A clip on a board should behave like a photograph on one

Open a folder of stills and clips together in most tools built for images and the clips are the ones that misbehave: no rating, no place in a search for "the ones I liked," a thumbnail that never generated, and a board that stutters the moment three of them try to decode in view at once. If a real share of what you collect is footage — camera moves, timing, how fabric settles after a step — that is not an edge case, it is half the library behaving like an afterthought.

What goes wrong when video is bolted onto an image tool

Most reference apps were designed around a still image and had video added afterward, and the seams show in predictable places. Search usually stops at the filename, because the metadata pipeline built for EXIF was never extended to whatever a video container carries. Ratings and tags frequently exist for images only, so a clip you loved has no way to say so. And playback on a canvas is often the source file itself, decoded live, which is fine for one clip and unusable for a board with a dozen.

None of that is a video problem specifically — it is what happens when a feature is added to a tool rather than designed into it from the start.

One index pass, not two feature sets

Video goes through the same indexing pass as images: dimensions are read, tags and ratings attach the same way, and notes get written against a clip exactly as they would against a photograph. The query line does not have a separate video mode — type:video, ext:mov, ext:mp4 are ordinary filter terms alongside tag:, rating: and has:notes, AND across keys, OR inside a comma list.

type:video tag:any:walk-cycle,run-cycle    motion studies by name
ext:mov width:>=1920 rating:>=3            usable footage, not test shots
has:notes no:tags                          annotated but unfiled clips

Proxies, so a board of clips scrolls like a board of stills

A canvas holding several source video files, each decoding independently, is where most tools fall over. Coii Ref writes a proxy at canvas resolution beside each original the first time it is indexed, so a board mixing nine clips and photographs previews and scrolls at one speed rather than nine different ones. The original file is never touched, moved or re-encoded — the proxy sits beside it, inside the workspace folder, and can be deleted and rebuilt without affecting the source at all.

What gets read off a clip during indexing

Indexing a video reads its dimensions the same way it reads an image's, so a query like width:>=1920 filters clips by resolution without any manual entry. Colour is read where the app can determine it, the same as for a still. None of this requires opening the clip in an editor first or running it through a separate transcoding step — the read happens once, during the first index, and the result sits in the same database an image's metadata does.

Nothing about the source file changes. The original clip is never re-encoded, trimmed or re-wrapped into a different container — the only new file involved is the proxy Coii Ref writes beside it, and deleting that proxy and re-indexing regenerates it without touching the original at all.

Tags and ratings that mean the same thing on a clip

Rating a video four stars means the same thing as rating a photograph four stars, because it is the same field in the same index. Tag a clip reference and walk-cycle and it shows up in tag:any:walk-cycle beside every still tagged the same way. There is no second tagging system to keep in sync and no risk that a tag applied to a video silently does not count toward a search that was written with images in mind.

Boarding a clip next to the frame it came from

A common habit among animators and editors is keeping a clip beside the specific stills pulled out of it — a walk cycle next to the three key poses inside it, or a piece of found footage next to the frame that actually got used. Because video and images share one index, a canvas can mix both without treating one as a second-class citizen: the clip's plate on the board uses its proxy, the stills beside it use their own thumbnails, and both are reachable from the same saved search afterward. Nothing about placing a clip on a canvas requires exporting a still from it first — the clip and any stills pulled from it separately are just two files in the same folder, tagged however makes sense.

Comparing this to a professional media browser

Software built for logging and transcoding camera footage — the kind an editor or DIT reaches for on set — solves a different problem: frame-accurate scrubbing, colour-managed previews, export to an editing timeline. Coii Ref does none of that and is not trying to. What it solves instead is the reference-collection version of the same complaint: thousands of clips saved over years, mixed with stills, that need to be findable by what they show rather than by remembering which folder holds them. If you need waveform monitors and timecode, a professional logging tool is the right purchase and this is not a substitute for it.

Watching folders that keep growing

Footage collections tend to grow in bursts — a shoot, a scrape of reference clips, a folder someone hands you on a drive — and the watcher treats a batch of new video files the same way it treats new images: a filesystem event becomes the smallest re-scan that brings the index up to date, without a manual re-import step. Move the folder to a faster external drive later and reconnecting it reconciles the workspace rather than losing track of what was already indexed.

Where the workspace actually lives

Everything the app writes for a video-heavy library — the index, the thumbnails, and the proxies, which are usually the largest of the three by far — sits inside the folder you registered, not in an application-support directory or an account somewhere else. That matters more for video than for stills, because proxies for a large clip collection can run to a meaningful amount of disk space, and knowing exactly where that space lives, and that it travels with the folder, is the difference between an external drive you can move confidently and one you are guessing about.

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 active, 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 build for both.

The app's entire 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 update check, because there is no in-app updater, and no analytics 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. Everything that reads, including every clip already indexed and every proxy already written, keeps working for good, and the watcher keeps running too.

What switching from a hosted moodboard tool costs

Most hosted moodboard tools accept video but do little with it once it is on a board — a rectangle that plays, with no rating, no tag and no place in a search. Moving a mixed collection to Coii Ref does not mean re-uploading anything: the files are already on your Mac, and the tool that changes is what happens after you point it at the folder. The first index is where the time goes, and reading video takes longer per file than reading a still, so a folder heavy with footage takes noticeably longer to finish its first pass than the same folder in bytes would if it were all images. That cost is paid once per folder, not once per session, and everything after it is a query line rather than a re-import.

What does not carry across from a hosted tool is any board it already holds — there is no importer for a Milanote, Miro or FigJam board, so an arrangement you care about gets rebuilt by searching for the same material once it is indexed here. For a board made mostly of video, rebuilding it is usually faster than it sounds, because the clips worth keeping are exactly the ones a rating-based query surfaces first.

The difference a proxy makes in practice

It is worth being specific about what "stutters" actually looks like, because the failure is easy to dismiss until you have hit it. A canvas with a dozen source video files, each one a different resolution and codec, forces a Mac to decode all of them simultaneously as you scroll past — even a fast machine drops frames doing that, and a laptop on battery does it worse. A canvas-resolution proxy sidesteps the problem structurally rather than by brute force: every clip on the board is decoded at the same modest size regardless of its source resolution, so scrolling a board of raw 4K footage costs the same as scrolling a board of thumbnails. The original files are never touched by this — proxies live beside them in the workspace folder and can be rebuilt at any time without re-indexing anything else.

Who this actually suits

Anyone whose reference folder is genuinely mixed — animators watching reference footage beside key poses, motion designers collecting reels beside stills, editors gathering film clips next to the frames they came from. If your collection is images only, the video handling here is not a reason to pick this app over a still-focused one; the general reference-manager version of this page makes the same case without the video-specific detail.

For a wider shelf of tools that handle video at all, the video reference manager round-up covers professional loggers and moodboard tools alongside this one, from a comparison shopper's side. And for the two most-discussed full libraries, refern handles video the same broad way and is the more capable app overall, while Eagle copies what you import into its own library rather than indexing clips in place. Once a shortlist of clips is ready, the moodboard-focused version of this page covers what happens when they go onto a canvas.

Thirty days, every feature, no card and no account: download it and point it at the folder where the footage and the stills have always lived side by side. Start the first index on the heaviest folder you have — it is the one where a proxy actually changes how a board feels to scroll through, and the trial is long enough to see that before deciding.