A gallery view is a table wearing pictures.

That is not a criticism. It is the design, and for a great many jobs it is the right one. A Notion gallery is a database rendered as cards, which means every image on it can carry a client, a status, a deadline, a licence, a source URL and a relation to the project page three levels up. Nothing on our side comes close to that, and if what you need is a catalogue of references with structure around each one, stay where you are.

Buy Coii Ref if the structure was never the problem. $19 once, macOS only, and it reads the folders of images and video already on your Mac without uploading, copying or renaming anything — then lets you arrange them on an infinite canvas that is saved as a plain file in your own folder. The split this page is about is simple: Notion is excellent at describing images and awkward at holding them.

What a gallery view actually gives you

Worth being precise, since half the internet writes "Notion moodboard" without saying what one is. Checked against Notion's own documentation on 3 September 2026.

A gallery is one of the views a database can take. Notion's gallery help page describes the card preview as a choice of three things: the page cover, the page content — which shows a preview of the first block — or a Files & media property, if the database has one. There is a Fit image toggle, which decides whether the whole image sits inside the card frame or is cropped to fill it, and a card size of small, medium or large. Properties can be shown, hidden and reordered on the card face.

So: a uniform grid, three sizes, one image per card, and as much structured metadata under each as you care to define. That is a very good catalogue. It is not a surface you compose on — you cannot put two crops edge to edge at the sizes you want them, blow one up four times to compare a hand against another hand, or leave a deliberate gap. The grid is the layout, and the grid is fixed.

Notion's numbers today

The pricing page shows Free at nothing, Plus at $10 and Business at $20 per member per month, with Enterprise quoted on request and yearly billing advertised as saving up to 20%.

The row that matters for a picture-heavy database is on the same page: file uploads on the Free plan are capped at 5 MB each, and paid plans lift that to unlimited uploads with roughly a 5 GB ceiling per file. Five megabytes is a perfectly ordinary size for a photograph off a modern camera, and it is smaller than most scans. If your references are film stills at 1920 wide, you will never notice. If they are 4000-pixel texture scans, you will notice on the second afternoon.

Coii Ref is $19 once, updates included, nothing that renews. Three machines per licence, thirty days of trial with every feature, no card and no account. macOS 11 Big Sur or later, and that is the entire platform list.

Where Notion is the better tool, and it is not a short list

Properties. This is the real one. In Notion an image can be a row with a dozen typed fields, a relation to the campaign, a rollup that counts how many approved shots a client has, and a filter that shows only the ones licensed for print. Coii Ref gives you tags, a rating, notes and whatever is already in the file — dimensions, EXIF, colour. That is the whole vocabulary. There are no custom fields and there will not be.

It is already where the work is described. The brief, the meeting notes, the invoice and the shot list are probably in the same workspace. A gallery that sits inside the project page needs no context switch and no second app, and adjacency is worth more than most feature comparisons admit.

Other people. Sharing, permissions, guests, comments on a page, a link you send a client. Coii Ref has none of it — no account, no cloud, no sharing link, no collaboration of any kind.

It runs everywhere. Browser, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android. We run on macOS and nowhere else. The code builds for other platforms, but nothing is signed, tested or released there, and a platform that has not shipped is not a platform. If you work across machines, that row is a loss for us and no argument about file formats repairs it.

The free tier is genuinely usable. For a single-person workspace it is generous, and a small moodboard database costs nothing forever.

Views. The same database is a gallery this morning and a table, board, calendar or timeline this afternoon, filtered and sorted differently for each. There is no equivalent of that shape-shifting on our side; a saved view in Coii Ref stores a search string, not a layout.

The part that strains: every image becomes a second copy

Here is the structural difference, and everything else on this page follows from it.

In Notion the image is an upload. The file on your disk stays where it is, and a copy of it goes into the workspace, where it becomes the thing the card shows. Two copies, two places, no relationship between them. Rename the original, re-export it at a higher resolution, move it to the archive drive — the card does not know and does not change. The upload is now the canonical version of an image you also own, and the one on your disk has quietly become a duplicate.

Coii Ref does the opposite thing and does only that. You point it at folders you already keep. It indexes them in place. Nothing is copied, nothing is moved, nothing is renamed. Everything the app writes — the database, the thumbnails, the canvas-resolution proxies — goes inside the folder you pointed at.

The consequence people notice first is not philosophical, it is operational. A folder watcher turns filesystem events into the smallest re-scan that makes the index true again, so a rename in Finder stays a rename rather than becoming a new file with a lost rating, a moved folder is followed, and a drive that comes back online is reconciled rather than rediscovered. A library that goes stale every time you tidy up is a library you stop trusting, and one you stop trusting is one you stop searching.

The table

Rows we lose are marked as losses, because you will find them out anyway.

Offline, checked rather than assumed

Notion added offline properly and it is better than its reputation, so this row deserves accuracy instead of a shrug. Their offline help page says the feature lives in the desktop and mobile apps rather than the browser, that you mark an individual page available offline from its menu, and that Plus, Business and Enterprise plans additionally download recently visited and favourited pages on their own. Embeds, AI, forms and buttons need a connection, and you cannot change sharing while disconnected.

The line worth reading twice if your gallery is large: a database downloads the first 50 rows of its first view. For a moodboard of thirty images that is the whole thing. For a reference library of four thousand it is the first screen.

