Eagle adopts your files. Coii Ref leaves them where they are.

Start with the sentence that decides this for most people, because everything else is detail hanging off it. Eagle's own support article states that it copies files to the library when importing, rather than creating index links to the original files. Coii Ref never copies anything. It reads the folders you already keep, in place, and leaves every file exactly where and as it was.

Neither of those is the right answer in general. They are different bets about whose job it is to own the file, and which one suits you is a question about your existing folders rather than about either app.

Buy Eagle if you want the more capable organiser and you are willing to let it hold the originals. It is $34.95 once for two devices, with free updates and a 30-day trial, and it runs on macOS 10.15 or later and Windows 10 or later. Its published feature list is longer than ours in almost every direction: colour search, search by image, smart folders that fill themselves by name, tag, colour or format, duplicate finding, automatic tagging from folders, annotation on the image, batch processing, a plugin centre, browser extensions, password protection, and the claim that any file format can be imported and organised.

Buy Coii Ref if your references already live in folders you built, on drives you chose, and you want them searched where they sit for $19 once on up to three Macs. It is images and video only, macOS only, and it has none of the features in the paragraph above. What it has instead is that your directory tree after installing it looks the same as your directory tree before.

The table

The bold cells are the wins, and most of them are Eagle's. You will find that out on their site anyway, and finding it out there instead of here would be a reason to distrust the rest of this page.

Where Eagle wins

It collects, and we only organise. Eagle's browser extension is built for the way references actually arrive: drag one out of a page, batch-save everything on a page in a click, take a screenshot into the library. Coii Ref has no browser extension and no opinion about how a file got onto your disk. If most of your collecting happens in a browser tab, that is friction you will feel every day, not a footnote in a table.

It searches in ways ours cannot. Colour search finds assets in the same palette. Search by image works back towards where a picture came from. Their keyword search sits over a library that their automatic tagging has already had a pass at, filling in tags from the folder an asset landed in. Coii Ref's search is literal: it matches what is already true of a file — its type, extension, dimensions, rating, tags, notes, EXIF — and if nobody has ever described an image, Coii Ref will not describe it for you.

Any file format. Eagle says any file format can be imported and organised. Coii Ref is images and video, full stop. A library that also holds fonts, PDFs, project files, audio and the odd zip is a library Eagle can hold and we cannot, and that is not a gap we are working towards — it is a decision about scope.

It is extensible, and we are not. Eagle publishes a plugin centre, so a workflow it does not ship can be added by somebody who wanted it badly enough, and it can put a password on a library. Coii Ref has neither. What you install is the whole of what it will ever do for you, and if the shape of your work needs one more step than it offers, there is no hook to hang that step on.

Two platforms. Eagle publishes builds for macOS and Windows. Coii Ref is a Mac app and only a Mac app. If you have a PC at work, that is the end of the argument, and no amount of the rest of this page changes it.

Duplicates, smart folders and batch work. Eagle will scan for duplicates and merge them. Its smart folders keep themselves current by name, tag, colour or format. It batch-processes collection, selection, categorisation and tagging. These are the parts of running a large library that are tedious by hand, and Eagle has spent years on them.

Where Coii Ref wins

Nothing is imported, because nothing needs to be

The first thing most reference tools ask you to do is give up your folder structure — not deliberately, but as the price of admission. You point the app at a directory, it takes copies, and from then on there are two of everything and only one of them is the one the app is looking at. That is a defensible design. It is how Eagle works, and it is why Eagle can be confident about formats, duplicates and integrity: it owns the bytes.

Coii Ref makes the other bet. You point it at a folder and it reads what is there, writing its index, thumbnails and canvas-resolution proxies inside that same folder. Your files are untouched — not moved, not renamed, not rewritten. The directory you had is the directory you still have.

The practical consequences are dull and they are the point. Whatever backs that folder up has backed up your library. Copying the folder to another drive copies the workspace with it, and opening it on your second Mac needs no export step. Six drives means six self-contained workspaces rather than one library with opinions about which volumes it can see. And a file you drop into one of those folders in Finder is a file the app knows about, because the watcher turns filesystem events into the smallest re-scan that makes the index true again — a rename stays a rename rather than becoming a new file with a lost rating.

A board is a file you can read

A Coii Ref canvas is Something.coii-canvas: pretty-printed JSON, saved in whichever of your own folders you chose to put it in.

That is the honest answer to the question everyone who has used one of these apps for a decade has learned to ask, which is what happens to the work if the app stops. It is not a promise about our longevity — every app makes that promise and it is worth nothing. It is a claim you can check tonight with cat. A board you spent an afternoon composing is a different asset from the images on it, and it is the one most likely to be trapped in a format nobody else reads.

