A miniature painter's colour memory is good for about a week. After that, the actual recipe — three thin coats, a specific contrast paint over a zenithal prime, a particular edge-highlight ratio — lives only in whatever photo was taken of the finished model, if one was taken at all, in whatever folder it landed in. A client asking for "that green again" six months later is really asking you to find a photo, not to remember a formula.
Where a painter's reference actually piles up
It starts as box art saved for colour inspiration, then a screenshot of someone else's paint job from a forum or a hobby group, then a photo of your own finished model taken to post for feedback, then a client's reference photo for a commission, then another screenshot of a tutorial you meant to follow. None of it gets named consistently, because none of it felt like it needed a system at the time it was saved. It only starts to matter the day a commission calls for a scheme you know you have done before and cannot place.
A scheme, found by its name rather than which model wore it
Tag a photo by the scheme it shows the moment you save it — nurgle-green,
contrast-over-zenithal, nmm-gold — and it stays reachable no matter which
model, army or client folder it eventually lands in. tag:any:a,b matches
either tag, rating:>=4 keeps the results to schemes that actually worked out
rather than every test swatch you have ever photographed.
tag:any:nmm-gold rating:>=4 non-metallic metal studies that held up
has:notes no:tags annotated but never actually filed
in:Commissions-2026 tag:any:zenithal this year's client folder onlyA word the parser does not recognise renders as free text rather than an error, so a half-remembered paint name still returns something to narrow down from.
Box art, forum screenshots and your own photos, searched as one set
A box art photo saved for its colour palette and a screenshot of a stranger's
paint job on a forum are different in origin but answer the same question —
"what did this scheme actually look like finished" — and neither needs its
own separate folder to be searchable alongside the other. Tag both by scheme
rather than by source, and tag:any:contrast-over-zenithal returns whichever
one actually matches, box art or screenshot alike.
Rating what actually survived being painted
Not every scheme photographed as a test swatch survives contact with an
actual model, and the gap rarely shows in the filename. Rating a photo once a
scheme has been painted on a real miniature and held up under normal light —
four stars for a green that reads well from across a table, one star for a
mix that looked fine on the palette and muddy on the model — turns
rating:>=4 into the shortlist worth reaching for on the next commission that
calls for something close, instead of a re-scroll through every test swatch
ever photographed.
A recipe kept next to the photo it belongs to
A recipe written down as a note attached to the photo it describes is easier to trust than one kept in a separate notebook that has to be cross-referenced by memory. Dragging the relevant photos onto a canvas and writing the coat order and paint names into its notes keeps the recipe and the visual proof of it in the same file, saved beside the commission's other working files rather than inside the app's own storage.
Keeping an army's scheme consistent across years of painting
An army painted over several years accumulates its own private shorthand —
"the green from the first ten Nurgle models," "the gold I used before I
switched brands" — and that shorthand only pays off if the same tag is used
every time a similar scheme comes up, rather than reinvented model by model.
Deciding early that a scheme is tagged by what it is rather than by which
batch of models it was first used on means tag:any:nurgle-green finds every
relevant photo three years later, not just the ones from the batch you happen
to remember tagging.
Renaming a tag later does not mean re-tagging every photo by hand. A saved view built on a tag re-parses its query every time it is opened, so fixing the tag on the files that carry it is enough — any view built against it reflects the correction from then on.
Client reference and your own test swatches, kept apart without separate folders
A commission client's own reference photo and a test swatch you photographed
while matching it are two different things that both belong to the same job.
Tagging them by scheme and by the client or commission name — rather than by
which of the two you happened to be looking at — means a search for either
one, tag:any:client-oakhurst or tag:any:nurgle-green, returns the right
set without needing the folder structure to separate them in advance.
What a competition entry's reference is still worth afterward
A scheme worked out carefully for a competition entry does not stop being useful once the model is judged and put on a shelf. Tagged by the scheme rather than by the competition it was entered into, that reference is exactly as findable the next time a similar commission comes in, months or years later, found by the same tag regardless of which show it was originally painted for.
