Apple Photos is a very good application for the photographs of your life, and it is free, and it is already open. Nothing on this page argues otherwise. What it argues is that a reference collection is a different kind of pile from a photo library, and that trying to keep both in one timeline is where the friction comes from.
The distinction is easy to feel and hard to state. Your photo library is chronological, personal, and mostly things you made — it wants to be sorted by when and who and where, and it wants to be on your phone. A reference library is none of those. It is things other people made that you decided to keep, it has no meaningful chronology, and its whole value is being able to ask it a question years later: what have I got that is a low-angle interior with hard light. Photos answers "when was I in Lisbon" beautifully. It was never built to answer the other one.
If you have been filing reference into Photos and it has started to grate, the reason is usually structural rather than a setting you have missed. This page is about which structure suits which pile.
The table
| Coii Ref | Apple Photos | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once, 3 Macs | Free, already installed |
| Platforms | macOS 11+ | macOS, iOS, iPadOS and the web |
| Sync across devices | None | iCloud Photos |
| Sharing | None | Shared Albums and iCloud Shared Photo Library |
| Editing | None | Yes |
| Where originals sit | Your folders, untouched | In a library, or referenced with caveats |
| Browsing the store in Finder | It is just folders | Apple advises against it |
| Search | One query line: type, ext, tag, rating, notes, EXIF, size | Its own search, built around photographs |
| Infinite canvas | Yes, saved as a plain file | — |
| Ratings on an image | Yes | Favourites |
| Video treated like a still | Same index, same tags, same board | Kept, but a photo library's kind of video |
| Account | None | An Apple Account for the sync features |
Where Photos wins
It is free, it is installed, and it will be there in ten years. That is the strongest argument any competitor in this category has, and it belongs at the top rather than buried. A tool that ships with the operating system does not have a business model that can change.
It syncs, and we do not — at all. The library overview in Apple's own guide is explicit that the System Photo Library is the only one that shares and updates photos with other devices using iCloud Photos, Shared Albums and iCloud Shared Photo Library. Coii Ref has no cloud, no account and no phone app. A picture you find on your phone reaches a Coii Ref workspace the way it always did: by ending up in a folder later.
It edits. Crop, adjust, retouch, and hand a picture to an extension. Coii Ref does not edit at all; it reads your files and never rewrites them, which is a deliberate limitation and still a limitation.
Its search understands photographs. Photos knows about people, places and dates because those are the axes a personal library actually has. If your reference collection is largely your own shots — a photographer's own archive, say — that machinery is doing real work for you that a folder index cannot.
It is on your phone, which is where half of collecting happens now. A screenshot taken on a train is in the library before you get home, on every device, with nothing to remember. Coii Ref has no phone application and no way to receive one; anything you capture away from the Mac has to reach a folder eventually, by whatever route you already use for files.
It handles your life, not just your work. Nobody should run two libraries for the sake of tidiness. If everything you keep fits comfortably in Photos, the correct number of additional applications is zero.
Where Coii Ref wins
The files stay files
This is the whole of it, and Apple states the constraint plainly. New photos and videos you add to Photos are stored in the library, which lives in your Pictures folder, and Apple's guide says not to manually access or alter the contents of a library in the Finder — to copy, move or transfer files you export them from the library first.
That is a sensible rule for a photo library and a real cost for a reference library, because the way people use reference is by dragging files into other applications, all day. Every drag out of a sealed library is an export.
Coii Ref never copies, moves or renames anything. You point it at the folders you already keep, it reads them where they sit — dimensions, EXIF, colour — and writes its index, thumbnails and canvas-resolution proxies inside that same folder.
~/Pictures/Reference- Film stills
- Interiors
- Costume
- Weather
- Hands
- coii-thumbnailswritten by Coii Ref
- coii-proxieswritten by Coii Ref
- coii.dbwritten by Coii Ref
Whatever backs that folder up has backed up the library. Copy it to another drive and the workspace goes with it. Open it on a second Mac and there is no export step, no rebuild and no account.
Referenced files, and why they are not quite the answer
Photos can be told to leave files alone: deselect "Copy items to the Photos library" and they become referenced files. It is a genuine option and worth knowing about before you buy anything.
Apple is candid about what it costs. Referenced files are not stored in iCloud and are not available to your other devices. They are not backed up along with the photo library — you back them up yourself. And if you disconnect the device they are on, or move or rename them in the Finder, Photos cannot locate them.
That last one is the difference in one line. A reference library is a thing you reorganise: you rename a folder in March because the old name stopped making sense, you move a batch onto the big drive, you tidy. Coii Ref is built for exactly that — its watcher turns filesystem events into the smallest re-scan that makes the index true again, so a rename stays a rename rather than becoming a new file with a lost rating, a moved folder is followed, and a drive that comes back after a month is reconciled rather than rediscovered. It keeps running after the trial ends, on purpose.
One query line, aimed at the things a reference has
Photos search is built around the axes of a personal library. A reference library has different ones, and Coii Ref puts them all on a single line:
The keys are type ext tag rating is has no in width height added modified. AND
across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses. A word the parser does not
recognise becomes free text rather than an error, so the grid keeps returning
rows while you are still typing. Saved views store the text of a search and
re-parse it on open, which is why renaming a tag does not break a view — there
is no membership list to repair.
