Eagle's own support article is direct about how it works: it copies files to the library when importing, rather than creating index links to the originals. That is a reasonable design and it is why Eagle can promise things about integrity that an indexer cannot. It also means that somewhere on your disk there are two populations of the same pictures — whatever you dragged in, and the copies Eagle keeps inside its own library package — and the first honest thing to say about this migration is that step one is not "install Coii Ref." It is getting a clean set of files back out of Eagle's library and onto disk as folders you control, because Coii Ref only knows how to index a folder; it has no idea what an Eagle library file even is.
Say the rest of the concession up front too. Coii Ref has exactly one importer, and it reads a refern library. There is no Eagle importer, and nothing here is going to describe a shortcut that does not exist. What follows is the honest manual path: export, index, and re-apply what an importer would otherwise have done for you.
What carries across, and what does not
| Carries to Coii Ref | Notes | |
|---|---|---|
| Original image and video files | Yes, once exported | Eagle's own folder export writes them back onto disk as ordinary files; Coii Ref indexes that folder in place from there |
| Tags | Manually | Eagle's CSV export lists each file's name, tags and source URL — a checklist, not an automatic re-import |
| Ratings | No automatic path | Not part of the CSV or folder export; re-set by hand once the files are indexed |
| Notes | No automatic path | Same as ratings |
| Eagle's smart folders | No | Coii Ref has saved views instead, built from a query line you write yourself against the new workspace |
| Eagle's own folder-in-library structure | Reinvented, not copied | You choose the folder shape Coii Ref indexes; it does not have to match how Eagle laid out its library package |
| Fonts, PDFs, audio | No | Coii Ref indexes images and video only |
| A Windows-side Eagle library | No | Coii Ref is macOS 11 or later, nothing else |
The pattern is the mirror image of moving from refern: there, an importer matches metadata to files by path and most of it survives. Here, nothing matches anything, because nothing reads Eagle's library format at all. The files themselves come across intact. Everything you did to organise them inside Eagle you either rebuild or accept the loss of.
~/Pictures/Reference- Concept
- Lighting
- Palettes
- coii-thumbnailswritten by Coii Ref
- coii-proxieswritten by Coii Ref
- coii.dbwritten by Coii Ref
Why export comes before anything else
Eagle's own two export tools are the ones that matter here, and it is worth using the right one rather than dragging files out of a Finder window into the library package, which is not how Eagle expects to be read from. Export folder from Eagle libraries to your computer recreates your Eagle folder tree as real folders of real files on disk — this is the one to run, because it gives Coii Ref exactly what it wants, a directory it can point at. Export to computer is the finer-grained tool if you would rather pull specific selections out folder by folder instead of the whole library at once.
Neither export touches what is inside the Eagle library itself. You are writing a second, independent set of files, which is also why it is safe to do slowly, folder by folder, while Eagle keeps running exactly as it did.
Before you start
Three things about your own library change how long this actually takes, and they are worth checking before you export the first folder rather than discovering them halfway through.
How much of it you actually use. Eagle libraries tend to accumulate a long tail of imports nobody has opened in years — a folder from an old client, a dump of reference nobody sorted. Exporting everything is the simplest plan, but exporting only the groups you still open is often faster and produces a Coii Ref workspace you will actually keep tagging, rather than one where most of the backlog is stuff you were never going to look at again.
Whether the library only lives on one machine. If Eagle's library sits on a drive shared between a desktop and a laptop, decide up front whether you want one Coii Ref workspace per drive or a single exported folder you sync between them. Coii Ref does not care which — a workspace is just a folder plus what it writes beside it — but deciding once avoids ending up with two half-tagged copies.
How many of your tags are actually load-bearing. Open Eagle's tag list and look at how many tags have a handful of files against them versus the handful that structure the whole library. The CSV export below is comprehensive, but for most people, only the second group is worth re-applying by hand; the long tail of one-off tags is usually safe to let go.
The steps
1. Decide the folder shape you actually want. This is the one point in the whole migration where you get a free redo. Eagle's folder tree grew over however many years you have used it, and mirroring it exactly is not required — Coii Ref only needs a directory it can walk, not a specific shape. Most people either mirror what they had or use the move as a chance to flatten a few layers of folders that stopped meaning anything years ago.
2. Export folder by folder from Eagle. Run the folder export against the top-level groups you use, landing them somewhere Coii Ref will later be pointed at. For a large library this is the slow step, and it is worth doing it a section at a time rather than exporting everything at once and hoping nothing needs correcting partway through.
