Saving your work
How a shot is saved — autosave, the Save button, closing, and the shot the app reopens on launch.
Reference
- Menu
- File ▸ Save Shot
Your work is saved for you. The shot file is kept current as you draw, so closing the app, being interrupted, or having iPadOS reclaim the app while it sits in the background cannot cost you a session.
There is one file per shot and one version of the truth in it. Autosave writes the real shot file, the way Procreate does — it is not a separate recovery snapshot that you have to be offered on the next launch.
When it writes
Four things trigger a write.
| Trigger | When |
|---|---|
| Idle | Ten seconds after your last committed edit — the moment you pause to look at what you have done. |
| Heartbeat | Whenever more than about ninety seconds of work is unwritten, for a session that never pauses. |
| Suspension | The moment the app leaves the screen, or the device locks. The write is held open so it finishes rather than being frozen halfway. |
| Explicit | The Save button, File ▸ Save Shot, and closing the shot. These block until the file has landed. |
Autosave waits out a stroke or a sculpt drag rather than writing in the middle of one, and the expensive half of a write happens off the drawing thread — an autosave in a working session is not something you should be able to feel.
The Save button
The Save control sits in the shot bar, to the right of the view controls, beside the red ✕ that closes the shot. It is a state readout as much as a button:
| Icon | Meaning |
|---|---|
| A filled download arrow, in the accent colour | There is work that has not been written yet. |
| A grey checkmark | Everything is on disk. |
You do not have to press it. It is there for when you want to be certain before putting the iPad down.
There is no “Discard changes”
Closing a shot just closes it. There is no Save / Discard / Cancel prompt, because with autosave there is nothing unsaved to discard — the file has been keeping up with you all along. Use Undo to take back work, not the close button.
The shot reopens on launch
The app remembers which shot was open when it last stopped running, and reopens it a moment after launch rather than landing on Home. Close the shot and you are back on the project's shots grid, and the next launch starts there.
If the shot has since been deleted, the marker is dropped and the app opens normally.
Thumbnails
Every save renders the shot's thumbnail — the picture on its card in the shots grid — through the same pipeline that exports it, so a card always shows what the shot currently looks like. Cards re-read the image whenever the shot's modified date changes.
A thumbnail is only rendered while the app is on screen. A write triggered by the app going to the background skips it and keeps the previous picture, because starting a GPU render on the way out is the one thing certain to get the app killed mid-write.
What is in the file
A shot file holds the layer stack, every stroke and fill, the timeline, the surfaces, the guides, and the references to any imported picture, video or audio. Large data — stroke chunks and fill pixels — is written alongside it in the project folder rather than inside the document.
See File formats for what can be taken out of the app and what can be brought in.