Notes and crop

Notes

Notes are short pieces of text you can pin anywhere on the board, right next to the photos they refer to.

1. Choose File → Add note
2. Click anywhere on the board to drop a note there — it opens straight into text-editing mode
3. Type your text; click elsewhere (or press Escape to discard a note you just started) to finish

Double-clicking an existing note reopens it for editing. Like photos, a note can be moved, resized, rotated, and included in a selection, group, or the layers panel.

Styling notes

Select one or more notes and the options bar above the board shows their style: text size, text color, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, the font (sans-serif, serif, or monospace), alignment (left, center, right), and an optional Background color behind the text. Every change applies to all selected notes and can be undone.

Lists, checklists, and links

Notes stay plain text, but a few ways of starting a line turn it into a list item:

Click a checkbox to tick or untick it — no need to open the note. A web address (https://…) in a note is underlined as a link; Ctrl/Cmd + click it to open it in a new tab. A plain click still just selects the note, so moving a note never opens a link by accident.

Drawing lines and arrows

Mark up your references with freehand lines and arrows — circle a detail, point at a seam.

1. Press D for freehand lines, or A for arrows (or click the Draw button in the tool bar — press and hold it to switch between lines and arrows — or use File → Draw Lines / Draw Arrows)
2. Drag on the board to draw. For an arrow, drag from its tail to its tip — hold Shift to keep it at 15° steps
3. The tool stays on, so you can draw several in a row. Press Escape (or the same key again) to stop

While drawing, the options bar shows the color and width of the next line (the line color is also in the tool bar), and a button for dashed lines. With drawings selected, changing them restyles those drawings too. Each drawing is an ordinary board item: select, move, resize, rotate, group, or delete it like a photo. Clicking near its line selects it; a click on the empty space around a line goes through to whatever is underneath.

Erasing drawings

Press E (or choose File → Erase Drawings, or the eraser in the Draw button's press-and-hold menu) and drag over lines and arrows to remove them. Each drawing the eraser touches disappears whole; photos, notes, swatches, and locked drawings are never erased. One drag is one undo step, and Escape stops erasing.

Cropping a photo

Cropping trims what's visible of a photo without discarding the original image data — you can always crop back out to the full picture later.

1. Select a photo and choose Object → Crop (or just double-click it)
2. Drag the crop handles to adjust the visible region, or drag inside the crop area to move it over the photo at the same size
3. Press Enter, or click outside the crop area, to apply it — or Escape to cancel and leave the photo as it was

Because the original image is never discarded, re-opening Crop on an already-cropped photo lets you adjust the region again, including back out to its full, uncropped extent.