Your folders stay exactly where you built them

You already have a working folder structure — by project, by year, by client, by whatever scheme survived contact with a few thousand images. The organizing happened when you saved the file into the right place the first time. What you actually need now is a way to search across all of it at once without handing those folders to an app that reorganizes them into something of its own.

That is a narrower job than most "image organizer" software signs up for, and it is worth being precise about why folders alone stop being enough long before an app that copies them in becomes worth the trade.

What goes wrong with folders alone

Finder is a fine organizer up to a size nobody agrees on in advance, and past it the same three problems show up in every library:

• Tags exist but don't compose. Finder tags answer "show me everything tagged Studio" well enough. They do not answer "show me video, tagged portrait or studio, rated four or better, that I haven't marked a favourite yet" — four conditions at once is a search, not a tag.
• Nothing remembers what you found last time. You build the same mental filter every time you need "the good stuff from this shoot," because there is nowhere to save it.
• A rename anywhere breaks anything that pointed at the old path. A folder you moved during a spring cleaning is a folder any tool with an absolute path to it now calls missing.

The apps that solve this most aggressively solve it by importing: your images get copied into a library the app owns, so it can guarantee consistency because it controls every file. Eagle's own support article states plainly that it copies files to the library when importing rather than creating index links to the originals — a reasonable design, and also a second copy of every picture you own, sitting in a place your existing backup routine may not know to look.

Coii Ref takes the other side of that trade. It indexes the folder where your files already live, reads what is true of them, and never asks you to move anything. It isn't the only app built this way — a wider round-up of tools that read folders in place instead of importing them covers a few others, each with a different idea of what to do once the folder is indexed — and the full comparison against Eagle goes through what Eagle's copy-based model buys you that indexing in place does not.

Who actually needs this

Not everyone does. If your library is a single project folder with a few hundred images, Finder and a handful of tags already work, and nothing below this line will feel like an upgrade yet. The case for indexing in place shows up once two things are both true: the library has grown past what a scroll can search, and the folder structure it's grown into is one you'd rather keep than replace. What a reference manager for Mac looks like day to day covers that second case in more detail, and if the actual friction is "I know this exists somewhere in my folders and can't find it," searching image folders from one query line is the narrower version of the same argument.

Search, without a second copy of anything

Point Coii Ref at a folder and it reads dimensions, EXIF and colour, then writes a database and a set of thumbnails and proxies beside your files — not instead of them. From there, one query line does what the tag panel could not:

type:video ext:mov rating:>=4 -is:favourite

That is AND across the different keys and OR inside a comma list — tag:any: portrait,studio matches either — with no parentheses, because a query with grouping is a query nobody can autocomplete or draw as chips. A word the parser does not recognise becomes free text instead of an error, so the grid keeps returning rows while you are still typing rather than stopping to complain about syntax.

Saved views that don't go stale

A view is the text of a search, saved under a name, and re-parsed every time you open it rather than stored as a fixed list of results:

has:notes no:tags

Rename a tag six months later and every view built on it keeps working, because there is no membership list anywhere that needs repairing — the view is a sentence, not a snapshot. That matters more than it sounds: a saved smart folder that silently stops matching after a rename is a saved folder you stop trusting, and one you stop trusting is one you stop opening.

A folder rename is not an emergency

This is the actual argument for indexing in place rather than importing. Your files move — a project gets archived into a dated folder, a drive gets reorganized, a subfolder gets split in two once it's too big to scroll. A watcher turns filesystem events into the smallest re-scan that makes the database true again, so a rename is recorded as a rename rather than treated as a new file with a lost rating, and a folder move is followed rather than flagged as missing. The watcher keeps running after a trial ends, too — it is not a feature that gets switched off if you decide not to buy.

Canvases are files, in the same folders

Boards you build from these images save as .coii-canvas — pretty-printed JSON, written wherever you tell it to, not tucked inside an app-owned library.

Copy that parent folder to another drive, or open it on a second Mac, and the board opens exactly as you left it — no export, no re-linking assets, because the canvas and the images it points at never left each other's neighbourhood.

Video references, indexed the same way

Nothing above changes if half of what you collect is footage rather than stills. Video goes through the same index pass as an image, carries the same tags, ratings and notes, and answers to the same query line — type:video ext:mov is a filter, not a separate mode you have to switch into first. Proxies for video are written at canvas resolution beside your files, the same way thumbnails are for stills, so a board mixing clips and photographs scrolls at one speed instead of stalling on the footage.

Working entirely offline, on purpose

None of this depends on a connection. The database, the thumbnails, the proxies and the canvases all live on your disk, which is most of what being local-first software actually means in practice rather than as a slogan — the app keeps working on a plane, on a studio network with no internet at all, or years after the servers behind a subscription tool have gone quiet. If offline is the actual requirement rather than a nice-to-have, an offline moodboard app with no account walks through what that looks like for boards specifically.

What it costs and what it runs on

$19 once, for three Macs, on macOS 11 or later — Apple Silicon or Intel, both built natively. Nothing renews and updates are included. The trial is 30 days with every feature enabled, no card and no account, and the one thing that stops at day thirty-one is registering new folders — search, tags, saved views and the canvases you already built keep working after that, on purpose, so an unpaid copy never holds a library hostage.

Coii Ref makes two kinds of outbound request, ever: the licence check when you activate, and a request at launch that reads only the Date header of the response, so a clock wound backward can't manufacture extra trial days. No analytics, no crash reporting, no update checker phoning home in the background.

The only importer Coii Ref has reads a refern library — ratings, tags, notes and canvases, matched by relative path, with your originals untouched either way. Coming from anything else, the folder you already have is the only migration step: point Coii Ref at it and let the first index run.

What the first week actually looks like

The first index is the slow part, and it's the only slow part. Pointing Coii Ref at a folder of forty thousand files means walking every one of them once to read dimensions, EXIF and colour and to write a thumbnail and a proxy — that pass takes time proportional to the folder, and it's the kind of thing you start before lunch and check on after. Everything after that first pass is incremental: the watcher only ever re-scans what actually changed, so adding another shoot's worth of images next month costs seconds, not another full pass over everything you already had.

What changes for you day to day is smaller than it sounds and adds up fast. Instead of remembering which of six subfolders held the shot you wanted, you type what you remember about it — a rating, a tag, a rough date — and the grid narrows to a handful of candidates. Instead of building a new pile of "maybe useful" images on the desktop for a pitch, you save the query that found them as a view and open it again when the deck needs updating. Neither of those requires learning a new filing scheme, because the filing scheme you already have was never touched.

What this approach doesn't solve

Worth being honest about before you commit an afternoon to trying it. If your files are genuinely disorganized — duplicated across drives with no consistent naming, or scattered with no folder logic at all — indexing in place inherits that mess rather than fixing it. Search helps you find things inside whatever structure exists; it doesn't invent a structure for you. Untangling that is worth doing in Finder first, on the files themselves, before pointing anything at the result — merge the obvious duplicates, settle on one drive as the real copy of anything that exists twice, and only then let an index run against what's left. An index built on top of a mess is a searchable mess, which is still better than an unsearchable one, but not by as much as doing the tidying first would get you. And if what you actually want is a second machine to look at untagged images and guess what they contain, that's a different feature entirely, one this kind of tool doesn't attempt — it searches what's already true of a file, not what a model thinks the file shows.

Download the trial, aim it at the folder you already trust, and see whether a query line finds what a scroll used to. Get Coii Ref — thirty days, nothing to undo if it isn't for you, because nothing was ever moved in the first place.