How the Image Editor works

Your first post gets you through a template in Basic mode without explaining anything. This is the explanation. It covers the whole editor — what's on screen, what Advanced mode unlocks, and how the pieces fit — so that when a template is nearly right, you fix it instead of giving up on it.

You don't need all of this to post. Read the first two sections, then come back for the rest when something specific is in your way.

Two modes, one project

The Basic / Advanced toggle at the top of the screen switches the editor between two views of the same project. Nothing is one-way: flip back and forth as often as you like, and your work carries across both.

• Basic shows only the slots the template designer marked as yours to fill — a photo

here, a headline there — and hides everything else. You can't move things, resize them or add to the design. That's the point: it's very hard to break.

• Advanced opens the full canvas. Every layer becomes something you can select, drag,

resize, restyle, reorder, delete or duplicate. You can add your own text, images, shapes and icons, and change the canvas itself.

Use Basic to fill a template. Use Advanced when the template needs to change — a headline that sits too low, a photo that needs cropping differently, a third line of text the design doesn't have a slot for.

What's on screen

Working around the editor in Advanced mode:

The small link icon next to the title takes you back to the template's page in the Content Hub — useful for re-reading How to use it.

Basic mode: the Edit tab

Fill Your Content lists the slots on the current slide, and only those. A photo slot shows a thumbnail — click it to swap the image. A text slot is a plain box — type over it, and use the size stepper beside it when your words run longer than the placeholder.

Two things above the slots are easy to miss:

• Personalization fields — if the template uses your Instagram handle, website or a

preferred link anywhere, a field for each appears at the top. Fill it once and it updates on every slide that uses it.

• Slide navigation — the arrows and Cover · 1 of 5 move you between slides. Every

slide has its own slots, so work through all of them.

The padlock beside each slot is yours: click it to lock that slot, which grays it out so you can't change it by accident. Handy once the headline is exactly right and you're still working on the rest.

Advanced mode: the canvas is live

Switch to Advanced and the canvas stops being a preview.

• Click anything to select it. Handles appear around it, and a floating toolbar for that

kind of layer appears above the canvas.

• Drag to move. As you move, colored guides snap you to the center and edges of the

slide and to other layers, with spacing readouts when things line up evenly.

• Pull a corner to resize. Photos keep their proportions by default — hold Shift

while you drag to free them. (If a photo has been set to resize freely, Shift does the opposite and locks it.)

• Drag the handle above a layer to rotate it.
• Drag on empty canvas to draw a box and select everything inside it. Hold Shift to

add to what's already selected; Shift-click does the same one layer at a time.

• Double-click a text layer to edit the words in place. Enter makes a new line,

Esc puts the original text back, and Ctrl/⌘ Enter — or clicking anywhere else — finishes. Select some of the words first and Ctrl/⌘ B or Ctrl/⌘ I styles just that selection.

• Double-click a photo to crop it. Drag the frame, scroll to zoom inside it, then

Enter to apply or Esc to cancel. Double-clicking the slide's background image crops that instead.

The floating toolbar

The toolbar that appears over the canvas changes with what you've selected:

Lock, duplicate and delete are always at the end. You can drag the toolbar by its grip if it's in the way, minimize it, and double-click the grip (or press Ctrl/⌘ Shift 0) to put it back.

The Layers tab

In Advanced mode the sidebar opens on Layers: every layer on the current slide, top of the list in front, bottom at the back. The slide's background image sits at the very bottom with a BG badge.

• Drag a row to change what sits in front of what.
• Eye hides a layer without deleting it. Padlock locks it so it can't be selected on

the canvas. Bin deletes it, after asking.

• Click a row to select the layer. The row expands with quick controls — the text and

size for a text layer, a Replace button for a photo — and the sidebar switches to the layer's full inspector.

• Add background appears at the bottom if the slide doesn't have one.

The inspector

Select a single layer and the sidebar shows everything about it, in collapsible sections that summarize themselves when closed: position and size, then whatever applies to that layer — font and text settings, fill, stroke, shadow and effects, image adjustments and overlay. Along the top is an align-and-order strip: align the layer to the slide, and send it forward or back.

Two things in here save a lot of clicking:

• Match text style pushes this text layer's look — font, size, color, spacing — onto

every other text layer you choose, across any slides you choose. Fix one headline, then apply it everywhere.

• Text presets save a style you've built so you can drop it onto new text later.

Text: fonts, sizes and fitting and Photos: swap, crop, remove background, frames go through those sections in full.

