A design review is in an hour, and the precedent is on a drive from three projects ago

A principal asks for "something like the exposed-concrete stair we did on the museum job" during a review scheduled to start in an hour, and whether that request gets answered well depends less on the drafting software than on whether the museum project's precedent photos are actually findable, or only theoretically still somewhere on the firm's server.

What a firm's precedent library turns into after a few projects

It is rarely one tidy archive. Site visit photos from every project a firm has worked on, precedent photography gathered for a competition entry, renders kept for how a material read in a past scheme, phone photos of a detail spotted on an unrelated building — all of it collecting in folders named after whichever project needed it at the time. That holds up for one job. It stops holding up the moment a new review needs "the stair from the museum job," because the folder it lives in is named after a project that closed out two years ago.

A material or a form, found by what it is rather than which project it was for

Tag a site photo, a render or a piece of precedent photography for what it demonstrates — exposed-concrete, cantilever, brutalist, top-lit — and it stays reachable regardless of which project's folder it lives in: type:image picks the media, tag:any:a,b matches either tag, rating:>=4 keeps it to precedent that actually made it into a past scheme. AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses.

type:image tag:any:top-lit,atrium rating:>=3    daylighting precedent, rated
has:notes no:tags                                annotated but never filed
in:Museum-Project tag:any:stair                  one project's stair studies only

A term the parser does not recognise renders as free text rather than an error, so a half-remembered material name still returns something worth narrowing from.

Keeping a tag vocabulary consistent across projects

A firm that has run a dozen projects accumulates its own private shorthand for precedent — "the museum stair," "the atrium we studied for the competition" — and that shorthand only pays off if it is applied the same way every time rather than reinvented project to project. Deciding early that a material or a form is always tagged by what it is rather than by which project first studied it means tag:any:exposed-concrete finds every relevant photo in one line two years from now, rather than finding half of them because half were filed under a slightly different word for the same material. The tag itself is just text typed into the app; using the same word twice is the only discipline involved, and it is far cheaper to keep from the start than to fix retroactively across a dozen projects of folders.

Renaming a tag later does not mean re-tagging every file by hand. A saved view built on a tag re-parses its query every time it opens, so correcting the tag on the files that carry it is enough — any view built against it simply reflects the fix from then on.

Working with a second architect on the same project drive

A firm's project rarely has one person touching the precedent folder — a project architect curating the direction and a junior staff member pulling site photos and precedent images through the week. Because the database, thumbnails and proxies all live inside the project folder on the shared drive itself rather than inside a separate account, a second person working from the same mounted drive sees the same tags and ratings the moment their own copy of the app re-scans the folder — there is no server keeping two people in sync, only the same folder both machines happen to be reading. Licensing covers three Macs on one purchase, which in practice covers a project architect's desktop, a laptop and a second staff seat without a second payment, though each machine keeps its own local index rather than updating live the way a hosted tool would.

Comparing this to precedent already kept in Adobe Bridge

Some firms already keep a project's images organised in Adobe Bridge as part of an existing Creative Cloud workflow, browsing folders by thumbnail without a search line. Coii Ref's difference is the query line itself: tag:any:exposed-concrete rating:>=4 reaches across every project's folder in one search, where Bridge's browsing is built around looking at one folder at a time. Neither tool copies a file anywhere, which is worth knowing if the point of comparison is really about what happens to the images rather than about how they are found.

A precedent board for the review, sitting in the project folder

Dragging a shortlist onto a canvas turns it into a .coii-canvas file — pretty-printed JSON saved wherever the current project's other files already live, next to the drawing set and the specification, rather than inside a separate application's storage. It names the images it uses without copying them, so the board can be sent over the firm's shared drive along with everything else for the review and moves with the project folder if that folder ever changes drives.

Comparing this to a review board the whole studio marks up together

A lot of design reviews happen on a shared digital whiteboard where several people are annotating the same board with cursors and sticky notes at once, which is Miro's job, not this app's. Coii Ref has no account, no sharing link and no real-time cursor — it is a single-user Mac application. Where a review needs several people marking up one board live, Miro is the tool for that step; what this app answers is the step before it, finding which precedent belongs on the board in the first place.

Comparing this to precedent pinned over a model while designing

A different, earlier stage of the job is pinning a single precedent image directly over a 3D modelling window while working through a form, which is PureRef's job — always on top, transparent to mouse clicks, floating over whatever else is open. Coii Ref does not do that; it answers which precedent, out of a firm's whole project history, is actually the right one to pin to the floating board to begin with.

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 whole outbound network activity is a licence check on Activate and a launch-time read of a server's Date header, 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.

Working across a firm server and a personal machine

A firm's precedent archive usually lives on a shared drive mounted by several machines, and an individual architect often keeps a personal precedent folder built up across firms and years. Coii Ref treats each folder registered as its own self-contained workspace, so the shared drive can be indexed on a studio machine while a personal archive is indexed separately on a laptop, with each machine building its own local index of the same or different files. Nothing about that setup requires a server or an account beyond what the firm already runs. Licensing covers three Macs on one purchase, which in practice covers a studio desktop, a laptop and a second seat without a second payment.

What a shelved project's precedent research is still worth

A competition entry that does not get built does not have to take its precedent research down with it, provided that research was tagged by what it demonstrates rather than only by the project it was gathered for. An exposed-concrete study gathered for a competition that never broke ground is exactly as useful the next time a similar material comes up on an unrelated job, found by tag:any:exposed-concrete regardless of which project's folder it happened to sit in.

What a site visit's phone photos are still worth a year later

A site visit usually produces a burst of phone photos taken in an afternoon — a detail worth remembering, a material seen used well on someone else's building, a condition worth flagging — and that material is easy to lose track of because it was never gathered with a specific project in mind. Registering the folder it landed in costs nothing beyond the first index, and tagging each photo by what it actually shows rather than by the site visit it was taken on means a cantilever detail photographed eighteen months ago surfaces next to one photographed last week, from the same tag:any:cantilever search. Which site visit a photo came from stops mattering the moment it is tagged by what it demonstrates.

The same habit pays off across an entire career rather than just one project. An architect who has been photographing details and materials on site visits for a decade has, without ever meaning to build one, a private precedent library that is often more specific to their own judgement than any published precedent study — the details that actually got specified on a past job, not a generic category a textbook sells by the chapter. That library is only worth what it is worth once it can be searched by what is in the photo rather than by which project's folder it happened to sit in, and a phone photo taken in a hurry on a site walk is exactly as searchable as a formally commissioned precedent photograph once both carry the same tag.

Who this actually suits

Someone at a firm with a real accumulation of precedent photography and site photos across more than one project, working to a review schedule where re-finding a precedent beats re-searching image sites from scratch. If the review itself needs several people marking up one board with cursors and comments, Miro answers that step more directly. Against the most capable full library in this category, refern adds an on-device tagger and search by meaning that this app does not have — worth fifteen minutes if a bigger, pricier tool is still on the table. The general search argument without the architecture framing is at the reference-manager page, and the moodboard-focused version covers what happens once a shortlist becomes a board.

Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account: download it and point it at whatever project drive has the deepest precedent history already on it. Tag last project's strongest references first — that is the search that answers "something like the museum job's stair" before the review starts, not after.