Arrange and align

Move, resize and rotateCopy Anchor Link

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• Move: drag a selected item. Several selected items move together. Press Esc mid-drag to cancel. Attached arrows follow.
• Resize: drag a corner handle. Shapes also have edge handles. Hold Shift to keep proportions, or Alt (Option on Mac) to resize around the center.
• Rotate: hover just outside a corner until the cursor becomes a rotate arrow, then drag. Hold Shift to snap to 15 degree steps.

None of these work on a read-only shared board.

Where new items landCopy Anchor Link

• Dropped, imported and generated items land together as a grid in free space, not under the pointer. They don't cover other items. This includes several files dropped at once, and drops near the toolbars or the edge of the window: items land in free space clear of the toolbars.
• Moved and copied items (Move to Board and Copy to Board) and references that Reuse puts back on the board also land in free space, keeping their layout.
• Duplicated items (⌘D) appear slightly down and to the right of the original. Repeated duplicates step further diagonally, so copies can overlap the original and other items. To tidy items up, press ⌘ with an arrow key to pack them.

Snap to gridCopy Anchor Link

Snap to Grid is on by default and lines items up on a 20 px grid. To place items freely, turn it off in User settings → General → Snap to Grid. The setting is remembered. See Settings.

Align and distributeCopy Anchor Link

Select two or more items. The alignment toolbar appears above them.

• Stack mode on: media and text notes line up against the edge without overlapping each other. They can still end up on top of items you didn't select. Arrows, shapes and drawings stay put.
• Stack mode off: everything aligns by edges or centers and may overlap.

Good to know:

• If items already overlap, stack mode stacks them one after another. Align top edges can then give a column or staircase instead of a row. Spread them out first, or turn stack mode off.

Pack with the keyboardCopy Anchor Link

Select two or more media items or notes and press ⌘ with an arrow key. They slide toward that edge and fill empty space without overlapping, a bit like Tetris.

Work on a whole selectionCopy Anchor Link

Select two or more items and open More actions (the ⋮ button just outside the top-left corner of the selection):

• Grid: lays the selected images out in an even grid of equal square cells, cropping them. Videos and audio stay where they are.
• Compose collage: builds one collage image automatically from two or more images.
• Manual collage: arrange a collage yourself and export it to the board as a PNG. Works for any signed-in account; it runs in your browser.
• Export selection as PNG: saves the Selection or Whole board as an image, with Scale, Padding and Background options. Only still images, notes, drawings, shapes and arrows are included; see Media Browser.
• Download selected: saves the selected media as a ZIP.
• Copy links: copies shareable links for the selected items.
• Merge videos: appears when every selected item is a video.

The red X next to More actions (Delete selected items) deletes the whole selection.

See Media tools for collage and merge details.

Play

For agentsCopy Anchor Link

A connected agent can move, resize, rotate, align, pack and group items with execute_board_action (for example updateItemsLayout with rotation, groupItems and ungroupItems). Each change is one Undo step, and the agent can undo its own edits with undo_board_edit. See Edit a board.

RelatedCopy Anchor Link