Selecting and arranging

Click to select; Shift-click to add or remove; drag across empty paper to select everything the box touches. Hold the box at an edge of the Canvas (or past it) and the view moves that way, faster the further you go, so you can take in things that were off screen in one drag; move back from the edge to stop. Escape clears the selection. Ctrl/⌘ + A selects everything.

On a touch screen, tap to select and tap empty space to clear. Drag something with a finger to move it. A finger dragged across empty space moves the view instead, so to draw a selection box, press and hold empty space for a moment, then drag (or lift without dragging for the Canvas’s menu). A double tap does what a double-click does: type in text, a note or a shape, go into a group, or open an image in the image editor. To choose several, keep a finger on one and tap the others with another finger; tap one again to leave it out. Press and hold something, then lift your finger, for the menu a right-click opens; on empty space, the Canvas’s menu. Tap with two fingers to undo, and with three to redo.

One change can include at most 5,000 things (a group counts with everything in it). A move, delete, layout or paste of more than that, or one too large to save at once (thousands of things with a lot of text), is refused before anything changes, with a message saying so: select fewer and do it in parts.

• Move by dragging, or with the arrow keys (Shift for 10 at a time). Alt-drag moves a copy; press or release Alt mid-drag to switch between moving a copy and moving the original.
• Resize from the corner handles or the edges. Images, text and notes keep their proportions, and shapes and frames resize freely; Shift switches between the two, and Alt resizes from the centre. After you touch the Canvas with a finger, the handles grow and can be taken from a little further away, so a fingertip finds them; they return to their size when you use a mouse or a pen again. Text and the words in notes and shapes grow and shrink with a proportional resize.
• Snapping lines things up with the edges and centres of what is around them, and with equal gaps, showing red guides. With Snap to grid on, moves, resizes and drawn shapes also land on the grid’s dots wherever nothing else snapped. Hold Ctrl/⌘ while dragging to move freely.
• Layer order: ] brings forward, [ sends backward; add Shift for to front or to back. Moving and resizing never change the order.
• Duplicate (Ctrl/⌘ + D), delete (Delete or Backspace), copy, cut and paste (Ctrl/⌘ + C, X, V). Copies travel between Canvases and tabs, and text you copy pastes into other apps. A copy of an image or video is its own: editing it never changes the one it was copied from, and the library lists both (they share the same file, so a copy takes no more storage). A paste lands under the pointer (from a right-click menu, where you clicked), and pasting again places each copy a little further along. With the pointer off the Canvas, it lands beside the original, or in the middle of the view once the original is out of sight. Plain text pasted onto a Canvas becomes a text box.

Select several and the selection toolbar at the Canvas’s top right offers Align, Layout and Group directly. It stays in the same place whatever you select, and disappears when nothing is selected. Right-click a selection (or use ⋯ at the toolbar’s right end) for its menu:

• Copy, Cut, Duplicate and Delete.
• Arrange: bring to front, bring forward, send backward, send to back.
• Layout, as in Figma:
  • Tidy up (Ctrl + Alt + Shift + T; ⌃⌥⇧T on a Mac) turns the rows and columns things roughly sit in into an even grid, with one spacing throughout: the usual gap between them now.
  • Distribute vertical spacing (Alt + Shift + V; ⌥⇧V) and Distribute horizontal spacing (Alt + Shift + H; ⌥⇧H) keep the outermost in place and make the gaps between equal. These need three or more.
  • Grid lays them out in a near-square grid of equal cells, in reading order, whatever their arrangement now.
  • Stack overlaps them in a cascade, each a little up and to the right of the one beneath, keeping their layer order.
  • Adjust the spacing of anything evenly laid out (after Tidy up, Grid or Stack, or any evenly spaced row, column or grid): hover the selection and handles appear in its gaps (on a stack’s steps); on a touch screen they show whenever it is selected. Drag one to change every gap on that axis alike; the gaps are tinted and the spacing shows as you drag. Things on a frame move with it, and each drag is one step to undo.
• Align to the selection’s left, centre, right, top, middle or bottom.
• Frame selection puts a new frame behind the selection, around it.
• Group selection (Ctrl/⌘ + G) groups the selection, and Ungroup (Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + G) takes a group apart (see Groups).
• Flip horizontal or vertical mirrors the selection; images also turn to face the other way.
• Export the selection as a PNG, JPG or WebP file, at twice its size on the Canvas (a frame on its own exports as the frame), or Copy as image to paste elsewhere. With several images selected, each is exported to its own file, named after the Canvas and numbered (“Campaign – 1.jpg”, “Campaign – 2.jpg”); a group or frame selected with them is exported as one file of its own (with what is in or on it, which isn’t exported again apart), and text, shapes and videos beside them are left out. Your browser may ask once to allow several downloads. A selection without images is still exported as one file. PNG and WebP have a transparent background; JPG keeps the paper. For a single image, Download original saves the file exactly as it was uploaded or made.
• Metadata (right-click one node) shows what it is: its type, position and size, when it was made and last changed, and the image or video it shows. For a video, it also shows its length, and whether its poster and scrub preview are ready yet: they are made shortly after a video is added or made. For something the Assistant made, it also shows the model and whether Auto chose it, what it was asked and made from, every attempt (a retry is another attempt), how long it took, why an attempt failed, and what you were charged for it, every attempt included: held while it’s being made, and nothing if it wasn’t made.
• Zoom to selection (Shift + 2).

Arranging and flipping take what lies on a frame along with it, and each is one step to undo.

Right-click empty paper for Paste here, Add (text, a note, a rectangle, an ellipse, a frame or images, where you clicked), View (Show grid, Snap to grid and Snap to objects, ticked when on), Fit all (Shift + 1) and 100% (Shift + 0). View settings are yours, and are remembered in this browser.

Every change is one step to undo (Ctrl/⌘ + Z) and redo (Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + Z, or Ctrl + Y), and is saved as you go.

Groups

Select some things and press Ctrl/⌘ + G to group them; Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + G ungroups. Groups can hold groups.

• A click on anything in a group selects the whole group. Double-click to go in one level (again to go deeper), then click between things in that group as usual. Escape steps back out one level. Ctrl/⌘ + click selects the thing itself, however deep.
• A group moves, resizes, copies, duplicates, deletes, lays out, flips and exports as one. Its outline is always exactly around what is in it, and what is in it stays together in the layer order.
• A group with nothing left in it goes away by itself.