Move from Cosmos, Savee, or Are.na to a Library You Own (2026)

By refern. Last updated: June 2026.

The short answer: you export what each platform allows, re-collect the rest through the browser extension, and drop everything into a local folder that refern indexes. Your images live on your disk, not in a company's cloud, and there is no subscription keeping you there.

This guide covers the honest export situation on each platform, a step-by-step process for rebuilding your library locally, and a clear look at what you gain and what you genuinely give up when you leave a community feed.

Why people decide to move

Cosmos, Savee, and Are.na are real tools with real strengths. If you are reading this, something probably shifted for you: a price increase, a concern about a platform shutting down, a subscription you keep paying for a library you built, or a desire to search your own collection properly rather than relying on a cloud interface.

The concerns that come up most often:

Subscription fatigue. Cosmos Pro runs $8 a month or $72 a year (as of 2026). Savee Pro runs $9 a month billed annually (as of 2026). Are.na Premium runs $7 a month or $70 a year (as of 2026). None of those amounts is outrageous on its own, but a tool you use for five years becomes $350 to $500 over time. A one-time purchase looks different at that scale.

Data that lives somewhere else. Cosmos's terms of service grant a non-exclusive, transferable, worldwide, royalty-free license to user content that survives account termination, and the terms state that deleted content may continue to exist on their servers. Are.na and Savee are more straightforward on this point, but all three platforms store your collection in their cloud, accessible only while you have a paid account and an internet connection.

No real search inside your own collection. Are.na's search covers channel names and usernames, not image content. Cosmos and Savee have community-facing color and visual search, but you cannot run a full-text search with operators across your own saved images offline.

No canvas. None of the three platforms has an infinite canvas for arranging references spatially while you work. That is a different category of tool, and if you need it, you are already switching between apps.

These are fair reasons to move. The platforms have equally fair reasons to stay, which this guide covers honestly at the end.

What you are moving to

refern is a desktop reference manager for artists that combines Eagle-style organization with a PureRef-style infinite canvas and an Obsidian-style relationship graph. It costs $30 one time (launch pricing, going to $35 about two months after launch), runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and does not copy your files.

A refern workspace is a folder you already own. refern writes a SQLite index and thumbnails next to your originals. Everything else stays exactly where it is. There is no upload step, no cloud account, and no ongoing fee.

Step 1. Export what each platform allows

Before you set up refern, get your images out. Here is the honest picture for each platform.

Cosmos

Cosmos added a per-cluster ZIP export in December 2024. Each cluster can be exported individually from the cluster menu. The ZIP contains the images from that cluster.

What the export does not guarantee: the Cosmos terms of service provide no explicit right to export your library in bulk, and there is no documented API or single-click "export everything" function. For large libraries with many clusters, you will need to export cluster by cluster.

Practical approach: Go through each cluster and trigger the ZIP download. Save everything into a folder structure that mirrors your cluster names. For images you saved as links rather than direct saves, the ZIP may not include the original file, only a URL. Those you will need to re-collect.

What you cannot recover automatically: the source URLs, any notes you added, and your organizational structure beyond the cluster name. Take a screenshot or text export of any metadata you want to preserve before you close your account.

Savee

Savee's Pro and Teams plans include a "download all saved assets" option. If you are on a paid plan, this is the cleanest export path of the three platforms: you get original files in a downloadable archive.

If you are on a free trial or have let your subscription lapse, you will need to reactivate to trigger the download.

What you cannot recover automatically: board structure, tags (Savee's tagging is basic), and any notes or metadata you added beyond the image itself.

Are.na

Are.na provides a "Download channel" option in the More dropdown of each channel. Are.na also has a public REST API at dev.are.na that developers use to export libraries programmatically. If you have many channels, a community-built script using the are.na npm package or the arena-js wrapper can pull everything in one pass.

What you cannot recover automatically: the connection model (a block living in multiple channels simultaneously) has no direct equivalent in a folder structure. You will need to decide whether to duplicate images across folders or use refern's entity links to represent the same image belonging to multiple contexts.

Are.na blocks also include text snippets, links, and PDFs alongside images. refern handles images, video, canvas files, and PDFs with full previews, but plain text and web bookmarks do not have a direct equivalent. Keep a separate notes file for any text-only blocks you want to preserve.

Step 2. Set up your local folder structure

Once you have your downloads, create a folder structure on your disk that reflects how you actually work, not how the platform organized things for you.

A few patterns that work well:

By project: one folder per active project, with subfolders for reference categories (color palettes, composition, character design, lighting, etc.).

By subject: if your references span many projects, a subject-based hierarchy (anatomy, environments, lighting, typography, etc.) tends to be more durable.

By source type: downloaded references, screenshots, browser-saved images, and scanned sketchbook pages can live in different top-level folders if you treat them differently.

There is no single right structure. refern lets you reorganize later without consequences because it never moves or copies your originals. Drag a folder somewhere else on disk, point refern at the new location, and run a reconcile to update the index.

