A blank canvas is fine, but most board game design work benefits from visuals, reference photography, your own card art, competitor box shots, moodboards. This page covers adding images and files to a whiteboard.

What this page helps you do

Drop images onto the canvas.
Add PDFs and other file types.
Build a moodboard, mockup grid, or reference wall.

Drag and drop

The fastest way:

Open your whiteboard.
Find the image on your computer (Finder, Files, browser tab).
Drag the image onto the whiteboard canvas.
Drop. The image lands where you released.

Most common formats work: PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP, SVG.

Paste from clipboard

If you've copied an image from elsewhere (a screenshot, an image on a webpage), paste with Cmd/Ctrl + V while the whiteboard is focused. The image lands at the cursor position.

Upload from the toolbar

If drag-and-drop isn't convenient (mobile, certain browsers):

Click the Image tool in the toolbar (or + menu).
Pick a file from your device.
The image is uploaded and placed on the canvas.

Image properties

Once an image is on the canvas, click to select it. The side panel shows:

Size: width × height in pixels (and on the canvas).
Position: x, y coordinates.
Crop: drag the crop handles to trim edges without changing the source.
Rotate: handle on top of the image.
Order: bring forward / send backward (controls overlap).
Lock: prevent accidental moves.

To replace an image with a different one, delete the existing one and drag in a new one.

PDFs

Drop a PDF onto the canvas. The Whiteboard renders it as a series of pages you can position. Useful for:

Reviewing rulebooks alongside notes.
Checking a sell sheet against your art reference.
Annotating diagrams: drop the PDF, then draw on top.

PDFs are rendered at view-quality. For high-resolution work, export the PDF pages to PNG first, then drop the PNGs.

Other file types

For files we don't render natively (Word docs, spreadsheets, etc.), you can:

Drop a link to the file and the Whiteboard creates a clickable thumbnail.
Drop the file and store it as an attachment on the canvas, clicking downloads it.

This is useful for keeping references together in one ideation space.

Building a moodboard

A common pattern:

Open a fresh whiteboard.
Drop 10–20 reference images (other games, art styles, illustrations).
Group related images together with Frames (see Pages and frames).
Add sticky notes labeling each cluster.
Annotate with the pen as design conversations happen.

The result is a single ideation surface a publisher or co-designer can take in at a glance.

Building a mockup grid

For card mockups:

Drop your card art images onto the canvas.
Resize and align them in a grid (use the alignment tools in the side panel).
Add labels above each row or column.
Annotate decisions with sticky notes ("this style for v0.7", "swap green for blue").

When the grid is final, export to PDF for a clean reference document, see Sharing and exporting.

Tips & common questions

Image upload is slow / fails. Most failures are large file sizes. Resize the image to under 5 MB first (JPG at quality 85 is usually plenty). If repeatable, check your network connection.

Image quality looks degraded. The Whiteboard re-encodes images for fast rendering. If you need print-quality, export the original from your image editor and use the PDF export from the whiteboard for final layouts.

Can I link to an external image (URL) instead of uploading? Some external image URLs work when dropped, but Boardssey caches a copy for reliability. If the source image changes later, the version on your whiteboard doesn't update automatically.

Can multiple people drop images at the same time? Yes. Live multiplayer means everyone sees uploads land in real time, useful for group moodboard sessions. See Collaborating in real time.

How big can a whiteboard get with lots of images? The infinite canvas handles a lot, but very heavy boards (hundreds of high-res images) can slow down. If a board gets sluggish, split it into multiple pages, see Pages and frames.