The question is not really about Pixave. It is about where your images live.

Start with the fact, because everything sensible follows from it: the Mac App Store listing for Pixave shows version 2.3.13, updated 23 November 2020, sold by YoungHo Kim, requiring macOS 10.11 or later. It was an Apple Best of 2015 app and it is still listed. That is the checkable part, and this page is not going to tell you what to conclude from it.

What this page can usefully do is answer the question people who search for a Pixave alternative are actually asking, which is rarely "what has the same feature list". It is: how do I make sure the next tool cannot leave me in this position again? There is a good answer to that, it is not specific to us, and it takes about an evening. The short version: get the images into ordinary folders, and then choose a tool that reads folders rather than one that adopts them.

There is a version of this page that would be much more fun to write and much less use to you, in which a competitor's product is described in the language of a eulogy. It is not written here, for two reasons. The first is that it would be a claim rather than a fact, and the only claims on this page are ones you can go and check. The second is that it would be beside the point: an app that suits you and has not changed in a while is still an app that suits you, and the risk you are weighing is not about the software at all. It is about whether your images can leave.

What Pixave did well, and still does

Its App Store description is worth reading before you replace it, because a replacement chosen without knowing what you had is a replacement you resent within a week.

• A format list that is genuinely broad. GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, PSD, AI, PDF, SVG, RAW, HEIC, HEIF and WebP, plus MOV, M4V and MP4, plus fonts and design documents. Coii Ref covers images and video. PDF, fonts and design files are outside it, and if a quarter of your library is one of those, that is the row that decides this.
• Auto-import from designated folders, with tags assigned as things arrive — the kind of automation people build once and then rely on daily.
• Web capture, including iPhone, iPad and landscape sizes for grabbing a page as it looks on a device.
• Tagging in bulk, with many tags applied to a run of images at once.
• Export with naming patterns, watermarks and metadata preserved, which is the feature that matters most to you today and is worth reading twice.
• iCloud sync for libraries. Coii Ref has no sync at all. That is a real loss on our side and stating it is not modesty, it is the row.
• macOS 10.11 or later. Coii Ref needs macOS 11 Big Sur. On a Mac older than that, we are not a candidate.

Nothing on that list is small, and several items are things we have no answer to. A comparison that skipped them would be an advertisement.

The one step to take before you choose anything

Whatever you land on — and it might not be us — do this first, because it is the step that makes every later decision reversible.

Export your images out into folders that mean something to you. Pixave's own description says its export can preserve metadata and follow a naming pattern, so this is a supported operation rather than a rescue. Folders by project, by client, by year, by subject — whatever your collections were mostly encoding. Then look at what you have: a tree of ordinary files that every application written in the last thirty years can open, and that no future app can take hostage.

At that point the question changes shape. You are no longer looking for a replacement that can read a proprietary library. You are looking for something that can search a folder tree well, and that is a much easier thing to buy, and a much easier thing to leave.

The table

What Coii Ref does instead

It never takes your files in. This is the whole design and it is the reason this page exists. You point Coii Ref at a folder; it reads what is there — dimensions, EXIF, colour — and writes its database, thumbnails and proxies inside that same folder. Your originals are not copied, not renamed, not moved, not one byte rewritten. Back up the folder and you have backed up the library. Put the folder on an external drive and the workspace goes with it. Open it on another Mac and there is no export step, because there is nothing to export.

The practical consequence is the one you care about after Pixave: the situation where an app stops being the right tool cannot cost you your collection, because your collection was never inside it in the first place.

Search is a line of text, not a panel.

type:image ext:svg                       just the vectors
tag:any:packaging,print rating:>=4       either tag, and good
added:>2026-01 no:tags                   this year's arrivals, unfiled
in:Textures type:image height:>=2000      big enough to actually use

AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses — grouping is what makes a query impossible to autocomplete or draw as chips. Anything the parser does not recognise becomes free text rather than an error, so the grid keeps returning results while you type. Saved views store the text of a search and re-parse it on open, so renaming a tag does not break them.

That last one is the honest answer to the tag problem you are about to face. Tags held in a database you are leaving do not travel. A tool that can only find things by tag would therefore start you at zero. A tool that indexes type, extension, dimensions, dates, EXIF, colour and folder gives you a usable library on day one and lets you tag the images that earn it later.

Canvases are files. A board in Coii Ref is a .coii-canvas file — pretty-printed JSON, saved wherever in your folders you put it. It diffs in git, it syncs with whatever you already sync with, and you can open it in a text editor and read it. Ten years from now, that file is still a file. This is the one claim on the page you can verify yourself with cat rather than take on trust, which is why it is the argument we lead with everywhere.

The library stays true without you maintaining it. After the first index pass, filesystem events become the smallest re-scan that makes the database correct again. Rename something in Finder and it stays the same item with the same rating. Move a folder and the index follows. Plug in the drive that has been in a bag since June and it reconciles rather than starts over. The watcher keeps running after the trial ends, so a library does not rot while you are deciding.

