Why working creatives have started moving their reference collections off Pinterest and Instagram.
TL;DR
Cosmos is a website and mobile app for collecting visual references. Designers, photographers, and other working creatives use it to save images, videos, links, and short text snippets. You organize what you save into themed collections called clusters, and you can search through everything by color, by image, or by text. What makes Cosmos different in 2026 is an image-provenance system that uses AI to research every image on the site and recover its creator, source, date, and cultural lineage. The same team also runs Public Work, a free standalone search engine for over 100,000 public-domain images. Cosmos itself is free.
What Cosmos Actually Is
Cosmos is a place to save things you find on the internet. Primarily images, but also videos, web links, text snippets, and articles. The app gives you a personal visual library you can return to, search through, and share with other people when you want to.
Cosmos uses three terms throughout the product. Elements are individual saved items, the same way blocks work on are.na. Clusters are themed collections of elements, similar to Pinterest boards or are.na channels. Captions are the new addition for 2026. They're AI-generated context that Cosmos attaches to every image, describing who made the work, where it came from, and what it depicts. The redesign that landed in January 2026 changed how saving works. Older reviews describe an earlier version where everything had to land in a cluster immediately, but the current version lets you save first and organize later, which matches the way most people actually collect things online.
Cosmos was founded in 2021 by Andy McCune and Luca Marra. McCune previously co-founded Unfold, the mobile storytelling toolkit acquired by Squarespace in 2019. Before that, he built Earth, the Instagram travel community that grew to roughly seven million followers before being acquired by Seed Health. Today Cosmos reports more than ten million images saved per month. The app ranked number one in the App Store's Design category across 28 countries after being named one of Apple's 25 Apps of 2025. Creative teams at Nike, Chanel, A24, Apple, Adidas, On Running, and J.Crew use it internally for campaign references and archival work.
Public Work: The Free Search Engine for Public Domain Images
Before signing up for Cosmos itself, take a look at Public Work. It's a free standalone resource built by the same team, and anyone with a browser can use it.
Public Work is a search engine for public-domain visual content. Type any subject (Hokusai, brutalist architecture, botanical illustrations, NASA mission photography, 1970s typography) and the page becomes an infinite-scrolling grid of historical imagery. The archive draws from over 100,000 copyright-free works held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Getty, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other contributing institutions. Every image is free to use, modify, and distribute without legal restriction, which is what public domain actually means.
The interface does most of the work. Search turns into wandering: you type one thing, see thirty results, click into a single image because it has gravity, find five related works alongside it, and twenty minutes later you're deep in a corner of nineteenth-century scientific illustration that you didn't know existed. The infinite scroll is a deliberate design decision, meant to encourage the kind of association-following that a curious reader does with footnotes in a book.
For working creatives, Public Work solves a recurring problem. Most reference imagery on the open web is either low resolution, locked behind paywalls, or so encumbered by copyright that you can't safely use it in finished work. Public Work pulls high-resolution, properly attributed material from institutions that have explicitly released it for unrestricted use. If you're moodboarding a project, illustrating an essay, designing a brand identity, or just looking for visual material to think with, this is one of the few resources on the open internet that genuinely earns the word free.
You don't need a Cosmos account to use Public Work. You can use it indefinitely without signing up for anything. The company built it because they decided historical visual culture should be easier to find. That decision says something about who's running Cosmos and what they care about, and it's worth knowing before you commit to anything else.
Why Cosmos Exists: The Founder's Argument
To understand why Cosmos exists, the best place to look is Andy McCune's January 2026 founder essay, "The Future of Cosmos". It's worth reading in full. The argument summarized below is my paraphrase, drawing on what he wrote there.
McCune starts with a diagnosis of the internet's lost capacity for unhurried looking. There was a moment, he writes, when collecting images online felt expressive rather than compulsive, when inspiration came from curiosity rather than algorithmic optimization. Tumblr is his named example. Over the past decade, that feeling has eroded as the internet has gotten louder, flatter, and more repackaged. Images turned into content, inspiration turned into noise, and even his own imagination, he says, started to feel a little house-trained.
