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The Gallery – Organizing

Your Files
The very first page you will see upon opening Procreate for the first time is what is called the Gallery.
This is where all your files exist and where you can create, organize, and view your artworks. This
feature sets Procreate apart from most other drawing software, in which the landing page takes you
directly to a new canvas.
To begin, the gallery should already have some sample artworks included to give you an idea of the
full extent of what the software is capable of. The gallery is where the application automatically saves
all your work, much like cloud-based types of software such as Google Docs. This relieves you from
having to continually save your progress while working.
In this chapter, let’s look into the gallery and its functionality. By the end of the chapter, you will have
learned how to navigate the gallery, make a new canvas, share and arrange your existing canvases,
and edit your canvas information.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Creating a canvas
• Sharing a canvas
• Ordering, renaming, and stacking
• Selecting, duplicating, and deleting

Creating a canvas
There are several ways of creating a new canvas on Procreate. In the upper-right corner of the gallery,
you will see four buttons. Out of those buttons, Import, Photo, and + are the options that let you
create a canvas from different sources of your choice. There is some overlap between how those three
work, but let’s look at them one by one.
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Creating a canvas using Import

Import allows you to create a new canvas directly from an image, video, PSD, or Procreate file saved
in the Files app on your iPad. This is ideal for when you have downloaded a file from somewhere else
(such as an email or a cloud drive) and want to open it in Procreate.
Tapping on Import will take you directly to Files, as shown here:

Figure 1.1: Importing from Files

From here, you simply have to go to the location of the file you want and tap on it. Once you have
chosen a compatible file to open, Procreate will automatically create a canvas using it for you to work on.
Procreate supports the following file types:

• .procreate
• PSD
• JPEG
• PNG
• TIFF
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• .PDF
• GIF
• .MP4
• HEVC

Another way to quickly import a file into Procreate is by dragging and dropping it from Files. We’ll go
into more detail about that in the Sharing by dragging and dropping section. With that, you now know
how to import images from Files to create a new canvas. Now, let’s look at the other options we have.

Creating a canvas using Photo

Another avenue the application offers is to import an image from the Photos app. Tapping on Photo will
take you to your iPad’s gallery, from where you can pick an image of your choice. It will look like this:

Figure 1.2: Importing from Photos

Here, you have an option to choose either from the entire gallery of photos or your albums. Similar
to Import, Procreate will automatically create a fresh canvas with the original image.

Important Note
A canvas created from an imported file from either Files (using Import) or Photos (using
Photo) will have the same properties as the source, including dimensions, resolution, and
color profile. For time-based files such as GIFs and videos, the canvas will automatically turn
on Animation Assist at the same frame rate as the source.
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Of course, in this case, dragging and dropping an image from the Photo Library also does the trick.
You now know how to create a canvas using Photo.

Creating a custom canvas

Tap on the + icon in the upper-right corner to create a fresh blank canvas from the available presets.
If you find that none of them fit your needs, you could always make one from scratch! In the next
chapter, we will cover, in detail, the process of setting up a custom canvas.
Next, we will look at the different ways in which we can share a canvas on Procreate.

Sharing a canvas
Procreate lets you export a canvas directly from the gallery to several supported apps such as Google
Drive, Twitter, and Instagram. There are two ways to do it: you can choose to either share a single
canvas or share multiple canvases together.

Sharing a single canvas

To begin, perform the following steps:

1. Open the gallery and find the canvas you want to export.
2. Swipe left on it to reveal three buttons, Share, Duplicate, and Delete, as shown here:

Figure 1.3: The canvas menu

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3. Tap on Share to reveal this menu, which has all the possible formats your file can be exported as:

Figure 1.4: The export formats menu

4. Once you have chosen your desired format, a dialog box will open. From here, you can choose
the destination of your exported file, as shown here:

Figure 1.5: The Share menu