Saving your work
Autosave, what lives in your browser, and what lives in the cloud.
Flipghost saves as you work. There is no save button you are expected to remember, and closing the tab does not lose anything.
Autosave
Changes are written out shortly after you stop making them, rather than on every stroke. Where they go depends on whether you are signed in.
| Signed out | Signed in | |
|---|---|---|
| Saved to | Your browser | Your account |
| Survives closing the tab | Yes | Yes |
| Available on another device | No | Yes |
| Survives clearing site data | No | Yes |
Working signed out
You do not need an account to use the workshop. Your animation is stored in your browser, and it will still be there when you come back.
The catch is that it is only in that browser, on that device. Clearing your site data removes it, and it does not follow you to another machine.
Signed out work lives in one browser on one device. If it matters to you, either export it or sign in.
Cloud projects
Signing in gets you the Save button in the header. Saving once turns your scratch work into a project on your account, and from then on it keeps itself up to date automatically as you draw.
The button also tells you where things stand. It reads Saved when everything is committed, Saving while it is working, and Retry save if something went wrong, which is usually a dropped connection rather than anything you did.
Your saved animations live under My animations, reachable from the ghost in the top left of the workshop.
Importing images
Signed in accounts can bring an image onto the current frame with the Import button. It is placed centred and scaled to fit, and it behaves like any other object on the canvas: the select tool moves, scales, and rotates it.
This is useful for tracing a reference, or for dropping in a background that your drawing sits on top of.
What gets saved
The animation itself, plus the settings that belong to it: title, frame rate, canvas size, onion skin configuration, and your current brush colour and size.
Your keyboard shortcuts are stored separately in your browser, and are not part of a project. See shortcuts.