A PureRef board never owned your files. This migration is mostly about the layout.

Every other migration on this site starts with a fight over which app gets to hold your originals. This one does not, because PureRef was never in that fight to begin with — it is a window that shows you images, not a library that claims them. Whatever you dragged into a scene is still wherever it was, plus one arrangement of it living inside a .pur file. That changes what "migrating" even means here: the images were never trapped, so getting them out is the easy half. What does not have anywhere to go is the layout itself, the thing PureRef is actually good at, because nothing on the Coii Ref side reads a .pur scene at all.

Say that plainly before anything else. Coii Ref has exactly one importer, and it reads a refern library. There is no PureRef importer, and there will not be one that reads layout, because a .pur file and a Coii Ref workspace are different kinds of object — one is a picture of a desk, the other is an index of a drive.

What carries across, and what does not

The shape of that table is the opposite of moving from Eagle. There, the files are the fight and the metadata is a footnote because there was so little of it. Here, the files were never the issue, and everything genuinely lost is spatial — arrangement, drawing, grouping — because that is the whole of what a .pur scene actually stores beyond the pictures themselves.

Why this is really two separate decisions

Most people reading this are actually deciding two different things at once, and it helps to split them. The first is whether you still need the images — almost always yes, and the export below handles that in an afternoon regardless of how many scenes you have. The second is whether you need the arrangement preserved, scene by scene, and the honest answer for most working libraries is: for a handful of boards, yes, and for the other dozen .pur files sitting in a folder somewhere, the arrangement stopped mattering the day you moved on to a different project. Rebuild the ones you would actually reopen. Let the rest exist as a folder of images Coii Ref can find later, with no board attached, which is still strictly more useful than a .pur file nobody has opened in a year.

Before you start

Count your scenes, not your images. A PureRef library is usually a folder of .pur files rather than one big one, and the number that matters for planning this move is how many scenes you have, not how many images are in all of them combined — each scene is a separate export and a separate decision about whether to rebuild it.

Check which scenes actually have drawings or groups on them. PureRef's handbook documents drawing, notes, grouping and hierarchy as scene features; a plain wall of dragged-in images loses nothing but its position when it becomes a Coii Ref canvas, while a heavily annotated moodboard with circled details and grouped clusters loses the most and is the kind of scene worth asking honestly whether you need at all, versus keeping PureRef around specifically for it.

Know whether you are on personal or business licensing. PureRef's personal tier is pay-what-you-want and its business tier is $49 once for up to three seats or a per-seat subscription — if a studio is paying for seats, that is a separate conversation from an individual deciding whether to keep one personal install around for the boards that still need floating and drawing.

The steps

1. Export the images out of each scene you care about. PureRef's own handbook documents three export modes: the whole canvas as one flattened image, all images in a scene as separate files, or just a selection. For migrating a reference library, "all images as separate files" is almost always the one you want, kept in their original format rather than converted — the export dialog's cropping option decides whether you get the image as it was added or only the cropped, visible part, and for a library you are about to search you generally want the former.

2. Land each scene's export in its own folder. One folder per .pur file is a reasonable default and matches the tree above; it keeps the provenance of "this came from that scene" visible in your folder structure even after the scene itself is not being opened anymore.

3. Install Coii Ref and point a workspace at the parent folder. Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account. This is a read pass — Coii Ref reads dimensions, EXIF and colour from each file and writes a thumbnail and proxy beside it, without touching what PureRef just exported.

4. Rebuild the boards you actually still use. Not all of them — the ones you would reopen. A .coii-canvas is pretty-printed JSON in your own folder, arranged by hand rather than imported, which is slower than a one-click import would be and is also the honest cost of there being no importer for this format.

5. Re-type the comments that mattered. Most scenes have a handful of genuinely useful notes and a lot of ordinary ones; carry the first kind over as Coii Ref notes as you rebuild each board, and let the rest go rather than transcribing every comment on every image as a rule.

What you are giving up

Worth stating plainly, because PureRef remains the better tool at the one job it does. It floats — always on top, overlay mode, transparent to mouse, lock window — which is the actual reason people keep it open for entire working sessions, and Coii Ref is an ordinary window with none of that. You can draw and annotate directly on images, group and nest them into a hierarchy, and play GIFs inside the scene; none of that exists on the Coii Ref side. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, where Coii Ref is a Mac app only. And personal use is pay-what-you-want, including nothing at all, which $19 once is never going to undercut on price alone.

What you get instead is a workspace that finds things a board was never built to find — one query line across tags, ratings, notes, type and EXIF — and boards that, once rebuilt, are plain JSON files you can read, diff and back up like any other text file rather than scenes inside a format with its own version history to keep straight. If the floating window and the drawing tools are why you open PureRef, this migration trades away the actual reason and you should not make it. If you have quietly stopped opening PureRef because you cannot remember which of fourteen scenes has the image you want, that is the problem an index solves and a board never will.

A worked example

Say you have twenty-two .pur files built up over a couple of years — mostly single-project boards, plus three you still actively work from: an ongoing personal style board, a client's current moodboard, and a reference sheet you keep coming back to for one recurring subject.

Start with those three. Export all images from each as separate files, originals uncropped, into their own folders. Point a Coii Ref workspace at the parent folder and let indexing run — for the handful of images a working board actually holds, that finishes in seconds. Rebuild each of the three as a .coii-canvas, which is the slower step because it is manual, and re-type whichever comments on them you would actually miss.

For the other nineteen, export them too — the export itself costs nothing but a few minutes per scene — but do not commit to rebuilding any of them as canvases yet. Let them sit as plain indexed folders. The moment you go looking for something in one of them, which you can now do with a query instead of opening a .pur file and scanning it by eye, is the moment you find out whether that particular scene's arrangement was worth rebuilding or whether the images alone were always going to be enough.

This staged approach is the realistic version of "migrate everything" for most PureRef libraries: the boards you actually use get the full treatment immediately, and the rest earn it later, if at all, rather than costing you a weekend up front on layouts you may never open again. It also means the first thing you notice is not a pile of unfinished work but a workspace that already answers questions the old folder of .pur files never could, which is the point of doing this at all.

How to verify nothing was lost

Do this before you delete a .pur file, not after — exporting does not touch the original scene, so there is no rush.

Count images per scene. PureRef's selection panel shows how many images are in a scene; compare that to what shows up in Coii Ref after indexing the matching export folder. These should match exactly, since the export is a straight file-by-file write.

Open the rebuilt boards side by side with the originals. For any canvas you rebuilt, keep the original .pur open in one window and the new .coii-canvas in another, and confirm the images and their relative positions read the same, even if the exact pixel placement does not need to.

Keep the exported originals even after rebuilding a board. A canvas names images; it does not contain them. If you ever move or reorganise the underlying folder, the canvas needs those files to still be there, the same way it always did inside PureRef.

Give the scenes you decided not to rebuild a second look after a month. Some of them will genuinely never be opened again, and some will turn out to matter more than they seemed to on migration day — the honest way to tell the two apart is time, not a decision made all at once while you are still exporting everything else.

Worth reading next: the full Coii Ref vs PureRef comparison is the page that goes through what PureRef does better at length, including the case for just running both. Best PureRef alternatives is the wider round-up. Is PureRef free for commercial use and what to do when a PureRef file gets lost answer two questions people usually have already asked before they get here, and why PureRef can't search your images is the specific gap this migration exists to close. Also worth a look if Eagle is in the mix too: migrating from Eagle is a very different shape of move, almost entirely about files rather than layout. Otherwise, the 30-day trial is the fastest way to find out whether a searchable folder is what you actually needed instead of another board.