this list, said plainly

PureRef's own handbook documents GIF playback and does not document general video file support. BeeRef and Kuadro are both explicitly image viewers, per their own sites, with no mention of MP4 or MOV anywhere on them. Are.na and Milanote hold links and uploads broadly but neither documents native video file handling the way the six below do. None of the four is a video reference manager, whatever else each one is good at — see the general moodboard round-up for what they are good at instead.

If the job is professional media logging, not a moodboard

Kyno — $159 Standard / $349 Premium, macOS and Windows

Lesspain Software's own product page describes Kyno as media management, screening, logging and organisation software for anyone working with video and stills, reading footage from DSLRs, drones, GoPro, RED, Blackmagic Design, Panasonic P2 and MXF workflows, with a transcoding engine built in. Its buy page lists Standard at $159 and Premium at $349 as annual licences — you keep using the version you bought indefinitely, and renewal at $79 or $169 buys another year of updates rather than continued use.

Pick it if the video you are organising is camera footage from an actual shoot and you need format conversion and professional logging tools, not a moodboard. It is the one entry here built for editorial rather than reference. No canvas, no boards, no tagging aimed at inspiration work.

If the board itself needs to hold the clip

FigJam — free on Starter; from $16/month per seat otherwise

Figma's help article on placing media lists MP4, MOV and WebM alongside PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, WEBP and GIF, available on any team or plan including the free Starter tier. FigJam itself is included with every Figma seat.

Pick it if the clip needs to sit on a shared board next to stills for a live review, and the collection behind it is small enough that a board is still the whole library. Full comparison.

If you want your own footage organised, not collected

Apple Photos — free, already on the Mac

Already installed, syncing through iCloud if you choose to. It handles video from your own camera roll natively — Live Photos, clips, slow motion — inside one chronological library rather than folders you arranged yourself.

Pick it if the "video references" in question are mostly your own footage rather than material collected from elsewhere, and a timeline suits you better than folders. Full comparison.

If you want a full catalogue that happens to include video

Eagle — $34.95 once, Windows and macOS 10.15+

Its pricing page states $34.95 for a licence covering two devices, lifetime free updates, no subscription. Video sits in the same catalogue as stills, with tags, smart folders and a browser extension for clipping straight from a page — though its own documentation says importing copies files into the library rather than indexing them where they sit, which for a folder of large clips is a real amount of disk space.

Pick it if you want video and stills in one maintained catalogue with a real tag and search panel, and a second copy of your footage does not bother you. Full comparison.

refern — $35 once, Windows, macOS and Linux

The most capable application in this category by a wide margin. Its pricing page lists $35 once for three devices, a 30-day trial with no card. Video is handled the same way images are — indexed in place rather than copied — and an on-device tagger and search by meaning both run across it, which no other tool on this page offers for footage specifically.

Pick it if you want the widest search over a video collection of anything here that is not a professional logging tool, and three platforms rather than one Mac is worth it. Full comparison.

Coii Ref — $19 once, macOS 11 or later

Ours, the same length as the rest. Video goes through the same index pass as an image, all the way through:

It carries the same tags, ratings and notes as a still, sits on a canvas beside photographs, and gets a proxy written at canvas resolution, so a board made mostly of clips scrolls instead of stuttering. Files are never copied, moved or renamed; the database, thumbnails and proxies live inside the folder you point it at.

Pick it if video is a real share of your reference library rather than a production job, and you want it searched exactly like the stills sitting next to it. Do not pick it if you need transcoding, format conversion or a shared review board: none of that exists here, and Kyno and FigJam respectively do it properly.

All six, on the rows that decide it

What a proxy actually buys you

"Proxy" is the word doing the most unexplained work on this page, so it is worth being precise about it once. A source clip from a phone or a camera can be large enough that decoding it in real time, while scrolling past eight others doing the same thing, is more than a laptop wants to do at once. A proxy is a smaller, faster-to-decode copy generated once and shown instead, at whatever resolution the canvas actually needs — full resolution is still one click away when you need to check something closely, but the board itself scrolls at the speed of a board of thumbnails rather than the speed of eight video decoders running simultaneously.

Tools that were never built around video skip this step entirely, because they were never asked to show nine clips at once — a single embed in a workshop board plays fine because it is the only one on screen. The moment a board is made mostly of footage rather than one clip among stills, the absence of a proxy step stops being invisible and starts being the reason the board stutters every time you scroll it. That is the concrete, checkable difference between "this tool accepts a video file" and "this tool was built to hold a library of them," and it is the actual dividing line this page draws, more than any row in the table above.

What switching into any of these actually costs

The hour that matters is the first index or the first import, and it is larger for video than for stills because the files are larger. Point Eagle, refern or Coii Ref at a folder of clips and expect the first pass to take noticeably longer than the same folder of photographs would — it is reading more data and, for Coii Ref and refern, writing a proxy for every file rather than just a thumbnail. Start it and do something else; none of the three needs supervision partway through.

What does not survive a move between any two of these, in either direction, is the arrangement — a board composed in one tool does not reappear composed in another, which is the same limitation every canvas application on this site has to concede. What does survive is the footage itself, since none of Eagle, refern or Coii Ref takes a copy that cannot be pointed elsewhere afterwards except Eagle, which does copy on import by its own design. Moving away from Eagle later means the second copy it made is the one you clean up, not the originals, which were never touched.

Why this list is short

Six entries rather than the eight or nine a broader moodboard round-up would carry, because most of the category simply has not built for video. A tool whose own site does not mention MP4 or MOV is not a candidate here, whatever else it is good at, and four genuinely useful reference apps — PureRef, BeeRef, Kuadro and Are.na — are absent from this specific page for exactly that reason. That is the whole point of writing it separately rather than folding a "video, sort of" column into the general round-up.

The camera-format question, answered once

Kyno's whole reason for existing is a list most of the other five never touch: footage straight off a DSLR, a drone, a GoPro, a RED or a Blackmagic camera, often in a format an editing application would rather not open directly. Eagle, refern and Coii Ref all work from finished files — MOV, MP4 and the formats QuickTime already understands — and none of the three transcodes anything or reads a camera's raw recording format. If the video in question came off a production camera rather than a phone or a downloaded clip, that distinction decides the question before price or search even come into it, and Kyno is the only name on this page built for that specific step.

The audio question nobody asks and should

Worth one line, since it is the detail that trips people up on the trial rather than before it. None of the six tools on this page is built around sound the way it is built around picture — a reference clip with dialogue, music or an interview underneath the image is treated as a video with an audio track attached, playable, but not searchable by anything in the audio itself. If what you are actually cataloguing is closer to an audio archive with pictures alongside it, none of the six above is the right tool, and that is a different search than this page.

What actually decides it

If the video is footage from a shoot — dailies, camera rolls that need converting to an editing format — that is Kyno's job, and none of the others here attempt it.

If the video needs to be reviewed by other people on a shared board, FigJam takes it natively on any plan, including free.

If the video is your own life rather than collected reference, Apple Photos is already doing that job.

If the video is part of a reference library you search alongside stills, Eagle, refern or Coii Ref, in ascending order of price and roughly matching order of what each adds beyond search — a browser extension and colour search for Eagle, an on-device tagger and meaning search for refern, nothing beyond the query line and a canvas for Coii Ref.

The trial runs thirty days with every feature, no card and no account — long enough to point it at a folder of real clips and stills together and see whether one query line across both is worth more than keeping two separate habits. For the broader category this page sits inside, the moodboard round-up covers the tools built mainly for stills, and the Eagle and refern round-ups go deeper on either catalogue specifically.