Nobody should stop using Pinterest because of a page like this. It is free, it is the best discovery engine that has ever existed for visual work, and the number of good images it has put in front of you that you would never have gone looking for is not a number a local application can compete with. If you are searching for a Pinterest alternative because the feed has started to feel like it is showing you the same eight things, that is a real complaint — and it is still not a reason to expect a $19 Mac app to replace it.
What a Mac app can do is the other half: the part after you have found the image. Coii Ref indexes the folders of pictures and video already on your disk, gives you one line of search across all of them, and lets you arrange what you find on canvases that are ordinary files in your own folders. Pinterest never had to solve that, because in Pinterest the images were never yours to keep in the first place — they are pins in an account.
Most working artists end up doing both. This page is about where the seam between them sits.
What Pinterest is better at, and it is not close
Discovery. You cannot search a folder for something you have not saved yet. Everything on your disk got there because you already knew you wanted it, which means a local library is a memory, not a source. Pinterest is the source.
It costs nothing. Its App Store listing shows free, with in-app purchases. Coii Ref is nineteen dollars.
It is in your pocket. iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision are on that listing. Mac is not — on a laptop it is a website — but a phone in a queue is where most people actually collect, and Coii Ref has nothing on a phone at all.
Boards can be secret and boards can be shared. Pinterest's help centre describes a secret option when you create a board, and sharing one with a client or a collaborator is a link. Coii Ref has no sharing of any kind: no accounts, no links, no live boards.
There is nothing to set up. No indexing pass, no folders to organise, no licence. That matters more than feature lists admit.
The three places where a pinboard stops being enough
Not failings — consequences of what it is. They tend to arrive in this order.
The wifi. A board you cannot open on a plane, on a shoot with no signal, or on a client's locked-down network is a board you cannot rely on for work. Every professional in this category eventually has the moment where the reference they need is in an account they cannot reach.
The search. Pinterest is very good at finding new images and much less useful for interrogating the ones you already kept. There is no way to ask a board for the four-thousand-pixel-wide shots from last spring that I rated well and have not used yet — that question is about properties of files, and in a pinboard those properties are not what is being stored.
The disk. When an image needs to go into a document, a paint-over, a storyboard, an edit or a printer, it needs to be a file with a resolution, and a saved pin is not that. Every professional workflow ends at a file. The only question is whether you organised the files or let them pile up in Downloads.
The workflow that actually works
This is the part worth taking away, whether or not you buy anything.
Keep collecting on Pinterest. Do not fight the tool that is good at the job.
Land the keepers on disk. When something graduates from "nice" to "I will
use this", it should become a file in a folder that means something —
~/Pictures/Reference/Lighting, .../Costume, .../Projects/Halden. Ten
seconds at the moment you decide, and the thing exists in a form nothing can
take away.
Index the folder, not the app. Point Coii Ref at the top of that tree once. It reads dimensions, EXIF and colour, writes thumbnails and canvas-resolution proxies inside that same folder, and never copies, moves or renames anything you put there.
Be clear about the seam: Coii Ref has no browser extension and no web clipper. It is not the thing that gets a picture from a web page onto your Mac; whatever you use for that today, you carry on using. If you want that step handled inside the reference manager, the app to look at is refern, which publishes extensions for three browsers, costs $35 once, and is more capable than Coii Ref in most respects including an on-device tagger and a search that finds images nobody tagged.
There is one more reason to make that landing step deliberate, and it has nothing to do with software. A reference you saved because it was striking and a reference you saved because you are going to work from it are different objects, and a single tap cannot tell them apart. Deciding at the moment of saving — folder, or feed — is a small act of editing, and a library made of things you decided about is worth ten times one made of everything you ever liked. People who keep excellent reference libraries are not better at collecting than you. They throw more away.
Getting your own Pinterest data
Pinterest documents a request flow: in Settings, open Privacy and data, then Request your data, then Start request. Their help page says it may take up to 48 hours for a download link to arrive by email. What exactly the archive contains is a question for them rather than for a competitor's page, so make the request and look — that is a better use of ten minutes than anything this page could assert about it.
The habit worth forming is smaller than a migration anyway: from today, the images you actually care about get saved to a folder at the moment you care about them. A year of that is a better library than any bulk export.
The table
Half of these rows are not losses so much as category differences, and they are marked as what they are.
| Coii Ref | ||
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | Free, with in-app purchases |
| Where it runs | macOS 11+ | Browser, iPhone, iPad, Apple Vision |
| Account | None | Required |
| Works with no connection | Yes, entirely | No |
| Discovery of new images | None | Its entire purpose |
| Sharing and collaboration | None | Boards, links, collaborators |
| Your images | Files in your folders | Pins in your account |
| Search by file properties | Yes: type, size, dates, ratings | Not the model |
| Video | Indexed and searchable with stills | Supported as content |
| Boards | A JSON file on your disk | In the service |
| Advertising in the product | None | Yes |
What you get on the local side
One line of search over everything. The same string drives the grid, the autocompleter and the saved views:
type:image width:>=4000 rating:>=4 -is:favourite big, good, not yet starred
in:Lighting tag:any:dusk,interior either mood, one folder
type:video ext:mp4 added:>2026-05 clips saved since May
has:notes no:tags written up, never filedAND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses. A word the parser does not recognise becomes free text instead of an error, so the grid never stops returning rows while you are typing. Saved views store the text of the search and re-parse it when opened, so renaming a tag does not break them — there is no membership list to repair.