Several layers at once

Select more than one layer and the sidebar becomes the Arrange panel: align them to the slide as a group or individually, send them forward or back together, space them evenly, or set an exact gap between them. Select two or more text layers and you also get batch text controls, so one change hits all of them.

Adding things

The tool rail on the left adds a new layer to the current slide:

• Text opens a set of presets — heading, body, caption, quote, a CTA button, a stat

number, a tag — plus a blank box. Pick one and it lands on the canvas ready to edit.

• Image opens the media browser — your own uploads, the stock library, or a fresh upload.
• Shape drops a rectangle you can restyle: fill, gradient, radius, stroke, opacity.
• Element opens the icon browser — thousands of icons you can recolor, plus stickers.

Anything you add behaves like any other layer: it shows in the Layers list, has an inspector, and responds to every shortcut below.

Slides

The strip along the bottom is the whole project. Slides are labeled Cover, CTA or by number, and each thumbnail shows a small count of its layers.

• Click a thumbnail to switch to it. Drag to reorder.
• + adds a blank slide after the last one. Duplicate copies the one you're on.
• Hover the current slide for a delete button (only when there's more than one).
• The grid button at the far left shows every slide at once — the quickest way to check a

carousel reads in order.

Some inspector actions work across slides — apply this layer to all slides, apply this overlay to all — and Brand Kit and AI Rewrite both let you choose which slides they touch. Slides: adding, reordering and applying to all covers all of it.

Styles

Some templates come in several looks. When one does, a bar appears at the bottom of the canvas listing them — the original first, then the alternatives. Click one and the whole project switches: fonts, colors and layout together. Your words and photos stay put. It works in Basic and Advanced alike, and you can switch back any time.

The other tabs

These are the same in both modes; each has its own article.

• Media — Autofill suggests a match for every photo slot from your own uploads or the

stock library; Replace is the manual browser. See How Autofill chooses media.

• Brand Kit — four cards: Fonts, Colors, Logo, Links. Tap one to apply it

to the slides you've selected at the top of the panel. Shuffle colors reassigns your palette if the first pass put the wrong color on the wrong thing. Needs a brand kit saved in Settings → Brand Kit. See Brand Kit.

• Caption — the template's example caption, and yours. Generate writes one from the

words that are actually on your slides, in the voice from Settings → AI Settings, and saves it for next time. See Captions.

• AI Rewrite — redrafts the text on the slides you choose, either from your profile or

from a prompt you write, and shows you before-and-after for every line before you apply. Only on templates that support it. See AI Rewrite.

• Settings (Advanced only) — the canvas itself: size, background color, background image.

Saving, undo and history

The editor does not save on its own. Save in the top bar — or Ctrl/⌘ S — writes the project to your account, and it shows (unsaved) beside the title while there's work you haven't saved. If you try to close the tab with unsaved changes, the browser stops and asks. Saved projects live under My Projects.

Undo is Ctrl/⌘ Z, redo is Ctrl/⌘ Shift Z (or Ctrl Y), and the buttons are in the top bar. The history holds your last 50 changes.

Exporting

Export offers Current Slide or All Slides. All Slides downloads a zip with every slide numbered in order, and then opens the Download to Phone dialog with a QR code — scan it and the files land on your phone. The clock icon next to Export is your export history: re-download an earlier export, or get its QR code again.

Exporting and Getting files onto your phone have the detail, including what happens with reels.

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcuts work in Advanced mode when you're not typing in a text box.

• Ctrl/⌘ S — Save
• Ctrl/⌘ Z · Ctrl/⌘ Shift Z — Undo · Redo
• Delete / Backspace — Delete selected layers
• Ctrl/⌘ C · Ctrl/⌘ V — Copy · Paste layers (works across slides)
• Ctrl/⌘ D — Duplicate
• Ctrl/⌘ A — Select every visible, unlocked layer
• Ctrl/⌘ L — Lock or unlock the selection
• Ctrl/⌘ G · Ctrl/⌘ Shift G — Group · Ungroup
• Ctrl/⌘ \] · Ctrl/⌘ \[ — Bring forward · Send backward
• Ctrl/⌘ Shift \] · Ctrl/⌘ Shift \[ — Bring to front · Send to back
• ↑ ↓ ← → — Nudge 1px; hold Shift for 10px
• Shift while resizing — Free or lock a photo's proportions
• Shift while dragging on empty canvas — Add to the selection
• Enter · Esc while editing text — New line · Put the original text back
• Ctrl/⌘ Enter while editing text — Finish editing
• Enter · Esc while cropping — Apply · Cancel
• Ctrl/⌘ Shift 0 — Reset the floating toolbar's position