The thesis behind the diagnosis is straightforward. Your inputs become your outputs, which means you are, in some real sense, what you see. As a creative, you're only as good as your source material. The visual environment you spend time in shapes the work you eventually make, so if your reference material is algorithmic slop, your work tends to follow. Well-curated, properly contextualized references give the work somewhere to grow from.
McCune's framing of Cosmos is deliberate. He describes the app as a place rather than a tool, because places have character and tools are interchangeable. The character of the visual space you spend years in shapes what you become, which is why it matters where you do your collecting.
The most ambitious 2026 feature is the structural answer to a problem the social internet has been creating for over a decade. Images now circulate at scale without their makers attached. They get reposted, screenshotted, downloaded, and redistributed until the original artist, photographer, designer, or institution is lost to memory. McCune calls this one of the original sins of social media, and he's not wrong.
To address this, Cosmos built an AI system that researches every image saved to the app. It scans the web for sources and then writes a caption identifying who created the work, where it was published, when it came out, and its broader cultural lineage. The community can refine the attribution over time.
This is where the AI-flooded-internet conversation gets interesting. The are.na piece in this series argued for human curation as a counter to the AI-saturated web. Cosmos takes a different position. AI is the source of the credit and context problem at scale, and AI used deliberately can also be the structural fix. Both arguments can hold at the same time. The same technology that strips images of their provenance when used carelessly can recover that provenance when used with intent, and Cosmos's design is a bet that the second use of AI matters more than the first.
How Cosmos Works in Practice
The save action is the entire core practice. Find something you want to remember, save it, and worry about organization later if at all.
In the web or mobile app, every image in your feed has a save button. Tap it and the element lands on your profile immediately. The browser extension for Chrome and Safari does the same thing across the open web. Right-click an image, save it to Cosmos, and it joins your library.
The iOS app supports share-sheet saving from any other app on your phone, which means Instagram, Twitter, are.na, your camera roll, and anything else can feed into Cosmos directly. Android users access Cosmos through a progressive web app at cosmos.so, which works well enough but is slightly less polished than the native iOS version.
Clusters are themed collections you create after the fact. A cluster might be "color story for spring campaign," or "modernist typography," or "places I want to design like," or anything else you want to gather references around. The same element can live in multiple clusters at once. The 2026 redesign deliberately moved cluster organization to the second step, after saving, which lets you capture compulsively and curate deliberately. Those are two different mental modes that used to get tangled together when every save required a destination decision.
Search is where Cosmos differs most visibly from Pinterest and Instagram. You can search by text, by uploading an image to find visually similar results, or by hex color code if you're working in a specific palette and want references that match it. The text search runs on top of the AI-generated captions, which means you can search by what's actually in an image rather than by tags that someone may or may not have bothered to apply.
One mechanic worth knowing about. After roughly nine saves, your profile starts to cohere into a visible taste, and Cosmos uses that taste to inform what shows up in your discovery feed. The feed is curated by the app's algorithm rather than by chronology, but the algorithm is trained on aesthetic affinity rather than engagement maximization. The difference shows up quickly in the kind of work that surfaces.
Who Cosmos Is For (And Who It Isn't)
Cosmos is built for visual practitioners. The core cohort is graphic designers, art directors, illustrators, photographers, fashion designers, architects, interior designers, brand strategists, and creative directors. Students increasingly use it to build mood boards for projects, or for the person they want to become, as McCune has put it. Anyone whose work involves making aesthetic decisions over time will find Cosmos useful within the first week.
The enterprise list mentioned earlier (Nike, Chanel, A24, Apple, Adidas, On Running, J.Crew) is worth taking seriously as proof. Creative teams at companies of that scale don't adopt new reference tools casually, and the fact that several of them now use Cosmos for internal campaign work suggests the app has crossed the threshold from promising consumer product to infrastructure for serious creative work.
Cosmos is not the right tool for everyone. Writers and researchers whose work runs primarily on text rather than image will find the visual orientation limiting, and Are.na or Obsidian both fit textual thinking better. Teams that need real-time collaborative editing in the Google Docs sense won't get it from Cosmos. Anyone whose creative practice is genuinely private, and who'd feel uncomfortable having any saved material visible to others, may find the social-by-default design uncomfortable, though private clusters are an option.