3. Export the CSV alongside it, and keep it. It will not go anywhere automatically, but it is the ground truth for what each file used to be tagged as, and the checklist you will actually use in step 5.
4. Install Coii Ref and point a new workspace at the exported folder. Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account. This is a read pass: Coii Ref reads each file's dimensions, EXIF and colour and writes a thumbnail and a proxy beside it, without touching what you just exported.
5. Re-apply tags and ratings as you actually use the folder, using the
CSV as a reference rather than a re-tagging weekend. A no:tags search in
Coii Ref shows you exactly what is left to do, which shrinks every time you
touch the library rather than all at once on day one.
What you are giving up
State this plainly, because a migration page that only lists what survives is not being straight with you. Eagle is the broader tool on almost every axis that matters to an organiser: colour search, search by image, automatic tagging from folders, duplicate detection, a browser extension for saving directly from a page, a plugin centre, password-protected libraries, and support for any file format rather than images and video alone. It also runs on Windows as well as macOS, which Coii Ref does not. None of that comes back after this migration, and nothing described above adds it.
What you get instead is a folder that is genuinely yours again — nothing copied into an application's own package, nothing to export a second time if you ever want to leave Coii Ref too — searched from one query line, at $19 once for three Macs rather than $34.95 once for two. If the reason you are reading this is the price or the folder ownership, that trade is real. If it is because Eagle feels heavy for what you actually use it for, read what Eagle actually offers once more before you commit an afternoon to exporting — narrowing on purpose is a fine reason to switch, narrowing by accident is not.
A worked example
Say your Eagle library holds about eighteen thousand images across six top-level groups, built up over three years of client work, with maybe a third of it tagged and rated with any consistency. Exporting all six groups in one sitting is possible but not pleasant, so a more realistic plan is three passes.
First, export the two groups you actually opened this month, using the folder export so the structure comes across intact. Point a new Coii Ref workspace at the result and let the first index run — for a few thousand files that is minutes, not hours. Pull the CSV for those same two groups and use it to re-apply the tags that mattered while the library is still fresh in your head.
Second, export the groups you open occasionally — old client work you might still need to reference — into their own folders. These do not need the same tagging effort immediately; indexing them is enough to make them searchable, and the tags can be filled in the first time you actually go looking for something in them.
Third, decide honestly about the rest. A folder from a client you have not heard from in two years is either worth exporting for the record or worth leaving inside Eagle as an archive you keep the licence around for, and either answer is fine — this migration does not require an all-or-nothing choice, and treating Eagle as a read-only archive for the parts of the library you rarely touch is a completely reasonable place to stop.
Total time for a library that size is dominated by how much you choose to export and re-tag, not by Coii Ref's own indexing, which runs unattended once pointed at a folder. Across the three passes, the actual hands-on time is closer to a handful of evenings spread over a couple of weeks than one long weekend, which is also why treating this as staged rather than all-at-once tends to be the plan people actually finish rather than abandon halfway through the second group.
How to verify nothing was lost
Do this before you let an Eagle licence lapse, not after.
Count files, not folders. Compare the number of images and clips Eagle reports for a group against what Coii Ref's workspace shows after indexing the matching export. A folder export should be exact; if it is not, a file was skipped on the way out and is worth tracking down before you trust the rest.
Use the CSV as the tagging checklist, not a formality. Open it beside Coii Ref and work through the files that mattered most — the highly rated ones, the ones with the longest tag lists — re-applying tags as you go. You are not obligated to restore every tag on every file; most libraries have tags that stopped being load-bearing years before the migration did.
Keep Eagle installed until you are sure. Exporting does not remove anything from Eagle's own library, so there is no cost to leaving it in place for a few weeks as a reference while the new workspace gets tagged back up to something you trust.
Worth reading next: the full Coii Ref vs Eagle comparison goes through every row Eagle wins honestly, which is most of them. Best Eagle alternatives is the wider round-up if Coii Ref is not the right fit once you have read the concession above. Does Eagle copy your files is the one-paragraph version of the fact this whole page is built on, and Eagle libraries duplicating disk space and Eagle slowing down with large libraries are the two symptoms that tend to be the actual reason people start this export in the first place. If PureRef is also in the running, Eagle vs PureRef is the page for that decision. And what happens to a library if the app behind it stops shipping is worth reading regardless of which way this goes. Otherwise, the 30-day trial is the fastest way to find out whether the folder you just exported is one you would rather keep searching this way.