One query line instead of a panel

Everything Coii Ref knows how to filter on is reachable from a single string, and the same string drives the grid, the autocompleter and the saved views:

type:image ext:jpg,png            just the stills
tag:any:brutalist,concrete        either tag
rating:>=4 no:tags                good, and never filed
has:notes modified:>2026-06       written up and touched since June

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 and re-parse it every time you open them, which is why renaming a tag does not break a view — there is no membership list to repair.

$19, three machines, and a very short list of connections

Coii Ref is $19 once and covers three Macs. Eagle is $34.95 once and covers two. Sixteen dollars is not a reason to choose a tool you will open every day, but it is worth stating because the purchase shapes are otherwise identical — one payment, free updates, a thirty-day trial — so this is the rare row where the comparison is genuinely like for like.

The connection list is the part worth more than the money. Coii Ref makes two kinds of outbound request in its life: the licence check when you press Activate, and one at launch that is read only for its Date header, so a wound-back clock cannot mint free trial days. No analytics, no crash reporting, no update check. If you work somewhere that audits what leaves the machine, that is a short list to defend.

What switching actually costs

This is the section where an honest comparison page has to disappoint someone, so: there is no Eagle importer. Coii Ref has exactly one importer and it reads a refern library. Moving an Eagle library into Coii Ref is a manual job.

The shape of it is: get your files back out of the Eagle library into ordinary folders, arrange those folders the way you actually think about your work, point Coii Ref at the top of them, and let the first index run. Then re-apply the organisation that lived in Eagle's database — ratings, the tags you care about, the notes — as you use the library rather than in one sitting, because a re-tagging weekend is how people end up with a library they never open again.

That is real work, and for a mature Eagle library it is not an evening. Two things make it less bad than it sounds. The first is that most people discover, on the way out, that a large fraction of their tags were never load-bearing — a rating:>=4 pass and a dozen tags reproduce most of what the old library was actually used for. The second is that you can run both. Coii Ref does not touch your files, so pointing it at a folder of exported originals while Eagle keeps running costs you nothing but disk for a second set of thumbnails, and you can decide after a fortnight of real work instead of after an evening of trialling.

Going the other way is easier, because your files were never taken hostage in the first place: they are already ordinary files in ordinary folders, and Eagle will import them.

Two questions that decide it at scale

Where does the disk space go? Because Eagle copies on import, a library assembled out of folders you already had is a second copy of those folders. That is a feature if you then delete the originals and let Eagle be the single home for everything, and it is a duplicated drive if you do not — which is the failure mode people actually hit, because deleting the originals is a decision nobody makes on the day they install a new app. Coii Ref writes an index, thumbnails and proxies, and those are small next to the pictures; there is only ever one copy of the image itself, and it is the one you already had.

What happens the day you tidy up in Finder? Every library that owns its files has to answer this, and every library that indexes files in place has to answer it harder. Coii Ref's answer is the watcher: filesystem events become the smallest re-scan that makes the database true again. Rename a folder and the folder is followed. Move a file between two indexed folders and it is the same file with the same rating. Plug in a drive that was away for a month and it is reconciled rather than rediscovered. This keeps running after the trial ends, on purpose — an unpaid copy that quietly lets the index rot is worse than no index.

Video is the same kind of thing as an image, all the way through. It is picked up on the same index pass, it carries the same tags, ratings and notes, it sits on a canvas beside the stills, and it is 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 full of clips scrolls like a board full of photographs. Eagle handles video too, so this is not a category win and it is not written as one; it is a description of behaviour worth trying against your own footage during the trial rather than taking from a table.

What neither of them does

Neither is a collaboration tool — no shared workspace, no comment thread on an image, no live board you send a client. Neither has a mobile app. Neither is a photo editor, and neither is trying to replace a catalogue for your own shoots; they organise what you collect, which is a different job from developing what you shot. And neither is a backup: both write their own artifacts around your files and both are perfectly happy pointed at a drive with no copy anywhere else. That remains your problem, solved with the tool you would have used anyway.

Who should buy which

Buy Eagle if you work on Windows as well as a Mac; if your library is more than images and video; if you save references from the browser several times a day; if colour search or duplicate detection is a thing you would genuinely use rather than admire; or if you would rather one application take responsibility for the files than keep that responsibility yourself.

Buy Coii Ref if you are on a Mac only; if your folders are already the organisation and you want them searched rather than absorbed; if you compose boards and want them to be files you can read, diff and back up like anything else; if the shortest possible list of outbound connections matters; and if $19 for a narrower app that does its narrow job well beats $34.95 for a wider one.

And the third answer, which is true more often than either of us would like: for a few thousand images, Finder and a good folder tree are still fine. It is worth knowing where Finder tags stop scaling before you buy anything. If you are weighing several of these at once, the comparison with refern is the one where we concede the most, the PureRef page is the right read if what you actually want is a board rather than a library, Adobe Bridge is the free option you may already have installed, and Apple Photos is the one already on the machine. Or take the thirty days — every feature, no card, no account, and the price only comes up at the end of it.