A canvas, and it is a file
Photos has albums. It does not have a surface you compose on, and composing is most of what reference is for: nineteen images from four folders, at the sizes and in the groupings the idea needs, kept and returned to.
A Coii Ref canvas is Something.coii-canvas — pretty-printed JSON, in whichever
of your own folders you saved it to. It diffs in version control, it syncs
through whatever you already sync with, and you could open it in a text editor
in ten years without asking us for anything. That is the only kind of guarantee
about longevity that a reader can check rather than take on trust, and in a
category where people have watched applications stop shipping, it is worth more
than a promise.
Video is not a second-class citizen
Clips are picked up on the same index pass as stills, carry the same tags,
ratings and notes, sit on a canvas beside the photographs, and are reachable
from the same query line — type:video ext:mov is not a mode you switch into.
Proxies are written at canvas resolution beside your files so a board of footage
scrolls like a board of stills. If a meaningful part of what you collect is
motion — film stills and the shots they came from, animation reference, camera
moves — that behaviour is worth trying against your own material during the
trial rather than taking from a table.
Three things that go wrong when reference lives in a photo library
None of these is a fault in Photos. They are what happens when a pile is asked to be a shape it is not.
The timeline stops meaning anything. A photo library is organised by when. For your own pictures that is the correct and almost magical answer: the day is how you remember. For reference, the date is the day you happened to save it, which correlates with nothing. Scrolling a year of reference is scrolling noise, and every organising affordance the app offers is built on the axis that has gone dead.
Your work and other people's get mixed. Once a folder of downloaded film stills is in the same library as your holiday, every view has to be filtered before it is useful, and the features that make a photo library pleasant — memories, on-this-day, the year view — start surfacing things that were never yours and were never about you. People solve this with albums, then with a second library, and a second library is the point at which the free tool has stopped being free of effort.
Getting a file out is a step. Reference is used by dragging: into a painting application, onto a canvas, into a document. Apple's guidance is to export from a library rather than reach into it in the Finder, which is exactly right for protecting a library and exactly wrong for a pile whose entire purpose is to be grabbed from. The friction is one action, and one action repeated forty times a day is the reason people go looking for something else.
The version of this that costs nothing is worth trying before you buy anything: pull the reference out of Photos into ordinary folders and see whether Finder alone is enough. For a few thousand images it often is, and the honest point at which it stops is roughly when you know you saved something and cannot find it.
Running both, which is the sane answer
Nothing here suggests removing Photos. It is the right tool for your photographs, it syncs your phone, and Coii Ref cannot do either.
What works is a clean split: your own pictures live in Photos, and the things you collected — film stills, other people's work, texture scans, screenshots, downloaded clips — live in ordinary folders that Coii Ref indexes. The two never touch, because Coii Ref does not import from Photos and does not want to. If some of your own shots belong in the reference pile, export those into the folder tree and let them be reference; a copy is the honest way to be in two libraries at once.
The scale where this pays off is not small. Neither application is worth rearranging your life for at four hundred images. The case that shaped Coii Ref is forty thousand across several drives, one of which is not plugged in today, in folders somebody keeps reorganising — and a photo library is not the shape that survives that.
What neither of them does
Neither is a collaboration tool in the sense a studio means: there is no comment thread on an image, no live board a client opens, no shared workspace two people edit at once. Photos does have Shared Albums, which is a real answer to a real need and more than Coii Ref offers, but it is sharing pictures rather than working together on an arrangement of them.
Neither is a backup, either. Photos keeps a library that you still have to back up, and Apple's own guidance warns against putting a Time Machine backup on the same external drive as a library stored there. Coii Ref writes its workspace inside the folder you nominated and is perfectly happy pointed at a drive with no second copy anywhere in the world. Whatever you already use to back up your work is still the thing doing that job.
And neither is a tool for deciding what to keep. That remains the hardest part of a reference habit and no application has solved it: the discipline of throwing out the eight nearly-identical saves is yours, and both of these will faithfully store all eight for a decade if you let them.
What switching costs
There is no Photos importer. Coii Ref reads a refern library and nothing else, so this is a manual move and it is worth being clear about the order.
Select what you actually want out of Photos and export the originals into a folder tree you arrange yourself. Do not export the whole library on principle — most of a photo library is not reference, and a reference library full of things that are not reference is the problem you were trying to solve. Then point Coii Ref at the top of that tree and let the first index run; it is a pass you start and walk away from. Ratings and keywords do not carry across, so re-apply them as you use the library rather than in one sitting.
Nothing about this is destructive. Your Photos library is untouched by everything above, and Coii Ref does not move, copy or rename the files you point it at, so running both while you decide costs you nothing but disk space for thumbnails.
Who should use which
Stay with Photos if free and already-installed is decisive; if you need what you keep on your phone; if you edit in it; if most of the pile is your own pictures; or if you have never once failed to find something in it.
Buy Coii Ref if your reference collection has outgrown a timeline; if you want files that stay ordinary files you can drag anywhere; if you want ratings, tags, notes and dimensions searchable from one line; if you want boards that are plain text files you can back up like anything else; and if $19 once for three Macs is a fair price for a second, narrower library that only does this.
More reading: Adobe Bridge is the other free option that browses folders in place; Eagle is the opposite bet, where the app owns the files; refern is the comparison where we concede the most; PureRef is the one to read if you only want a board; and Finder tags covers the free approach you already have. Or take thirty days — every feature, no card, no account.