You want to lay out a set of images on a canvas — a shoot, a scene, a look — somewhere that does not care whether the wifi is on. Not because you distrust the internet in principle, but because the last three tools you tried for this all put a login screen between you and the board the moment the connection dropped, and a moodboard tool that stops working exactly when you are away from a desk is not doing the one job it was for.
Where "just use folders" and "just use a hosted board" both fall short
Finder gets you a grid of thumbnails and nothing to arrange them with — no canvas, no layering, no way to keep forty images from one shoot spatially related to each other the way a board does. That much is obvious, which is why people reach for a dedicated tool. The less obvious failure shows up in the tool they reach for next: most moodboard apps built in the last five years are web apps first, and a web app needs a server to talk to before it will show you anything, including a board you made yesterday on the same machine. Take the connection away and the app does not degrade gracefully — it shows a login screen, a spinner, or a cached view that will not let you add anything new until it can reach home again.
Building the board from what is already indexed, not what you just uploaded
The search runs against a local index built from folders already on the Mac, so there is no upload step standing between "I have these images" and "I can see all of them that match." Type, tag, rating and date are AND'd together in one line; a comma list inside one key is an OR. Save the string as a view and it re-parses on open rather than remembering a fixed list of files, so renaming a tag next month does not quietly orphan a board's shortlist.
The board itself, as a file rather than a session on a server
A .coii-canvas is written to disk the moment you save it, in whichever
folder you chose. There is no draft state living only on a server and no sync
step that has to finish before the board is "really" saved — the file on disk
is the board, which is also why it opens identically whether the machine
that opens it has a connection or not.
What actually needs a network, and what never does
Two kinds of outbound request happen across the app's entire life: the
licence check when you press Activate, and a single read of a server's Date
header at launch, used only to stop a clock wound backward from stretching a
trial. Neither of those touches search, tags, canvases or the folder watcher
that keeps the index current — all of it runs the same with the router off as
it does on office wifi. That is a different claim from "works offline as a
fallback mode": there is no online mode to fall back from, because nothing
about opening a board or running a search was ever routed through a server in
the first place.
Tags and ratings that do not depend on a server being reachable
Rating an image, adding a note, or applying a tag are all writes to a local database sitting inside the folder you pointed the app at, not calls to a server that has to acknowledge them before they count. That distinction is easy to miss until it matters: a hosted tool that queues an edit while offline and syncs it later is still, structurally, a tool where "offline" means "pending," and a pending edit can fail to sync, conflict with a version made on another device, or simply sit unsent if you forget to reopen the app before the trip ends. Here there is no queue, because there was never a second copy of the data anywhere else to reconcile with. Rate a hundred images on a plane with the connection off and land with a hundred images rated — not a hundred pending writes.
Sending a board without putting it through anyone's cloud
A board built from tags and ratings applied this way can be handed off as soon as it is saved. There is nothing to wait for and nothing to check the sync status of first.
has:notes tag:any:approved finds the plates a client already signed off on;
rating:>=4 -is:favourite finds what is strong but not yet pinned to
anything. Both run the instant you type them, against whatever was indexed
the last time the watcher saw the folder change.
A board built this way leaves the machine the same way any file does — as an attachment, on a shared drive, over AirDrop. There is no share link to generate, no permission to set, and nothing waiting on a server to notice the recipient opened it. The tradeoff is real and worth saying plainly: the person on the other end needs Coii Ref installed to see the canvas rendered, since there is no web viewer standing in for one. Where a board's whole point is a link a stranger can click with nothing installed, that is a job a hosted tool does and this one does not try to.
Video on the same board, without a bigger upload to wait on
Boards that mix stills and clips are exactly where a hosted tool's dependence on a connection gets expensive — uploading video is slow even on a fast connection, and slower still on the hotel wifi where a "no account, no connection" tool actually earns its keep. Coii Ref indexes video on the same pass as images, with the same tags and ratings reachable from the same query line, and writes canvas-resolution proxies beside the originals so a board of six clips scrolls like a board of six photographs rather than stalling on the first frame — all of it against files that were never sent anywhere to begin with.
Backing up a board that never lived in someone else's cloud
A hosted board's backup story is whatever the vendor's infrastructure
happens to guarantee, and it is rarely spelled out beyond "we take backups."
A .coii-canvas and the images it names are backed up the same way anything
else in that folder is: copy the folder to an external drive, or let whatever
already backs up the Mac keep doing its job, and the board travels with
everything else in it — no export step, no account-side archive to trust, and
no risk that a service shutting down takes a board down with it. Restoring is
just as plain: put the folder back, open the file, and the canvas renders
exactly as it did before, because nothing about it depended on a server
remembering who you were.
Where a login genuinely buys you something this app does not
Milanote and Are.na are both good at the thing an account is actually for: Milanote's boards can be shared live and edited by other people watching the same canvas update in real time, and Are.na's channels connect blocks across other people's collections, which only works because there is a server in the middle keeping everyone's view in sync. An account is the price of that, and it is a fair trade if collaboration or a public network is the actual job. Coii Ref has no answer for either — no live cursors, no comment thread, no public channel — because the entire design starts from the opposite premise: one person, one Mac, files that stay files.
What the index reads before you ever set a filter
Registering a folder reads dimensions, EXIF and colour off every image and
clip in it, so a filter like width:>=2400 or a sort by colour works without
any manual tagging first — the data was already inside the files, and
indexing only makes it queryable. None of that reading is written back into
the originals, and none of it requires a connection either: it is a local
pass over local files, the same whether the Mac running it has ever been
online at all. A folder copied fresh onto a brand-new machine, with the wifi
never turned on, indexes exactly the same way it would with a full-speed
connection sitting idle in the background.
What it costs and what it runs on
$19 once, for three Macs, with updates included and nothing that renews. The trial runs the full 30 days with every feature on, and starting it needs no card and no account — the same "no account" the rest of this page is about applies to buying it, not just using it. It requires macOS 11 Big Sur or later, built natively for Apple Silicon and Intel rather than shipped as one universal binary.
An unpaid trial past day thirty stops one category of action — registering a new folder or running the importer — while everything that already exists keeps working for good: opening boards, searching, tagging, rating, and the folder watcher that keeps all of it honest as files move around underneath it.
Who this actually suits
Someone building boards from a personal or small-team library who has been burned, at least once, by a tool that would not open on a train — or who simply does not want another login sitting between them and a folder of their own pictures. The trial is the honest way to find out which camp you are in: turn the wifi off on purpose for a day, build a real board from a real folder, and see whether anything about the workflow actually needed a connection at any point. If nothing did, the "no account" part of this page was never a compromise to begin with — it was just describing how the app already worked. If the board is meant to be a live collaborative surface with several people editing at once, Milanote does that job properly and this app does not compete with it there. If the appeal is a public, connected collection you browse alongside strangers with similar taste, that is Are.na's job, and the wider offline round-up covers what else holds up with the wifi off.
For the search this app is actually built around, the reference-manager version of this page goes deeper on finding things before you ever open a canvas, and the plain moodboard page covers boards from the file-format side rather than the connectivity side. If the recurring bill is the bigger objection than the login screen, the one-time-purchase angle is written from that side of the same decision.
Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account: download it and build one board with the connection off on purpose, before you ever need it to actually be off.