Export, Recents & sync
When a document is ready, Share in the editor's toolbar opens the export sheet (⇧⌘E, or File › Export… on the Mac). Pick the pages, pick a format, then save the file or send it on. Export is part of Pro for every format except Pixara's own.
Where Export lives
- The Share button in the toolbar. With more than one page it is a menu: Export… or Present.
- The pages panel — Export Page exports just that page.
- A selection's menu — Export makes a page exactly the size of what you selected, with a transparent background, and starts on PNG.
- Home — Export is in every document's menu, so a document can go out without being opened.
| Format | What you get |
|---|---|
| One PDF page per page, kept as vectors where possible; effects such as gradients are drawn as pictures. Author goes into the file's info, Password locks it, Optimize File Size keeps it light. The default for a document of several pages. | |
| PNG, JPG, HEIC | A picture of one page: Original, 2×, 3× or a custom size up to 8192 px on the long side. Quality for JPG and HEIC; colour profile sRGB, Display P3, Adobe RGB, Rec. 709 or Rec. 2020. PNG keeps transparency; JPG and HEIC are flattened on white. |
| SVG | One page as vectors, for the web or another design tool: shapes as paths, text as outlines, photos embedded. The page background included, or transparent. |
| Video | The pages as an MP4 or MOV — H.264 or HEVC, 30 or 60 fps — with the Magic Move transitions between them, each page on screen for its own duration. Needs at least two pages. |
| Pixara | The whole document, editable: a Package that keeps its preview, or a Compact single file (.pixd) for sending around. Always free. |
- Choose the pages. With several pages, the strip at the top of the sheet starts with all of them; tap pages to export just those. Pictures and SVG take one page at a time, Video two or more.
- Pages export at their own size. A 1080 × 1080 page is a 1080 × 1080 picture at Original.
- Export prepares the file, then you save it where you choose or share it — Mail, Messages, AirDrop or another app.
Copy and paste, in and out
Export is for the finished document. For everything smaller there is the clipboard: Pixara uses the system one, so it talks to the apps next to it — no file, no round trip.
- Out. Copy a selection (⌘C) and paste it into another app. Text pastes as text, keeping its font, size and style; a single photo as the picture itself; anything else — a card, a group, several elements — arrives as a picture.
- In. Copy an image or some text anywhere and paste it onto a page: pictures land as photos, text as a text element.
- Between documents the elements stay real elements: selectable, editable, styles intact.
- Or drag a photo, an SVG or a PDF from Files or the Finder onto a page.
Recents
- Recents is every document you work on, wherever its file lives, the last edited first. Sort By, in the ⋯ menu, orders by name, date created or date updated; choose the same one again to reverse it.
- Long-press or right-click a document: Open, Duplicate, Rename, Export, Delete — on the Mac also Move To… and Show in Finder, and Remove from Recents for a document outside the Pixara folder, which leaves the file alone. Select, in the ⋯ menu, picks several to delete at once.
- Recently Deleted, in the ⋯ menu (on the Mac also View › Recently Deleted, from Home), keeps documents deleted from the Pixara folder for thirty days; restore them or delete them for good. A document deleted from any other folder goes to the Trash.
- Search finds documents by name. Settings › Document display chooses what shows under each preview.
- Spotlight and Siri. Documents are indexed, so a search from the Home Screen or the Mac finds them by name; "New Pixara document" and "Open Pixara document" work as Siri phrases and in the Shortcuts app.
- A .pixara file opens in Pixara from anywhere. From the Finder or Files it opens where it is, and your edits save into that file; from Mail or AirDrop it comes in as a copy. Either way it is in Recents, and the Finder and Files show its first page as the file's thumbnail.
Where documents live
- On iPhone and iPad, new documents go to iCloud Drive › Pixara — or stay on the device when iCloud is off. To keep one somewhere else, export it as a Pixara file or drag it out of Recents; a document you open from Files still opens where it is.
- On the Mac, a new document asks where to save it, like Pages: a client folder, the Desktop, or iCloud Drive › Pixara. The panel opens in the folder you used last. Move To…, in the document's menu in Recents, moves it later.
- You never save. Documents save themselves every ten seconds while you work, when you close them, when the app goes to the background, and before you present or export. File › Save (⌘S) is there if you want it now.
Sync
- Documents in iCloud Drive › Pixara — the folder shows up in Files and the Finder too — sync in the background. Open the same document on another device and it is already there.
- A document in another folder syncs the way that folder does: one in iCloud Drive syncs, one on the Mac's own disk stays on the Mac.
- Saved components sync the same way, so a part saved on the iPad is in Elements › Saved on the Mac. Settings › My Components renames and deletes them.
- Offline works. You keep editing and saving on the device, and changes sync when you are back. Templates and the AI that runs in the cloud need a connection.