Step 3. Point refern at your folder

Open refern and create a new workspace by pointing it at your reference folder. On first load, refern runs a streaming indexer that:

• Scans every file in the folder and subfolders
• Generates thumbnails (WebP, stored in a refern-thumbnails/ subfolder alongside your images)
• Reads embedded EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata from image files automatically
• Builds a full-text search index using SQLite FTS5

For a library of several thousand images, this first scan takes a few minutes. You can watch the progress in the pipeline status card. After that, incremental updates happen in the background as you add or change files.

Nothing is uploaded. Everything stays on your disk.

Step 4. Rebuild your tag structure

Your tags from Cosmos, Savee, or Are.na did not come across in the export. This is the part of migration that takes the most time, but it is also an opportunity to build a structure that actually fits how you think.

refern supports hierarchical tags (parent and child tags, nested as deep as you need), tag groups (color-coded clusters for visual organization), linked tags (one tag pointing to related tags), and tag macros (shortcuts that insert multiple tags at once).

Start with a small set of broad categories. Let the rest emerge as you tag individual images. refern's autocomplete suggests tags as you type, and a recent-tags shortcut (Alt+#) makes it fast to apply the same tags repeatedly across a batch.

If your image files have EXIF or IPTC keyword metadata from a previous tool (Lightroom, digiKam, or a similar DAM), refern reads those automatically on import and creates matching tags. This can give you a substantial head start.

Step 5. Rebuild what you were re-collecting from the web

For images you captured via the Cosmos or Savee browser extension that were not included in your export (because they were saved as URLs rather than files), refern's browser extension can re-collect them.

Install the refern extension for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. It supports hover-save, right-click save, and batch save on any page. As you encounter sources you care about again, save them directly into your refern workspace. Over a few weeks, the most important material comes back naturally.

For images you specifically remember and want to find again, refern's local search often works better than going back to the web: if the image is in your library from a previous collection, a color search or visual similarity search can surface it without you needing to remember the source.

Step 6. Migrate your canvas work (Cosmos and Savee users)

Neither Cosmos nor Savee has a canvas, so this step does not apply to most users migrating from them. For Are.na users who were arranging images in channels as a loose spatial reference, refern's infinite canvas is a closer replacement.

In refern, create a new canvas file in your workspace. Drag images from your library onto the canvas, arrange them freely, add text labels, draw annotations, and use layers to separate concerns. The canvas file is saved as a .refern-canvas JSON file in your workspace folder alongside your images.

If you were using PureRef alongside Cosmos or Are.na for your actual moodboard work, refern's canvas replaces PureRef directly: it supports pin-to-top, window transparency, and mouse click-through so you can reference the board while working in another application.

What you gain

Search that works on your actual collection. FTS5 full-text search across names, paths, descriptions, notes, source URLs, creator fields, and tags. Inline operators: type:image, rating:>=3, tag:anatomy, color:#c0392b, is:duplicate, and more. Color search finds images by hex code. Visual similarity search finds near-matches by a local descriptor. All of this runs offline, no API call.

No subscription dependency. You paid once. The library is yours regardless of whether refern continues to exist, whether you have internet access, or whether you are on a plane.

Files that are actually yours. Your originals stay in a normal folder. You can browse them in Finder or Explorer, back them up with any tool you choose, and open them in any application. refern adds an index layer; it never takes custody of your files.

Relationships between images. refern's typed entity links (cross-reference, derived-from, placed-in-canvas) let you describe how images relate to each other. The Linked References sidebar shows, for any image, what it was derived from, which canvases it appears in, and what it is cross-referenced with. A full-screen relationship graph shows all of this as a navigable map.

Works offline. Everything runs locally. No internet required.

What you genuinely give up

This guide would be incomplete without saying this plainly.

The discovery feed. Cosmos's algorithmically curated Discover feed, Savee's human-curated community, and Are.na's public channel browsing all surface content you would not have found on your own. refern has no feed, no discovery layer, and no community. You are working from what you already have or actively seek out. Some users find that liberating. Others find it genuinely limiting, especially early in a project when they are looking for direction.

Mobile access. All three platforms have iOS apps, and Cosmos and Savee have Android apps as well. refern is a desktop application today. There is no mobile version for browsing your library on your phone. (Web and mobile access are on the planned roadmap, but they are not shipped.)

Collaboration. Cosmos shared clusters, Savee team boards, and Are.na group channels all support real-time collaborative curation. refern is a single-user local tool today. (Cloud sync and collaboration are on the planned roadmap.)

The Are.na community specifically. Are.na's community is genuinely distinctive: designers, architects, academics, and researchers with serious curatorial intent. That community is not reproducible in a local tool. If discovering how other thoughtful people organize knowledge is part of why you use Are.na, that is a real loss that no local tool replaces.

Zero installation friction. All three platforms work in a browser. refern requires a download and installation. That is a small difference for most people, but it is a real one.

Platform comparison at a glance