The reader most likely to fall in love with Cosmos has been collecting reference images for years across Instagram saves, screenshot folders, Pinterest burner accounts, and random Notes app entries. The fragmentation eventually becomes exhausting, and Cosmos puts everything in one place.
What It Costs
Cosmos is free. You can sign up, install the browser extension, save elements without limit, build clusters, search by color and by image, and use the full feature set without paying anything.
Cosmos Premium runs $8 per month, and it adds a handful of useful features. The username system opens up so any available handle becomes yours, including short or common-word names. You also get early access to new features before they're publicly released. Collaboration on shared clusters lets you invite friends or coworkers to build collections together. Bulk export of an entire cluster as a ZIP file is the most practically useful upgrade, since it protects against any future platform risk. The plan also lets you customize the grid layout.
One honest note on the funding model. Cosmos is venture-backed. The company raised a $6 million seed round in 2023, then closed a $15 million Series A in January 2026, bringing total funding to $21 million. The Series A was co-led by Shine Capital and Matrix, with participation from GV, Accel, Plug and Play, and Anthony Casalena, founder and CEO of Squarespace. This is structurally different from Are.na's member-supported model, and it's worth being honest about. Venture funding lets Cosmos move fast and invest in technical infrastructure that smaller bootstrapped operations cannot match. The AI provenance system is the obvious example. The standard tradeoff is that venture-backed companies eventually face growth pressure that can shape product decisions over time. Cosmos is currently good and the founder's stated values point in a direction worth supporting, so you weigh that against the funding structure and decide for yourself.
How to Start Using Cosmos
Sign up at cosmos.so, either through the web or by downloading the iOS app. No payment required, no email confirmation drama.
Install the browser extension next. The Chrome and Safari versions are the move that turns Cosmos from an app you open occasionally into where saved things go automatically. Without the extension, you'll forget the app exists within two weeks. With it, you'll be sending things to Cosmos within an hour.
Here is the unusual instruction for the first day. Don't organize anything yet, don't plan your clusters, and don't worry about taste consistency. Just save twenty things that immediately compel you. Images you've been screenshot-hoarding, references you've half-remembered, anything that catches your eye in the next hour of browsing. The Cosmos taste-profile mechanic needs raw material to work with, and trying to be tasteful before you've accumulated anything is the same productive-procrastination trap that kills new Obsidian users.
After roughly a week of compulsive saving, patterns start to emerge in your library. You might notice the same kind of typography showing up repeatedly, or three different photographs of the same kind of light, or a color story you didn't know you were building. That's the moment to start creating clusters, when you can name a pattern that already exists in your saves rather than guessing at one you might want.
The mistake to avoid is treating Cosmos like a productivity tool with optimal workflows. Cosmos doesn't work that way. The right frame is to think of it as a thinking environment that rewards slow accumulation and asymmetric attention. Some clusters will explode while others sit half-filled for months before suddenly becoming the seed of a project, and both outcomes are normal.
Where to Go From Here
Cosmos rewards return visits more than first impressions. In the first hour you see a clean interface and some compelling images. By the end of the first month, you start to see what your own taste actually looks like when laid out alongside itself. A year in, you can read patterns in how your thinking has changed, which is the closest thing software can offer to a long-term creative practice.
The three guides in this series cover Obsidian, Are.na, and Cosmos. Each one solves a different kind of problem. Obsidian is for thinking in writing, where ideas connect through text inside a private network you build over years. Are.na sits in the middle, somewhere between thinking and publishing, where the work happens alongside strangers inside a member-supported commons. Cosmos is for thinking in images, where visual material accumulates into taste over time and provenance gets restored to the work that deserves it.
None of these tools replaces the others. A creative practice in 2026 can run on any one of them, or all three together, depending on what kind of thinking the work in front of you requires. The shared principle underneath all three is the same. Your reference material is part of your output, and the environment you store it in shapes what comes next.
If this series has been useful to you, the newsletter is where the next things will live. No filler in between.
Subscribe to Contemporary Blueprint for the rest of the series.