Comparing this to pinning references straight from a browser
Some painters keep a running Pinterest board of schemes they like, which is a genuinely good way to collect ideas but does not double as a searchable record of what you yourself have actually mixed and painted before. Coii Ref answers the other half of that job: once an image — saved from anywhere, including a downloaded Pinterest photo — is sitting in a folder, it becomes searchable by the scheme it shows rather than by when you happened to pin it.
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 entire outbound network activity is a licence check on Activate and
a launch-time read of a server's Date header only, 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, one category of action stops: growing the library, meaning registering a new folder, running the importer or starting an index by hand. Search, tags, ratings, notes and the folder watcher all keep working permanently on whatever is already indexed, so a commission mid-way through does not stall because a trial ran out.
Working between a hobby room Mac and a laptop taken to a club night
A painter who works from a dedicated hobby setup at home and brings a laptop to a club painting night or a convention does not need one workspace to cover both. Register the main reference folder on the home Mac and, separately, a smaller travel folder of the current project's photos on the laptop — each builds its own local index, with nothing to sync and no account tying the two together. Licensing covers three Macs on one purchase, which in practice covers a desktop, a laptop and a phone-photo import machine without paying twice.
What a lighting box actually changes about a photo record
A phone photo taken under a desk lamp and one taken in a proper lighting
box of the same model can look like two different colours entirely, which
matters the moment a photo is meant to double as a colour record rather
than just a proof the model got finished. Tagging photos by whether they
were shot under consistent lighting — lightbox versus a quick phone snap
— means a search for a scheme's true colour can be scoped to the
trustworthy set with tag:any:lightbox, rather than mixing in a shot where
the green only looks that dark because of a warm bulb overhead.
Sharing one scheme without handing over the whole library
A client or a fellow painter asking to see how a specific scheme was built
does not need access to years of unrelated commission photos to see it.
Building a canvas for just that scheme and sending the .coii-canvas file
on its own — rather than an export of the whole workspace — keeps the rest
of the library private while still handing over exactly the reference
being asked for, with the images it names travelling alongside it if they
are copied together into a shared folder first.
What a client's own inconsistent reference actually needs
A commission client sending three photos of "the colour they want" that do
not quite agree with each other is a normal part of the job, not a sign the
client did something wrong. Saving all three into the commission's folder
and tagging them by what they actually show — warm-green, cool-green —
rather than picking one to trust and discarding the rest keeps the
disagreement itself visible and searchable, which is often more useful
during a paint session than a single photo that quietly hides how much
the client's own references disagree.
Comparing this to a library tool built around one managed collection
Eagle is a genuinely capable option for organising box art, screenshots and photos together and copies whatever is imported into its own managed library. Coii Ref indexes a painter's existing folders exactly where they sit instead, which matters most for anyone who already has years of commission photos filed the way they prefer and does not want a second, app-managed copy of all of it. The general reference manager page covers the underlying search argument without the paint-specific framing this page leads with, and a broader moodboard habit for collecting palette inspiration before a scheme is even chosen is closer to the graphic designer page.
Who this actually suits
Anyone whose paint-scheme reference has quietly become too large to hold in memory or to re-find by scrolling — box art, forum screenshots, client photos and your own finished models all mixed into the same pile of folders. If the actual habit is closer to collecting ideas from the web before anything is painted, the Pinterest comparison and the round-up of Pinterest alternatives cover that earlier stage directly. A related job built around costume reference rather than paint schemes sits at the cosplay maker page, and a colour-and-material habit from a different craft entirely is at the industrial designer page.
Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account: download it and point it at whatever folder has been quietly accumulating scheme photos the longest. Tag the recipes that actually worked first — that is the search that answers "what did I mix for that green" before the client finishes asking.