Two kinds of network request, ever. A licence check when you press Activate, and one request at launch read only for its Date header. No analytics, no crash reporting, no update check, no account, no cloud. The full list is on the home page, and it is short enough to check rather than believe.

Doing the move in one evening

The order matters more than the speed, so here is the shape of it.

Export first, before you install anything. Whatever tool you end up with, the export is the irreversible-feeling step and it is better done while you still have the old app open and working. Pixave's description says its export follows a naming pattern and can preserve metadata, so this is the supported path rather than a workaround. Write it out to a fresh folder tree, not into the middle of an existing one, so you can see exactly what came out.

Then look at the tree and fix the names. This is the half hour nobody plans for and everybody is glad of afterwards. Folder names are the only organisational information that survives every future migration, so spend the time making them mean something: Client work/2024 Halden, not Untitled 3. File names matter less; folders matter enormously.

Then index it. Point Coii Ref at the top of that tree and let the first pass run — it is the slow part, and it is a walk-away job. Afterwards the watcher keeps the index true, so the folder tidying you do next week is not a re-import.

Then check a handful of things you know are in there. Search for a project by folder, an aspect ratio by width and height, a format by ext, a month by added. What you are testing is not the app; it is whether the tree you just wrote is one you can navigate by describing, because that is what you will be doing for the next five years.

Keep the old library. Do not delete anything for a month. Disk is cheaper than a mistake, and the export you took is not a backup of the app, only of the images.

The difference underneath the feature lists

Pixave and Coii Ref sit on opposite sides of an old argument about what a reference library is.

One view says the library is a database, and files are what the database stores. Import everything, let the app own the arrangement, and get sync, in-app organisation and consistent metadata in return. That is a coherent design and it is why the format list can be as broad as Pixave's: once a file is inside, the app decides how to present it. Most of the tools in this category, Eagle included, work this way.

The other says the filesystem is the library and the app is a lens over it. Nothing is imported. The app's job is to read what is already there, remember what it learned, and get out of the way. You give up sync and you give up any feature that depends on owning the file, and what you get back is that no app — including this one — is ever between you and your work.

The second view costs you things, and this page has named them. It is the right view for exactly one reason, which happens to be the reason you searched for this page today: it is the only one where the app's future and your library's future are separate questions.

What does not carry across

Plainly, so you can plan an evening rather than discover this at 11pm:

Collections and tags that live only in Pixave's database. There is no importer. Coii Ref reads a refern library and nothing else. Where Pixave's export writes metadata into the files themselves, that part comes with them, and Coii Ref reads EXIF; anything held only in the app does not.

Anything that depended on a feature we do not have. Fonts and design documents are not indexed. Neither are PDFs. A collection built around those needs something else, and that something else might well be Adobe Bridge, which is free, browses folders in place, and handles far more file types than either app here.

Web captures as an ongoing habit. Coii Ref has no browser extension. Whatever you use to get an image from a page onto your disk is what you carry on using; the app starts at the point the file exists. Inboard is the small Mac app that does still ship extensions for three browsers, and refern is the larger one, at $35, with extensions and an on-device tagger and search by meaning, none of which we have.

What neither of them is

Both apps organise references, and it is worth being clear about the jobs neither takes on. Neither is a backup: both are content to be pointed at a single drive that has no copy anywhere else, and that stays your problem to solve with whatever you already use for it. Neither is an editor — nothing here develops a RAW file or retouches anything. Neither is a collaboration tool, with no shared workspace and no live board a client can open. And neither is a catalogue for your own shoots in the sense that a photo application is; they hold the pictures you collected, which is a different pile from the pictures you took, even when the file types are identical.

Knowing which pile you are actually organising saves more time than any feature comparison. If the answer is mostly your own photographs, the tool for that is probably already on the machine.

Which one to use now

Stay with Pixave if it does what you need on the Mac you have, your library is already inside it, and nothing about the situation is bothering you. An app that works is an app that works, and switching costs an evening you could spend drawing. The only thing worth doing regardless is the export — so that the choice stays yours.

Choose Coii Ref if you have got the images out into folders and now want them searched where they sit; if you want boards you compose to be files you can read and back up like anything else; if video belongs in the same library as the stills; if $19 once with no account and almost no network activity is the shape of purchase you want; and if your Mac runs macOS 11 or later.

Choose something else if your collection is full of PDFs, fonts or layered design documents; if you need sync between two machines and do not want to solve that with a folder; or if you want the most capable app in the category rather than the smallest one that fits, in which case the comparison to read is refern. And if most of what you keep is photographs you took yourself rather than references you collected, Apple Photos is already on the machine and is better at that job than either of us.

Whatever you decide, the lesson from this particular search is worth keeping: the format your work is stored in outlives the app that stored it. Choose for that, not for the feature list.

The rest of the library has the migration notes and the round-ups, and Coii Ref itself is a thirty-day trial with every feature, no card and no account — long enough to index a real collection and find out whether one line of search suits how you think.