Ten years of your own style studies, finally searchable

An illustrator's Mac tends to hold two libraries that never talk to each other: the photo reference and mood collections saved for jobs, and the illustrator's own back catalogue — sketches, finished pieces, abandoned studies — exported and forgotten in whatever folder felt right at the time. Both are useful for the same reason on a new brief, and neither is easy to search once either one passes a few thousand files.

Why a style folder stops being browsable

A working illustrator accumulates reference for a reason a photographer or a 3D artist does not: half of what gets saved is not somebody else's work at all, it is a past attempt of your own — a palette that worked, a linework style tried once for an editorial job, a character pose that reads well. Scrolling a folder to find "the loose ink thing I did two summers ago" is slow specifically because nothing about the filename says what made it worth keeping. The same problem hits saved photo reference the moment a job wants "something like that anatomy study from the children's-book project," and the only way to find it is remembering which folder you filed it under at the time, which is exactly the kind of memory that fails under a deadline.

Finding a style, not a filename

Tag as you finish a piece or save a reference — linework, gouache-look, limited-palette, whatever the actual visual property is — and the query line reaches all of it later, whether the file is your own export or somebody else's photograph: type:image narrows to stills, tag:any:a,b matches either tag, rating:>=4 surfaces what you rated well, -is:favourite excludes what is already pinned somewhere active. AND across keys, OR inside a comma list, no parentheses needed.

tag:any:childrens-book,editorial rating:>=4      past work by kind of job
has:notes no:tags                                annotated but never filed
added:>2025-01 tag:any:gouache-look               last year's studies only

A folder does not need reorganising for this to work — the query reaches into subfolders regardless of how the collection is actually laid out on disk, so a "sort it properly one day" backlog is not a prerequisite.

A moving reference next to a still one, on the same board

Dragging a shortlist onto a canvas produces a plain JSON file, saved wherever the project already lives, naming the images it uses without copying them. A pitch board can mix your own prior work with saved photography exactly the same way, because the app makes no distinction between the two kinds of file — both are images to the index, and both take tags, ratings and a place on a canvas identically.

Your own back catalogue as searchable reference

The habit worth building specifically for illustration is treating finished work the same as any other saved reference: export a flattened copy into the folder you index, tag it by style and subject the way you would tag a photograph, and a technique from three years ago stops being something you half-remember and becomes something tag:any:crosshatch returns alongside whatever inspired it originally. Nothing about the source file needs touching for this — the export lives beside the working file, not instead of it, and only the export needs to be inside the registered folder.

Photo reference, without pretending to be a DAM for client assets

Illustration jobs often arrive with a folder of art-directed reference — product shots, a location scout, a real person to draw from — that needs to sit alongside your own collected material for the length of one project and then mostly stop mattering. Drop it into a project folder inside the workspace already registered and the watcher picks it up without an import step; tag it loosely by project rather than trying to fold it permanently into a long-term taxonomy, since most of it is job-specific and will not be searched again once the piece ships.

Research references that only matter for one assignment

Some briefs need a burst of real research that has nothing to do with an ongoing style practice — a historically accurate costume, the correct anatomy of an animal never drawn before, a specific architectural period. That kind of reference is disposable in a way personal style studies are not: it earns its keep for one job and rarely gets searched again once the piece ships. It still belongs in the same workspace, tagged loosely by subject and by the job it was gathered for, because the alternative — a separate scratch folder outside the indexed library — is exactly the kind of thing that gets lost the next time a similar brief comes in eighteen months later and nobody remembers where the costume research went.

tag:any:victorian,costume added:>2025-01     last year's period research
tag:any:animal-anatomy -tag:used             research not yet drawn from

Tagging research-only reference the same way as a long-term style study costs nothing extra at the point of saving it, and it means "have I drawn a Victorian costume before" stops being a question answered by memory and starts being one answered by a query line.

What actually gets indexed, and what does not

Coii Ref reads images and video into its index. A layered working file — a .psd, a .procreate document, a .clip file — is not indexed and does not appear in search results; this is a library for finished exports and saved reference, not for the working files an illustration is built in. Where a flattened export or a screenshot of a working file is saved alongside the source, that export is an ordinary image and searches like any other, while the layered original stays exactly where the drawing application already keeps it.

When "similar to that other job" is the actual brief

tag:any:limited-palette,flat-color rating:>=4    the closest past match
type:image tag:any:portrait width:>=2000         usable-resolution portraits

A surprising amount of illustration work is answering "can you do something like the thing you did for [other client]" — which only works quickly if the old piece and the reference that fed it are both still findable months or years later. Rating a piece well when it ships and tagging it by its visual qualities, not just its client name, is what makes that question answerable in one query instead of a scroll through an exports folder.

Building a folder shape that survives more than one style

Illustrators who take on varied briefs tend to land on organising by visual quality rather than by project — Linework, Flat color, Painterly, Limited palette — with a tag for the client or job layered on top, because a folder-per-project structure answers "what did I do for them" but not "who has hired the loose-ink style before," and the second question is the one that actually predicts future work. Neither structure is required; the query line reaches subfolders the same way regardless of depth, so an existing mess of project folders does not need fixing before this becomes useful.

Comparing this to pinning references in your drawing app

Procreate's reference panel and Photoshop's floating window both work well for the single piece in front of you, and this page will not argue against either for that. Where they run out is afterward: once the piece ships, the pinned images are gone from view and rarely findable again without opening the file they were pinned inside. Registering the same folder of source images with Coii Ref does not change how you pin references while drawing — it means the version outside the working file stays searchable on its own, independent of which piece it was originally pinned for.

Working between a home studio and a laptop taken to client meetings

Freelance illustration work often means keeping the main reference and back-catalogue folder on a home desktop while a laptop travels to pitches and client sessions. Registering the same folder — over a shared drive, or a copy kept in sync however files already move between the two machines — on both Macs gives each one its own local index of the same material, with no account or server required to keep them in step. Licensing covers three Macs on one purchase, which in practice covers a home desktop, a laptop and a backup machine without a second payment.

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. It needs macOS 11 Big Sur or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel, as two native builds rather than one shared binary.

Network activity is limited to 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 and therefore no update check, and no analytics or crash reporting of any kind.

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 keep working permanently, so nothing already indexed becomes unreadable.

What survives a change of drawing app

Illustration tools change more often across a career than most illustrators expect at the start of one — a new device, a new subscription model, a studio standardising on something different. None of that should threaten a reference library built from ordinary image files in ordinary folders, because nothing about Coii Ref ties the collection to a specific drawing application. Switching from one drawing tool to another means the working files change; the reference underneath, and the tags and ratings attached to it, do not need to move or be reformatted at all.

Who this actually suits

Someone with years of saved photo reference and their own back catalogue scattered across export folders, who wants both searchable by what they actually show rather than by which job they were filed under. If your reference use is mostly a handful of images pinned inside the drawing app while working on one piece, this is more than that job needs — a floating pin tool like PureRef answers it more directly.

For the broader argument without the illustration-specific detail, the general reference-manager page covers the same ground, and the moodboard-focused version picks up once a shortlist becomes a pitch board. Against the two most capable full libraries, refern adds an on-device tagger and search by meaning that this app does not attempt, and a side-by-side of the pinning tool most illustrators already know sits at Coii Ref vs PureRef — with a wider round-up of PureRef alternatives if a floating pin tool is still the more likely fit.

Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account: download it and point it at the folder where the reference and the back catalogue have both been sitting. Index the oldest export folder first — it is the one where a style you forgot you had turns out to already be exactly where you left it.