A director asks for "something like the corridor chase we did last year, but angrier" during a morning scheduled for four new panels, and answering that well depends on whether last year's reference is actually findable or only theoretically still on a drive somewhere. Storyboard work runs on borrowed staging — a camera angle from a film, a stunt reference clip, a photo of an actor's blocking from a previous project — and the value of keeping any of it is entirely conditional on being able to find the right piece again under a deadline that does not care how organised the collecting was at the time.
What a storyboard reference archive actually looks like after a year
It is rarely one clean library. Film stills saved for staging ideas, phone footage of a friend acting out a stunt, photographs pulled from a location scout, frames grabbed from a previous project's own boards for continuity — all of it collecting in folders named after whichever sequence needed it at the time. That works fine inside one production. It stops working the moment a new job needs "the low-angle confrontation shot we used two productions ago," because the folder it lives in is named after a show that wrapped a year ago and nobody remembers to check there first.
A camera angle, found by what it shows rather than which show it was for
Tag a still or a clip for the staging idea it demonstrates — low-angle,
two-shot, over-the-shoulder, chase — and it stays reachable regardless
of which production folder it lives in: type:image or type:video picks
the media, tag:any:a,b matches either tag, rating:>=4 keeps it to
references that actually earned their keep. AND across keys, OR inside a
comma list, no parentheses.
type:video tag:any:stunt,chase rating:>=3 footage blocking reference, rated
has:notes no:tags annotated but never filed
added:>2025-06 tag:any:corridor this year's corridor referencesA term the parser does not know renders as free text rather than an error, so a half-remembered word still returns something worth narrowing from.
Video and stills in the same search, because a chase is rarely just one
Staging a chase or a fight draws on both stills and footage at once — a
single frame for a pose, a full clip for how a stunt actually moves through
space — and Coii Ref does not split them into separate modes. type:video ext:mov reaches footage the same way type:image reaches stills, both take
tags and ratings the same way, and a canvas can put a still key pose beside
the clip it was pulled from without treating either as secondary. Proxies
are written at canvas resolution beside the source files, so a board mixing
footage and stills scrolls at the same speed either way.
Boarding a shortlist for the sequence you are actually blocking
Drag a shortlist onto a canvas and it becomes Something.coii-canvas,
pretty-printed JSON saved wherever the sequence's other files already live —
which means it can sit right beside the panel files themselves and move with
the project folder if that folder changes drives. There is no sharing link
and no live comment thread; sending it to a director means sending the file,
and they need Coii Ref installed to open it. For a board that has to be
annotated live with a director on a call, PureRef
covers that better — it floats over other windows and takes drawing directly
on the board, neither of which this app attempts.
Organising by sequence without losing the cross-production view
A folder per sequence keeps a single production tidy, but the reference
worth keeping tends to outlive the production it was gathered for — a good
low-angle setup is good on the next job too. Tagging by staging idea across
whichever folder structure a production actually used answers both questions
from the same collection: sequence-4b scoped to one folder for "what's in
this sequence," and tag:any:low-angle reaching across every past
production for "what have I used for this kind of shot before." Neither
structure is required by the app; the query line reaches into subfolders the
same way regardless of depth.
tag:any:sequence-4b rating:>=4 this sequence's strongest picks
tag:any:low-angle -tag:used low-angle setups not yet placed-tag:used assumes tagging a reference once it has actually been placed on a
board, which turns "have I used this angle already" into a search rather
than a memory test.
Comparing this to a floating board over the drawing surface
A lot of storyboard artists work with a reference floating directly over their drawing tablet's canvas while blocking a panel, which is a genuinely different job from searching a library. PureRef is built for exactly that — always on top, transparent to mouse, drawing directly on the board — and none of that is something Coii Ref does. What this app answers is the question before that one: which reference, out of years of accumulated stills and footage, is actually the right one to drag onto the floating board in the first place.
Comparing this to a templated storyboard tool
Some storyboard workflows run inside a tool built around panel templates, shot lists and export to an animatic — a different job again, closer to Milanote, which holds documents, shot lists and boards together for planning a sequence with a team. Coii Ref has none of that: no panel templates, no shot-list document, no timing track, and no export to video. It is the search layer underneath a workflow like that, feeding it reference, not a replacement for the planning tool itself.
Continuity reference across a multi-episode order
A show ordered across several episodes tends to reuse locations, blocking
ideas and even specific camera setups from one episode to the next, and
continuity depends on whoever is boarding episode six being able to find
exactly how a location or a stunt was staged back in episode two. Tagging
staging reference by location or setup name — warehouse-int,
rooftop-chase — rather than only by episode number means a search for
tag:any:warehouse-int reaches every episode that used the location at
once, regardless of which folder each episode's material was originally
filed under. Nothing about the folder structure a production already uses
needs to change for that to work; the tag is what carries the continuity,
not the filing.
What a reused setup is worth on the next show entirely
Staging reference does not have a natural expiry tied to the production it was gathered for. A rooftop chase setup that worked well two shows ago is just as useful on an unrelated show today, provided it survived being tagged by what it demonstrates rather than filed only under a folder named after a production that wrapped and will never be reopened. Registering an old production's reference folder as part of a new workspace costs one re-index and nothing else — the tags and ratings applied years earlier are exactly where they were left.
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. It needs macOS 11 Big Sur or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel, as two native builds rather than one shared binary.
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.
Reference that survives moving between productions
Storyboard artists move between productions and studios more often than a personal reference archive should have to be rebuilt. Because the stills and footage stay ordinary files in ordinary folders, tagged by the staging idea they demonstrate rather than by which production used them, the archive survives every studio change it will ever see — registering the same folder again on a new machine costs one re-index, not a rebuilt collection.
Working across a personal archive and a studio machine
A personal reference archive built up across years at home and a studio-issued machine used during a contract rarely need to be one workspace. Register the personal archive on a personal Mac and a studio's shared reference drive on the studio machine, and each one keeps its own local index, with nothing syncing between them and no account tying the two together. Licensing covers three Macs on one purchase, which in practice covers a home machine, a laptop and a studio seat without a second payment.
What a shelved production's reference is still worth
A production that gets shelved or recut does not take its staging reference
down with it, provided that reference was tagged by the idea it demonstrates
rather than only by the show it was gathered for. A confrontation setup
filmed for a cancelled sequence is exactly as useful the next time a
confrontation comes up on an unrelated job, found by
tag:any:confrontation regardless of which production folder it happened to
sit in.
Why the search matters more than the boarding
The part of this job that looks the hardest — arranging plates on a canvas — is rarely the part that actually costs a storyboard artist time on a deadline. Dragging nine images onto a board takes a minute once the right nine are in front of you. What costs the time is everything before that: remembering that a reference exists at all, remembering which of several past productions it came from, and then actually locating the folder. A search-first tool is a bet that the slow part of the job is finding, not arranging, which tends to be true for anyone who has been collecting staging reference for more than a year or two.
Who this actually suits
Someone with a real accumulation of staging reference across more than one production, working under deadlines where re-finding a setup beats re-searching for one. If the day-to-day need is a floating board to draw directly over while blocking, PureRef answers that more directly. For the deadline-driven, single-project version of this same argument, the concept artist page covers related ground, and the animator page covers the motion-study side of the same footage habit. The fuller treatment of video specifically is at the video reference manager page, and the general search argument without the storyboard framing is at the reference-manager page.
Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account: download it and point it at whatever staging reference has survived more than one production already. Tag last year's best setups first — that is the search that answers "something like the corridor chase, but angrier" before the morning is over.