You want one big surface, not a slideshow

Arranging reference images side by side, zooming out to see the whole set and back in to compare two of them closely, is a spatial way of thinking that a folder of thumbnails and a slide deck both get in the way of. An infinite canvas is the answer to that specific problem, and the question worth asking before picking one is what happens to the board once the app that made it stops being the thing you use.

What a folder alone cannot do

A folder shows files in a grid or a list, sorted by name or date, one size fits all. It cannot hold two images at different scales next to each other, cannot group a dozen references into a cluster with space around it, and cannot remember that three photos belonged together for a reason that had nothing to do with when they were saved. That is a real gap, and it is the one an infinite canvas actually closes — space itself becomes the organising principle, rather than a filename or a date.

A board that is a file, not a row in an app

A Coii Ref canvas is Something.coii-canvas: plain JSON, saved wherever you put it. It diffs in version control, syncs through whatever you already sync with, and opens on a second Mac with no export step, because there is nothing to export — the file already is the whole board, referencing your images by path rather than copying them into itself.

Filling a canvas from a search rather than a scroll

Building a board usually starts with narrowing down what belongs on it, and a query line does that faster than scrolling a grid by eye. tag:any:a,b matches either tag, rating:>=4 keeps the results to images that actually earned a place, and the shortlist that comes back is what gets dragged onto the canvas — the search and the board are two views of the same registered folder, not two separate tools to keep in sync.

type:image tag:any:cool-palette rating:>=3   a colder set, rated
has:notes no:tags                             annotated but never filed
added:>2026-01 -tag:archived                  this month's active set

A term the parser does not recognise renders as free text rather than an error, so the grid never stops returning something while you are still narrowing down.

More than one canvas, for more than one question

A single board rarely answers every question a reference collection needs answered — a palette study is a different question from a composition study, even against the same source images. Nothing stops making several canvases from the same registered folder, each one a separate .coii-canvas file named for the question it answers, sitting beside the images rather than nested inside one app's project structure.

What a canvas does not do

It is not a drawing tool — there is no pen, no shape layer, no text annotation beyond a canvas's own notes field. It is not a presentation mode with slides and transitions. And it is not live: two people cannot edit the same board at once, and there is no link that opens it in a browser for someone without the app installed. What it does is hold images in space and save that arrangement as a file, and that narrower job is the whole reason it survives being opened five years from now.

Comparing this to a whiteboard tool built for a browser

Miro and FigJam are built for real-time collaboration in a browser, which is a genuinely different job — a team sketching and voting together in the same session. Neither is primarily built around a personal reference library living on disk, and the board itself lives in an account rather than a file you can point to. Coii Ref's canvas trades that collaboration for a plainer guarantee: the board is yours, in your folder, openable without a login.

Comparing this to a canvas that floats over other apps

PureRef is built to stay on top of whatever else is open — a script, a painting app, a browser — which is a different use than arranging a large study for its own sake. Both save a board as a file rather than into an account; the difference is mainly in what the canvas is for while it is open, floating reference versus a study you are building.

What it costs and what it runs on

$19 once, three Macs, updates included, nothing that renews. The trial runs 30 days with every feature enabled, no card and no account required to start. It needs macOS 11 Big Sur or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel, as two native builds.

The app's entire outbound network activity is a licence check on Activate and a launch-time read of a server's Date header only, so a wound-back clock cannot extend a trial. There is no in-app updater, so no update check, and no analytics or crash reporting.

Past day thirty of an unpaid trial, growing the library — registering a new folder, running the importer, starting an index by hand — needs a licence. Search, tags, ratings, notes, canvases and the folder watcher all keep working permanently on whatever was already indexed, including every canvas already built.

Why the file format matters more than the interaction model

A canvas tool's pan-and-zoom interaction is roughly the same everywhere by now; what actually differs between them is what happens to the board once you stop paying for the app that made it. A board stored inside an application's own database or a hosted account is only as durable as that account. A board stored as Something.coii-canvas — plain JSON, readable with cat, sitting in the same folder as the images it names — answers the question a promise on a pricing page cannot: you can check it yourself, today, without asking anyone.

What panning and zooming actually cost on a large board

A canvas that holds a genuinely large number of high-resolution images only stays usable if panning and zooming stay smooth once it does, which is why Coii Ref draws from the same proxies the rest of the app already writes at index time rather than loading a full-resolution original every time a board scrolls. A board built from forty images behaves the same as one built from four; the cost of a large canvas is mostly the cost of the index that already happened, not something the canvas itself adds on top.

A board built for a decision, then kept after it is made

Not every canvas is a long-lived study — some exist to settle one question, like shortlisting five directions down to two before a meeting, and get opened rarely afterward. Keeping that board as a file rather than deleting it once the decision is made costs nothing and occasionally pays off: a similar decision eighteen months later starts from a shortlist someone already built, rather than from an empty canvas and the same scroll through source images all over again.

Comparing this to a board built inside a note-taking app

A gallery or a canvas view inside a note-taking or knowledge-management app is a reasonable way to arrange a handful of images alongside written notes, and for a small, mixed collection of text and pictures it can be enough. Where it tends to strain is a board built mostly of images at a size a reference study actually needs — a note app's canvas is typically secondary to its text, not built around large images as the primary content, and the board itself lives inside that app's own file format rather than as a standalone file naming images in a folder.

Building more than one board from the same source images

A single set of photographs often needs to answer more than one question, and duplicating the images to build a second board wastes disk space for no real benefit. Because a canvas references images by path rather than copying them into itself, the same source folder can back a palette study, a composition study and a client-facing shortlist as three separate .coii-canvas files, each one editable and rearrangeable on its own without any of the others noticing a change. Deleting one board does not touch the images it referenced, and none of the three needs to agree with the others about how anything should be arranged.

What a canvas remembers between sessions

Closing a canvas and reopening it later shows the same arrangement exactly as it was left — the same positions, the same groupings, nothing reflowed or auto-tidied in the meantime. That stability matters more than it sounds: a board built over several sittings, added to a little at a time as new reference turns up, stays coherent because nothing about it changes except what is deliberately changed. A canvas is not a live view that updates itself as the underlying folder changes; it is closer to a snapshot of a decision, which is exactly the property that makes it trustworthy to return to months later.

What moving a canvas to another Mac actually requires

A canvas naming images by relative path means the whole workspace has to travel together for the board to open correctly somewhere else — the .coii-canvas file, the folder of images it references, kept in the same relationship to each other. Copying the parent folder to another drive or another Mac and registering it there again is the entire migration step; there is no export format to generate first and no account to sign into on the other end, because the file was never anything other than what it already is.

Why the notes field on a canvas matters as much as the layout

Arranging images in space answers "what belongs together," but not always "why," and a board with no room to write that down loses the reasoning the moment whoever built it stops remembering. A short note attached to a canvas — why a particular image anchors a cluster, what a comparison was actually meant to prove — keeps that reasoning attached to the file itself, so opening the board a year later explains itself rather than requiring the person who built it to be in the room.

Who this actually suits

Anyone who thinks spatially about a reference collection and wants that arrangement to outlast the app that helped build it — a study, a palette board, a shortlist for a decision — kept as a file rather than a row in someone else's database. The round-up of infinite canvas apps for Mac covers the field if a collaborative or browser-based canvas is closer to the actual need, and the search-first page covers the other half of this app's job — finding what belongs on a canvas in the first place. A wider look at moodboard tools generally, canvas or otherwise, is at the moodboard app round-up.

Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account: download it and build the first board from whatever folder has been waiting for one. Save it beside the images it uses — that is the file you will still be able to open in ten years.