Boards that are files. Drag results onto a canvas and the canvas is a
.coii-canvas file: pretty-printed JSON, saved in a folder you chose.
You can read it in a text editor, diff it in git and back it up with everything
else. This is the only claim on the page you can verify with cat instead of
trusting, which is why it gets made everywhere on this site.
Ratings and notes that mean something to you. A star on an image and two
sentences about why you kept it are worth more, a year later, than any tag
taxonomy you will actually maintain. Both are searchable — rating:>=4,
has:notes — and both live in the workspace beside your files rather than in a
service. The habit that pays is small: when you finally use a reference for
real work, rate it then. Six months on, rating:>=5 is a shortlist of things
already proven in practice rather than a list of things that looked good in a
feed.
Video sits in the same library. Same index pass, same tags and ratings,
same query line — type:video ext:mov is not a mode you switch into — with
proxies written at canvas resolution so a board of clips scrolls like a board
of stills. If half your references are film, that is not a footnote.
A network surface you can hold in your head. Two kinds of outbound request
in the app's whole life: a licence check when you press Activate, and one
request at launch read only for its Date header, so a wound-back clock cannot
mint free trial days. No analytics, no crash reporting, no update check, no
account, no upload. The full list is on the home page.
What happens when a board reaches two thousand pins
Pinboards scale beautifully up to the point where you can still remember what is on them, and then they stop, and the failure is quiet. You keep saving, because saving is one tap and feels productive. What degrades is retrieval: a board called lighting with two thousand pins is a slower way to find a lighting reference than the internet was, and the thing you are looking for is in there somewhere, which is worse than it not being there at all.
The usual response is to split into more boards, which works twice and then creates the second problem — an image that is a costume reference and a lighting reference has to be in two places, and you have to remember which place you were feeling like when you saved it. Every filing system based purely on where a thing was put runs into this eventually, whether it is boards, folders or a wall of labelled boxes.
The local answer is not better folders, it is not needing to remember the folder. If the index knows a file's type, dimensions, rating, dates, EXIF and whatever tags you have bothered to add, then a question can be composed at the moment you have it rather than anticipated at the moment you saved. That is what the query line is for, and it is the reason Coii Ref stays useful at forty thousand files across several drives, where an untagged pile would not.
A pin and a file are different kinds of thing
Worth being precise about, because it is the root of most of the frustration people describe when they go looking for an alternative.
A saved pin is an entry in your account: it points at an image and it carries what the service knows about it. A file on your disk is the image, in a resolution you can check, at a path you chose, on hardware you own. Neither is better in the abstract. They fail differently, though. An account is reachable from anywhere and needs a connection and a login; a file is reachable from nothing but the machine it is on, and does not care about either.
For collecting, the account version is obviously right — that is why nobody maintains a folder of downloads while browsing. For working, the file version is the only one that functions, because every tool downstream of your reference — the paint program, the edit, the layout, the printer — takes a file. The mistake is not choosing one. It is never converting between them, and then discovering at the worst moment that six years of collecting produced a list of links rather than a library.
What Coii Ref deliberately does not do
So the trial does not surprise you. There is no feed and no recommendation of any kind: it will never suggest an image, because it has never seen one that is not already yours. There is no browser extension. There is no account, no cloud sync, no sharing link and no mobile app. There is no automatic tagging and no search by meaning — the search is literal, over things that are true of your files, and the app that does the other kind is refern at $35.
It also does not read PDFs, documents or 3D formats: images and video, and that is the whole list. And it is macOS 11 or later, with native builds for Apple Silicon and Intel, and nothing on any other platform. If you work across a Mac and a PC, that single line ends the discussion, and it should.
The privacy difference, stated without drama
A pinboard is a product built around an account and an advertising business, which is why it is free and why the feed knows what you like. That is a fair trade and plenty of people take it happily, including people who read this page and carry on taking it.
Coii Ref is at the other end of the scale for a boring reason rather than a noble one: it has no server, so there is nowhere for anything to go. Your library is a folder on your disk. What you saved, what you rated, what you wrote in a note, what you put on a board — none of it is legible to us, because none of it is sent anywhere. If you keep client work, unreleased projects or anything under a non-disclosure agreement in among your references, that distinction stops being philosophical.
Who should use what
Pinterest if the problem is finding new material, if you collect mostly on your phone, if you share boards with clients or collaborators, and if you would rather not pay for any of it.
Coii Ref if the problem is that you have thousands of images on your Mac and cannot find the one you want; if you work offline often; if boards should be files you own; if video and stills belong in one library; and if $19 once with no account suits you better than a service.
Both, honestly, is the answer for most people, with the seam in the place described above: discover there, keep here.
If the pull away from Pinterest is really about wanting somewhere calmer to collect online, Are.na is the one people tend to land on, and it has a free tier and no advertising business. Milanote is where boards go when they need writing on them and other people looking at them. If the pile you are actually organising is photographs you took rather than images you saved, Apple Photos is already on the machine, and if you want a local app that takes your files into a managed library rather than leaving them alone, Eagle is the one to read about.
Otherwise: the library has the rest of the comparisons and the practical guides, and the trial runs thirty days with every feature, no card and no account — enough to index everything you have already saved and find out how much of it you had forgotten.