Import files

Most diagrams do not start from a blank canvas. They start from a screenshot in a chat thread, a flowchart someone else exported last week, a Figma frame your designer just pasted, or a YouTube link you want to annotate. CorriDraw treats imports as first-class citizens — the canvas accepts almost anything you throw at it, and infers the right behaviour from the content. This page covers every way you can get material in.

Drag and drop a .corridraw file

The cleanest import path is also the most powerful: drag a .corridraw file from your file manager and drop it anywhere on the canvas. The editor reads the JSON, restores every element with its original styling, re-attaches every embedded image, and replaces the current scene with the imported one. The new scene becomes the active document and inherits the file handle, so the next time you save (Main menu → Save to…) it writes straight back to that file on disk.

Screenshot pending

A .corridraw file being dragged from a file manager onto the editor canvas, with the drop overlay highlighted

/screenshots/docs/import-files-1.png

The same drop also works with PNG and SVG files that were exported from CorriDraw with Embed scene turned on. The editor checks the file’s metadata for an embedded scene payload first and, if it finds one, opens it as a full editable scene instead of inserting it as a flat image. That is the round-trip property that makes those formats so useful for handoff.

Paste or drop a raster image

Any time you have an image on your clipboard — from a screenshot tool, a browser’s Copy image, or another editor — right-click the canvas and choose Paste (or just press Ctrl+V, which is faster once you know it). The image lands at the cursor position as a regular CorriDraw image element: you can resize it, crop it, lock its aspect ratio, layer text on top, and treat it like any other shape.

The same is true for drag-and-drop: drop a .png, .jpg, .gif, or .webp file from your file system onto the canvas and it becomes an image element at the drop point. PNGs that contain CorriDraw scene data trigger the round-trip path described above; everything else inserts as a flat image.

Screenshot pending

A screenshot pasted onto the canvas, sitting alongside hand-drawn arrows and labels that annotate it

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Image elements respect the canvas, not the file system. If you delete the original file on disk after pasting, the diagram is unaffected — the bytes were uploaded into the scene and stored alongside it.

Drop a URL → it becomes an embed

If the thing you want to import is a URL — a YouTube video, a Figma frame, a tweet, a CodeSandbox, a Loom recording — you do not need to paste a screenshot of it. Drag the URL itself onto the canvas. Two flavours work out of the box:

• From the address bar: grab the padlock icon (or favicon, depending on your browser) at the left of the URL and drag it onto the canvas.
• From a link in a webpage: drag the link the same way you would drag selected text, and drop it onto the canvas.

CorriDraw inspects the URL, matches it against the supported-providers list, and inserts an embed — a sandboxed live iframe of the destination, sized to that provider’s natural aspect ratio. You can resize, move, and group the embed like any other shape; the live content keeps rendering inside it. The next chapter — Embeds on the canvas — covers the supported providers and the security model in full.

Screenshot pending

A YouTube URL being dragged from a browser address bar onto the canvas, materialising as a video embed at 16:9

/screenshots/docs/import-files-3.png

If the dropped URL is not on the supported-providers list, the editor falls back to inserting a plain text element with the URL as a clickable hyperlink. You can promote it to an embed later if you add the host to the workspace allow-list.

Open via Main menu → Open

For the times when drag-and-drop is awkward — you are on a tablet, the file is buried in a deep folder, or you want the explicit native file picker — open the Main menu (the hamburger icon top-left) and choose Open. The browser’s native file picker opens; pick a file and CorriDraw imports it. This is also the easiest path on touch devices where dragging from another app is fiddly.

The picker accepts the same set of types as drag-and-drop: .corridraw, PNG, SVG, JPG, and WEBP. CorriDraw inspects the chosen file and either opens it as a scene (for .corridraw, or PNG/SVG with embedded scene metadata) or inserts it as an image element (for everything else).

Screenshot pending

The native file-open dialog filtered to CorriDraw-compatible types, showing a few .corridraw and .png files

/screenshots/docs/import-files-4.png

What happens when the import overlaps existing content

Two distinct behaviours, depending on what you imported:

• Scene imports (.corridraw, PNG/SVG with embedded scene) — replace the current scene. The editor warns you if you have unsaved local changes; either save first (Main menu → Save to…, or Ctrl+S) or accept that they will be lost.
• Image and embed imports — append to the current scene at the drop point or cursor position. The existing scene is untouched.

The asymmetry is intentional. A .corridraw file is a scene, so dropping it implies "open this", not "merge this in". An image or an embed is a single element, so dropping it implies "insert here".

Importing libraries (and a heads-up about .corridrawlib)

The fifth file extension you might encounter is .corridrawlib — a CorriDraw library file. Library files do not contain a scene; they contain a collection of reusable shapes, frames, or grouped elements that show up in your Personal Library sidebar. Dropping a .corridrawlib file installs the library; it does not change the canvas. The Library chapter covers this in depth — see Folders & libraries in the dashboard section.

Once an import has landed, all the regular tools apply. Right-click the canvas and choose Select all to grab the new content, group it from the right-click menu, lock it to prevent accidental edits, or wrap it in a frame to keep it organised. From CorriDraw’s perspective, imported elements are indistinguishable from elements you drew yourself. (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+G get you to the same actions if your hands are on the keyboard.)