← Back# What Is Cosmos? A Plain Guide to the Image App for Designers and Visual Researchers
*Why working creatives have started moving their reference collections off Pinterest and Instagram.*
---
## TL;DR
[Cosmos](https://www.cosmos.so) is a website and mobile app for collecting visual references. Designers, photographers, and other working creatives use it to save images, videos, links, and short text snippets. You organize what you save into themed collections called clusters, and you can search through everything by color, by image, or by text. What makes Cosmos different in 2026 is an image-provenance system that uses AI to research every image on the site and recover its creator, source, date, and cultural lineage. The same team also runs [Public Work](https://www.cosmos.so/public-work), a free standalone search engine for over 100,000 public-domain images. Cosmos itself is free.
---
## What Cosmos Actually Is
Cosmos is a place to save things you find on the internet. Primarily images, but also videos, web links, text snippets, and articles. The app gives you a personal visual library you can return to, search through, and share with other people when you want to.
Cosmos uses three terms throughout the product. **Elements** are individual saved items, the same way blocks work on are.na. **Clusters** are themed collections of elements, similar to Pinterest boards or are.na channels. **Captions** are the new addition for 2026. They're AI-generated context that Cosmos attaches to every image, describing who made the work, where it came from, and what it depicts. The redesign that landed in January 2026 changed how saving works. Older reviews describe an earlier version where everything had to land in a cluster immediately, but the current version lets you save first and organize later, which matches the way most people actually collect things online.
Cosmos was founded in 2021 by Andy McCune and Luca Marra. McCune previously co-founded Unfold, the mobile storytelling toolkit acquired by Squarespace in 2019. Before that, he built Earth, the Instagram travel community that grew to roughly seven million followers before being acquired by Seed Health. Today Cosmos reports more than ten million images saved per month. The app ranked number one in the App Store's Design category across 28 countries after being named one of Apple's 25 Apps of 2025. Creative teams at Nike, Chanel, A24, Apple, Adidas, On Running, and J.Crew use it internally for campaign references and archival work.
---
## Public Work: The Free Search Engine for Public Domain Images
Before signing up for Cosmos itself, take a look at [Public Work](https://www.cosmos.so/public-work). It's a free standalone resource built by the same team, and anyone with a browser can use it.
Public Work is a search engine for public-domain visual content. Type any subject (Hokusai, brutalist architecture, botanical illustrations, NASA mission photography, 1970s typography) and the page becomes an infinite-scrolling grid of historical imagery. The archive draws from over 100,000 copyright-free works held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Getty, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other contributing institutions. Every image is free to use, modify, and distribute without legal restriction, which is what public domain actually means.
The interface does most of the work. Search turns into wandering: you type one thing, see thirty results, click into a single image because it has gravity, find five related works alongside it, and twenty minutes later you're deep in a corner of nineteenth-century scientific illustration that you didn't know existed. The infinite scroll is a deliberate design decision, meant to encourage the kind of association-following that a curious reader does with footnotes in a book.
For working creatives, Public Work solves a recurring problem. Most reference imagery on the open web is either low resolution, locked behind paywalls, or so encumbered by copyright that you can't safely use it in finished work. Public Work pulls high-resolution, properly attributed material from institutions that have explicitly released it for unrestricted use. If you're moodboarding a project, illustrating an essay, designing a brand identity, or just looking for visual material to think with, this is one of the few resources on the open internet that genuinely earns the word free.
You don't need a Cosmos account to use Public Work. You can use it indefinitely without signing up for anything. The company built it because they decided historical visual culture should be easier to find. That decision says something about who's running Cosmos and what they care about, and it's worth knowing before you commit to anything else.
---
## Why Cosmos Exists: The Founder's Argument
To understand why Cosmos exists, the best place to look is Andy McCune's January 2026 founder essay, ["The Future of Cosmos"](https://www.cosmos.so/blog/the-future-of-cosmos). It's worth reading in full. The argument summarized below is my paraphrase, drawing on what he wrote there.
McCune starts with a diagnosis of the internet's lost capacity for unhurried looking. There was a moment, he writes, when collecting images online felt expressive rather than compulsive, when inspiration came from curiosity rather than algorithmic optimization. Tumblr is his named example. Over the past decade, that feeling has eroded as the internet has gotten louder, flatter, and more repackaged. Images turned into content, inspiration turned into noise, and even his own imagination, he says, started to feel a little house-trained.
