Snapping and alignment
As you drag a card, guides appear showing where it lines up with the cards around it, and it snaps to their edges, centres and spacing. Hold Alt while dragging to switch snapping off for that drag. Nothing needs enabling — the guides only appear while you are actually moving something.
Boards look better when things line up, and lining things up by hand is tedious. Guides do it while you drag.
What happens as you drag
Move a card and thin guide lines appear showing where it aligns with its neighbours:
- Edges — left, right, top, bottom
- Centres — horizontal and vertical
- Equal spacing — when three or more cards are evenly distributed, the calipers show it
The card snaps to those positions as you approach them. Release and it lands exactly aligned.
Turning it off for one drag
Hold Alt while dragging. Snapping is suppressed for that drag only.
This is deliberately momentary rather than a persistent setting: the case for disabling snapping is almost always "just this one card, just now", and a setting you have to remember to turn back on is a setting that stays wrong.
Aligning a selection
Select several cards and right-click. Under Arrange you get:
Align — Left, Center, Right, Top, Middle, Bottom. Every selected card moves to that edge of the selection's own bounding box. Nothing is resized.
Distribute — Horizontally or Vertically. The two outermost cards stay put and the ones between them are spread so the gaps are equal. Equal gaps rather than equal centres, because with cards of different sizes equal centres still looks uneven, which is the thing you were trying to fix. Needs at least three cards — two have no gap between them to even out.
Tidying up
Arrange → Tidy up repacks cards rather than nudging them:
| Justified rows | Rows of equal height with every picture at its true shape, flush on both edges. The best answer for photographs — there are no holes in it. |
| Masonry columns | Even columns, ordered by colour, so the board reads as a deliberate sweep rather than as the order things arrived. |
| Grid | One uniform cell for everything. Best when the cards are different kinds — an image beside a PDF beside an audio clip. |
| Single row / Single column | One line. |
With cards selected it tidies those; with nothing selected it tidies the whole board. Either way the block stays where it already was and keeps clear of anything it is not moving, so tidying part of a board cannot bury the rest. It is one undo step.
Justified rows is the only one that resizes cards — fitting a row to a width is a resize. The rest only move things.
The same layouts are available over the API, so an assistant can tidy a board too.
Dropping a lot of files at once
Drop a folder of images onto the canvas and they arrive as a block centred on where you dropped, laid out as justified rows, rather than in a line running off the side of the screen.
On a crowded board
Guides are culled to cards actually near the one you are moving. Without that, a board with hundreds of cards would produce a screen full of lines and no useful signal.
Where snapping does not apply
- Free-draw strokes — freehand marks are freehand.
- Inside a grid — cells are defined by dividers, and dragging a divider resizes rather than snapping.
- Schedule slots — a slot is a date, and dropping into it is exact by definition.
Frequently asked questions
How do I place something deliberately off-grid?
Hold Alt while dragging. Snapping is suppressed for that drag only, so you do not have to remember to switch it back on.
Does snapping work with many cards on screen?
Yes. Candidate guides are culled to what is actually near the card you are moving, so a board with hundreds of cards does not turn into a screen full of lines.
Can I align a selection all at once?
Yes. Select several cards, right-click, and use Arrange → Align or Distribute. To repack a whole board, Arrange → Tidy up.
Machine-readable: /docs/canvas/snapping-and-alignment.md · /llms.txt