Coii Ref has no online mode to lose. There is no account, no sync and no server holding anything, and the only two kinds of outbound request the app ever makes are a licence check when you press Activate and one at launch read solely for its Date header, so that winding the clock back does not mint free trial days. No analytics, no crash reporting, no update check. The what it sends section on the home page is the full list.

Finding one image out of eleven thousand

Notion's search is full text over your workspace, which is exactly right for pages and imperfect for pictures, because a picture has no text unless somebody typed some. In practice a Notion image library is searchable to the extent that you filled in its properties, and property discipline is the thing that decays first when a project gets busy.

Coii Ref searches what is already true of a file, from one line:

type:video ext:mov                    just the clips
tag:any:packaging,type                either tag
rating:>=4 -is:favourite              good, not yet starred
has:notes no:tags                     written up, never filed
width:>=3000 added:>2026-01           big and recent

AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses — grouping is what makes a query impossible to autocomplete or draw as chips you can delete one at a time. A word it does not recognise becomes free text rather than an error, so the grid keeps returning rows while you are mid-sentence. A saved view stores that string and re-parses it on open, which is why renaming a tag does not break one: there is no membership list to repair.

Note the honest limit. This is literal search. There is no automatic tagging and no search by meaning, so an untagged photograph of a stairwell is findable by its folder, its size, its date and its EXIF, and not by the word stairwell. If that matters more to you than anything else on this page, refern has both and is $35 once.

A board that is a file, not a row

The other half of the app is the canvas, and it is where the comparison stops being about databases.

Spring lookbook — direction 2.coii-canvas sits in the project folder next to the brief. You can open it in a text editor. You can put it in git and see what changed between the version the client rejected and the one they approved. You can copy it to a drive and open it on a Mac that has never seen your workspace.

This is not a claim that Notion will lose your work — their export exists and their company is not going anywhere. It is a claim about what is checkable. Ours you can verify with cat; anything else is a promise on a pricing page, and those are different kinds of guarantee. It is also the reason the same argument is conceded on the Obsidian Canvas page, where the other side's canvas is also a plain file in a folder you own — the argument is not that we are unique, it is that it matters.

Video, which a database treats as an attachment

Both handle video, so the row is a draw and the behaviour underneath is not. In Notion a clip is an uploaded file on a page, subject to the same per-file ceilings as everything else.

In Coii Ref video is the same kind of object as an image the whole way through. Same index pass. Same tags, ratings and notes. Same canvas, sitting beside the stills. Same query line — type:video ext:mov is a filter rather than a mode you switch into. Proxies are written at canvas resolution beside your files, so a board made mostly of footage scrolls like a board made of photographs. If a meaningful share of your references move, that is worth trying against your own material in the trial rather than taking from a table.

What Coii Ref does not have

In one block, so nobody arrives for a feature that is not there. No account, no cloud, no sync between machines beyond whatever already syncs your folders. No sharing links, no comments, no collaboration. No custom properties, relations or rollups — tags, ratings and notes are the whole vocabulary. No browser extension, so an image reaches the library the way it always did, by landing in a folder. No automatic tagging and no search by meaning. No PDF or document support: images and video. No mobile app. No Windows or Linux release.

Using both, which is what usually happens

The arrangement that works is not a migration. Notion keeps doing the part it is good at — the brief, the client, the status, the deadline, the shared page — and the images stop being uploads. The folder on disk becomes the library, Coii Ref indexes it, the search line produces the shortlist, and the composed canvas lands in the same project folder as everything else about that job. If the client needs to see it, you export a picture of the board the way you always would.

The cost of trying that is close to zero, because Coii Ref never takes ownership of a file. Index the folders you already have, use it for two weeks against real work, and if it is not for you, delete it — your originals were never moved and never rewritten, and the only trace is a database, a thumbnail cache and a proxy folder inside the directory you pointed at.

The trial is thirty days with every feature and no card. What stops at day thirty-one is one category of action, and it is growing the library: registering a new folder, running the importer and starting an indexing pass by hand are refused until you buy. Everything that reads keeps working permanently — search, tags, ratings, saved views, canvases, thumbnails — and the watcher keeps running, so a rename in Finder next March does not quietly turn the index into a liar.

Who should pick which

Stay with a Notion gallery if the metadata around each image is the point; if the board has to live where the project lives; if other people read or edit it; if you work across a phone, a Windows machine and a Mac; or if you want the same set of images as a table on Monday and a calendar on Friday.

Add Coii Ref if the images already exist as files in folders you have organised and uploading them all again is the thing you have been avoiding; if you have more of them than any card grid wants to render; if you need to place and scale things freely rather than fill a grid; if the collection includes video you want searched like everything else; and if you want the finished board to be a file you can read, diff and back up like anything else you own.

Neither, if you have four hundred images. A folder and Finder are the correct answer until scrolling stops working — usually somewhere north of ten thousand files, or the first time you cannot find something you are certain you saved.

If the moodboard is really a meeting, FigJam and Miro are the two to weigh instead, and both beat all of this at the live-session part. If what you are saving is mostly links rather than files, Raindrop is the honest comparison, and Are.na is the one where the collecting is public and the point.

Otherwise: the library has the rest of the comparisons and the migration guides, and downloading it costs thirty days and no card.