The thesis behind the diagnosis is straightforward. Your inputs become your outputs, which means you are, in some real sense, what you see. As a creative, you're only as good as your source material. The visual environment you spend time in shapes the work you eventually make, so if your reference material is algorithmic slop, your work tends to follow. Well-curated, properly contextualized references give the work somewhere to grow from.
McCune's framing of Cosmos is deliberate. He describes the app as a place rather than a tool, because places have character and tools are interchangeable. The character of the visual space you spend years in shapes what you become, which is why it matters where you do your collecting.
The most ambitious 2026 feature is the structural answer to a problem the social internet has been creating for over a decade. Images now circulate at scale without their makers attached. They get reposted, screenshotted, downloaded, and redistributed until the original artist, photographer, designer, or institution is lost to memory. McCune calls this one of the original sins of social media, and he's not wrong.
To address this, Cosmos built an AI system that researches every image saved to the app. It scans the web for sources and then writes a caption identifying who created the work, where it was published, when it came out, and its broader cultural lineage. The community can refine the attribution over time.
This is where the AI-flooded-internet conversation gets interesting. The are.na piece in this series argued for human curation as a counter to the AI-saturated web. Cosmos takes a different position. AI is the source of the credit and context problem at scale, and AI used deliberately can also be the structural fix. Both arguments can hold at the same time. The same technology that strips images of their provenance when used carelessly can recover that provenance when used with intent, and Cosmos's design is a bet that the second use of AI matters more than the first.
---
## How Cosmos Works in Practice
The save action is the entire core practice. Find something you want to remember, save it, and worry about organization later if at all.
In the web or mobile app, every image in your feed has a save button. Tap it and the element lands on your profile immediately. The browser extension for Chrome and Safari does the same thing across the open web. Right-click an image, save it to Cosmos, and it joins your library.
The iOS app supports share-sheet saving from any other app on your phone, which means Instagram, Twitter, are.na, your camera roll, and anything else can feed into Cosmos directly. Android users access Cosmos through a progressive web app at cosmos.so, which works well enough but is slightly less polished than the native iOS version.
Clusters are themed collections you create after the fact. A cluster might be "color story for spring campaign," or "modernist typography," or "places I want to design like," or anything else you want to gather references around. The same element can live in multiple clusters at once. The 2026 redesign deliberately moved cluster organization to the second step, after saving, which lets you capture compulsively and curate deliberately. Those are two different mental modes that used to get tangled together when every save required a destination decision.
Search is where Cosmos differs most visibly from Pinterest and Instagram. You can search by text, by uploading an image to find visually similar results, or by hex color code if you're working in a specific palette and want references that match it. The text search runs on top of the AI-generated captions, which means you can search by what's actually in an image rather than by tags that someone may or may not have bothered to apply.
One mechanic worth knowing about. After roughly nine saves, your profile starts to cohere into a visible taste, and Cosmos uses that taste to inform what shows up in your discovery feed. The feed is curated by the app's algorithm rather than by chronology, but the algorithm is trained on aesthetic affinity rather than engagement maximization. The difference shows up quickly in the kind of work that surfaces.
---
## Who Cosmos Is For (And Who It Isn't)
Cosmos is built for visual practitioners. The core cohort is graphic designers, art directors, illustrators, photographers, fashion designers, architects, interior designers, brand strategists, and creative directors. Students increasingly use it to build mood boards for projects, or for the person they want to become, as McCune has put it. Anyone whose work involves making aesthetic decisions over time will find Cosmos useful within the first week.
The enterprise list mentioned earlier (Nike, Chanel, A24, Apple, Adidas, On Running, J.Crew) is worth taking seriously as proof. Creative teams at companies of that scale don't adopt new reference tools casually, and the fact that several of them now use Cosmos for internal campaign work suggests the app has crossed the threshold from promising consumer product to infrastructure for serious creative work.
Cosmos is not the right tool for everyone. Writers and researchers whose work runs primarily on text rather than image will find the visual orientation limiting, and Are.na or Obsidian both fit textual thinking better. Teams that need real-time collaborative editing in the Google Docs sense won't get it from Cosmos. Anyone whose creative practice is genuinely private, and who'd feel uncomfortable having any saved material visible to others, may find the social-by-default design uncomfortable, though private clusters are an option.
