Canvas and import

The tool bar and options bar

The tool bar on the left holds the board's tools: Select (V), Note (N), Draw (D for lines, A for arrows — press and hold the button to switch between them), and Pick color (I). The tool in use is highlighted. Below them are two overlapping color squares, as in Photoshop: the front one is the line color for the next drawing (click it to change it), the one behind it is the last color you picked (click it to see its values), and the small arrow in the corner makes the picked color the line color. Last comes the half-circle button for the view adjustments (grayscale, mirror, invert, brightness, contrast).

The options bar above the board shows the settings for whatever you're doing: line color and width while drawing or with drawings selected, text style with notes selected, playback controls with one animated photo selected, and the picked color's values while picking. When there's nothing to set, it shows a short hint.

Hide the tool bar with the button at the top right next to the side panel button, View → Tool Bar, or T — every tool stays in the menus, on its key, and in the right-click menu.

Navigating the board

Locking the board

View → Lock Board (Ctrl + Shift + L) turns the board into a pure viewer: dragging pans, and nothing can be selected, moved, or changed by accident. A Board locked chip at the top of the board says so; click it, or use the same menu item or keys, to unlock. While locked, menu items that would change the board do nothing but say why, and the side panel is greyed out. Zooming, Focus, the slideshow, the view adjustments, color picking, and exporting all keep working. The lock isn't saved — the board opens unlocked next time.

The command palette

View → Command Palette… (Ctrl + K, or Ctrl + Shift + P in browsers that don't keep that key for themselves) lists every menu command in one searchable box. Type a few letters of a command — they don't need to be next to each other, so zfit finds Zoom to Fit — then pick it with the arrow keys and Enter, or click it. The menu name works too (obj crop). Commands that can't run right now are listed but greyed out; Escape closes the box.

Prefer to pan with two fingers on a trackpad, the way a web page scrolls? Set Two-finger scroll on a trackpad to Pans under File → Preferences… → Display. A pinch always zooms either way.

The board is effectively endless — there's no fixed canvas size, and only what's actually visible on screen is ever decoded at full resolution, so panning and zooming stay smooth even with hundreds of photos open.

Adding photos

Three ways to bring a photo onto the board:

• File → Add photos… — opens a file picker; select one or many at once
• Drag and drop — drag image files from your file manager straight onto the canvas, or drag an image straight out of a web page in another browser tab or window
• Paste — Ctrl/Cmd + V pastes an image from your clipboard directly onto the board

Supported formats are JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF, AVIF, BMP, and TIFF. Each file can be up to 300 MB and 150 megapixels — large enough for any real photo, while keeping the board responsive.

Some files are converted in your browser before they're added:

• BMP and TIFF files are always converted, since most browsers can't display TIFF and BMP is uncompressed (often tens of megabytes).
• Any other photo over 20 MB is shrunk the same way.

The converted copy is a WebP (JPEG or PNG in browsers that can't create WebP, such as Safari), at most 8192 pixels on its longest side. Only that copy is stored, backed up, and synced; your original file is never changed. Converting a large TIFF can take a few seconds. Adding the same original again later reuses the converted copy instead of converting it a second time.

Newly added photos land centered on your current view (or wherever you dropped them), stacked in front of everything already on the board. Each one keeps its file name (without the extension) as its name in the layers panel.

Animated GIFs

Animated GIFs — and animated WebP and PNG files — play on the board; see Slideshow and animations.

Images from web pages

Dragging an image out of a web page, or pasting one you copied with "Copy image address", downloads it in your browser and adds it like any other photo — it never passes through our server. Some websites don't allow their images to be downloaded this way; the board then tells you so, and you can save the image to your computer first and drop the file instead.

The board remembers where such a photo came from: select it and choose Object → Open Source to open that page again in a new tab. When the image sat inside a link (a search result, a gallery post), that's the linked page; otherwise it's the image's own address. Hovering its row in the layers panel shows the address too.

The mini-map

On a board that's bigger than the view, a small overview appears in the bottom-left corner of the board: every item in miniature, with your current view outlined in blue. Click or drag in it to move the view there. It hides itself whenever everything already fits on screen; View → Mini-Map (O) turns it off completely.

Sharp pixels

Zoomed far into a photo, the board shows each of its pixels as a crisp square instead of a smooth blur — so you can check pixel art or a texture pixel by pixel. It kicks in once a single image pixel covers about three screen pixels. Sharp pixels when zoomed in under File → Preferences… → Display switches it off.

Moving, resizing, and rotating

With an item selected:

• Drag anywhere on it to move it — hold Shift to keep it on a straight horizontal or vertical line
• Drag a corner handle to resize it — hold Shift to keep its proportions, Alt to resize around its center
• Drag the rotate handle to turn it — hold Shift to turn in 15° steps

Object → Reset Transform (Shift + R) undoes rotation, flips, crop, and resizing in one step: a photo goes back to the whole picture at the size it was added with, and a note, swatch, or drawing loses its rotation and flips.

Holding Alt also ignores snapping for just that drag — see Align, distribute, and snap.

Filling the browser window

The Fill browser window button at the top right of the editor makes it fill the whole browser tab, with the site's header and footer out of the way, the same layout as fullscreen. Unlike fullscreen, the browser's tabs and your other windows stay where they are, so you can switch to a reference or another tool and come straight back. Click the button again to go back. The editor remembers your choice, so it opens filled next time too.