A board made of files you already had, not uploads you just made

Most moodboard apps start from an empty canvas and ask you to bring images to it — dragged from Finder, pasted from a browser, uploaded one at a time. If your actual problem is that you already have thousands of reference images on disk and the board only ever needed forty of them, that first step is the slow one, and it is the step this app skips.

Where a folder of images stops being enough for a board

Dragging files onto a canvas works fine for the first board. By the fifth or sixth, two things start going wrong. The originals scattered across boards are now duplicated in spirit if not in bytes — the same texture shot ends up pasted into three different canvases because you forgot it was already on one — and there is no way to ask "which of my images have never made it onto a board at all," because a folder of files and a stack of boards do not know about each other.

The second failure shows up when a board's source app is a hosted one: the canvas is a row in an account, and the images inside it were uploaded, which means there are now two copies of everything that mattered enough to board — one in your folders, one in someone else's storage, gradually drifting apart as you edit one and forget the other exists.

Finding the forty before you touch a canvas

The query line is what replaces scrolling a folder tree looking for the right material. type:image and type:video filter by kind, tag:any:a,b matches either tag, rating:>=4 keeps only what you starred well, and width:>=2400 filters out anything too small to hold up printed large. AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses. A saved view stores the text and re-parses it on open, so renaming a tag later does not quietly break the shortlist you built around it.

The board itself, as a file rather than a row

Drag a shortlist onto a canvas and the result is Something.coii-canvas, saved wherever you choose in your own folders. It names the files it uses; it does not copy them. That means the canvas diffs in git, syncs through whatever you already sync a folder with, and opens in a plain text editor if you ever want to check what it actually contains — a claim you can verify with cat rather than take on trust.

Video on the same board as stills

A board that mixes photographs and film stills is common in this category and poorly served by most tools built primarily for images. Coii Ref indexes video on the same pass as images — same tags, same ratings, same query line — and writes canvas-resolution proxies beside the originals, so a board with six clips on it scrolls and previews like a board of nine photographs rather than stalling on the first one.

type:video ext:mov rating:>=4        the clips worth keeping
has:notes no:tags                    written up, not yet filed

What gets read off an image before it ever reaches a board

Indexing a folder reads dimensions, EXIF and colour off every file in it, so a search like width:>=2400 or a sort by colour works without any manual tagging first — the data was already inside the file, and indexing only makes it queryable. Nothing is written back into the original: a .coii-canvas names paths, and the files it points at are never touched, moved or renamed by the act of putting them on a board.

That distinction matters more here than in a plain search tool, because a board is exactly the moment most apps in this category start copying files. Dragging an image into a browser-based board usually means uploading it. Dragging it onto a Coii Ref canvas means recording where it already is.

Tags and ratings a board can be built from directly

tag:any:texture,fabric rating:>=4      the strong material studies
has:notes no:tags                      annotated, not yet filed
added:>2026-03 -is:favourite           recent, not already pinned

A board built from a search rather than from memory tends to be more consistent, because the query surfaces everything that matches rather than whatever you happen to remember saving. Rate images as you collect them across projects and a future board is a query away rather than a new round of scrolling through folders trying to recall which ones were good.

Rebuilding a board when the source folder changes

Boards do not freeze the moment they are saved. A .coii-canvas names files by path, and if the underlying folder keeps growing — more shoots, more scans, more clips — the board itself does not automatically pull in new matches, but the search that built it still can. Re-running the same query a month later and dragging the new results onto the same canvas is the normal way a board stays current, rather than a special "refresh" feature: the canvas is a file you add to, the same way you would add rows to a spreadsheet.

If a whole folder gets moved to another drive — a project wraps and its material moves to cold storage — the canvas moves with it as long as the relative layout of files inside that folder does not change, since the watcher keeps the index and the canvas in the same state as the disk beneath them.

Several boards, one collection underneath

A common failure in board-first tools is the same image getting re-collected into three different canvases because there was no way to check whether it was already boarded somewhere else. Since Coii Ref indexes the folder rather than the boards, the underlying image exists exactly once regardless of how many canvases reference it — checking whether something has already been used elsewhere is a search (tag:used-on-board, if you tag that way) rather than a memory test across every board you have ever made.

What a board on this app does not do

Worth stating plainly rather than discovering it later. There is no comment thread on a canvas, no link you send a client that opens live in a browser, and no real-time cursor from a second person editing alongside you. If the job is a workshop session with several people moving things at once, that is a different tool's job — Miro and similar apps exist specifically for it, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

Backing up a board, and what "losing" one actually means here

Because a canvas is a plain file naming other plain files, backing it up is the same job as backing up the folder it lives in — no separate export step, no account-side backup you have to trust, no service that could shut down and take the board with it. Copy the folder to an external drive, and the canvas, the images it references and the thumbnails Coii Ref generated all travel together. Open that copy on a second Mac with Coii Ref installed and the board renders exactly as it did on the first machine, because nothing about it depended on that machine specifically.

The one way to actually lose a board is the same way you would lose any file: delete it, or delete the images it points at without a copy existing elsewhere. Uninstalling Coii Ref does not touch either — the canvas file and the images it names stay on disk exactly as they were, readable as plain JSON even without the app installed to render them as a grid.

What it costs and what it runs on

$19 once, for three Macs, with updates included and nothing that renews. The trial runs 30 days with every feature turned on, no card and no account needed to start it. It requires macOS 11 Big Sur or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel, built natively for both rather than run through one universal binary.

Two kinds of outbound request happen in the app's whole life: the licence check on Activate, and a launch-time read of a server's Date header only, so that a clock wound backward cannot extend a trial. There is no in-app updater and therefore no update check, and no analytics or crash reporting.

An unpaid trial past day thirty stops one category of action — registering a new folder, running the importer, starting a fresh index by hand — while everything that reads keeps working for good: search, tags, ratings, notes, canvases and thumbnails, plus the folder watcher that keeps the index honest as files move around underneath it.

What switching costs, if you already board somewhere else

Moving from a hosted board to this one is not an import, because there is nothing to import a board into — a canvas is built once, from a search, not carried across from another app's format. What actually moves is the images, and they were already on your Mac before you ever uploaded copies of them anywhere. Point Coii Ref at the folder they live in, let the first index finish, and rebuild the handful of boards that still matter by searching for what was on them. For most people that is a handful of canvases, not hundreds, because most boards in a hosted tool were made for one project and never opened again once it shipped.

What does not come across at all: any writing, to-do items or comments a hosted board held, since a .coii-canvas places images and nothing else. Where a board was mostly notes with a few images attached, this app is not the replacement for it — keep the hosted tool for that specific board and use this one for the boards that were really about pictures.

Who this actually suits

Someone who already keeps a real folder of images and video, who boards occasionally rather than constantly, and for whom the board was always the small visible output of a much bigger private collection rather than the whole job. If your boards are mostly for showing someone else, live, with comments attached, the honest answer is a hosted tool — the full moodboard round-up sorts by exactly that question and does not put this app first for every row.

If you are weighing this specifically against the tools people already board with, Milanote does writing and sharing that this app has no answer for, and PureRef floats a scene over whatever you are painting in, which is a different job again. For the one-time-purchase side of this same question, the Milanote round-up goes deeper. And if the board is genuinely secondary to search across thousands of files, the reference-manager version of this page is written from that angle rather than this one.

Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account: download it and see whether a query line replaces the scrolling before the first board gets made. Index one real folder during the trial rather than a handful of test images — the difference only shows up at the size a real collection actually reaches.