The reader most likely to fall in love with Cosmos has been collecting reference images for years across Instagram saves, screenshot folders, Pinterest burner accounts, and random Notes app entries. The fragmentation eventually becomes exhausting, and Cosmos puts everything in one place.
---
## What It Costs
Cosmos is free. You can sign up, install the browser extension, save elements without limit, build clusters, search by color and by image, and use the full feature set without paying anything.
Cosmos Premium runs $8 per month, and it adds a handful of useful features. The username system opens up so any available handle becomes yours, including short or common-word names. You also get early access to new features before they're publicly released. Collaboration on shared clusters lets you invite friends or coworkers to build collections together. Bulk export of an entire cluster as a ZIP file is the most practically useful upgrade, since it protects against any future platform risk. The plan also lets you customize the grid layout.
One honest note on the funding model. Cosmos is venture-backed. The company raised a $6 million seed round in 2023, then closed a $15 million Series A in January 2026, bringing total funding to $21 million. The Series A was co-led by Shine Capital and Matrix, with participation from GV, Accel, Plug and Play, and Anthony Casalena, founder and CEO of Squarespace. This is structurally different from Are.na's member-supported model, and it's worth being honest about. Venture funding lets Cosmos move fast and invest in technical infrastructure that smaller bootstrapped operations cannot match. The AI provenance system is the obvious example. The standard tradeoff is that venture-backed companies eventually face growth pressure that can shape product decisions over time. Cosmos is currently good and the founder's stated values point in a direction worth supporting, so you weigh that against the funding structure and decide for yourself.
---
## How to Start Using Cosmos
Sign up at [cosmos.so](https://www.cosmos.so), either through the web or by downloading the iOS app. No payment required, no email confirmation drama.
Install the browser extension next. The Chrome and Safari versions are the move that turns Cosmos from an app you open occasionally into where saved things go automatically. Without the extension, you'll forget the app exists within two weeks. With it, you'll be sending things to Cosmos within an hour.
Here is the unusual instruction for the first day. Don't organize anything yet, don't plan your clusters, and don't worry about taste consistency. Just save twenty things that immediately compel you. Images you've been screenshot-hoarding, references you've half-remembered, anything that catches your eye in the next hour of browsing. The Cosmos taste-profile mechanic needs raw material to work with, and trying to be tasteful before you've accumulated anything is the same productive-procrastination trap that kills new Obsidian users.
After roughly a week of compulsive saving, patterns start to emerge in your library. You might notice the same kind of typography showing up repeatedly, or three different photographs of the same kind of light, or a color story you didn't know you were building. That's the moment to start creating clusters, when you can name a pattern that already exists in your saves rather than guessing at one you might want.
The mistake to avoid is treating Cosmos like a productivity tool with optimal workflows. Cosmos doesn't work that way. The right frame is to think of it as a thinking environment that rewards slow accumulation and asymmetric attention. Some clusters will explode while others sit half-filled for months before suddenly becoming the seed of a project, and both outcomes are normal.
---
## Where to Go From Here
Cosmos rewards return visits more than first impressions. In the first hour you see a clean interface and some compelling images. By the end of the first month, you start to see what your own taste actually looks like when laid out alongside itself. A year in, you can read patterns in how your thinking has changed, which is the closest thing software can offer to a long-term creative practice.
The three guides in this series cover [Obsidian](#), [Are.na](#), and Cosmos. Each one solves a different kind of problem. Obsidian is for thinking in writing, where ideas connect through text inside a private network you build over years. Are.na sits in the middle, somewhere between thinking and publishing, where the work happens alongside strangers inside a member-supported commons. Cosmos is for thinking in images, where visual material accumulates into taste over time and provenance gets restored to the work that deserves it.
None of these tools replaces the others. A creative practice in 2026 can run on any one of them, or all three together, depending on what kind of thinking the work in front of you requires. The shared principle underneath all three is the same. Your reference material is part of your output, and the environment you store it in shapes what comes next.
If this series has been useful to you, the newsletter is where the next things will live. No filler in between.
---
*Subscribe to [Contemporary Blueprint](#) for the rest of the series.*