A shape library is a named set of shapes you reuse: a UML preset, your team's icons, a notation of your own. Each library is yours, kept with your documents, and its shapes are ready to place on any tab from the palette's My shapes category.
Making a library
Shape libraries come from draw.io. In draw.io, a library is the set of shapes you keep in a scratchpad or save as a library file. Import the file with Import from draw.io on the Explorer page, on its own or together with diagrams and folders:
- Each library file becomes its own library, named after the file. Importing two libraries gives you two; they are never merged.
- If you already have a library with that name, the new one is called "Team icons (2)", so neither is lost.
- Shapes keep their order, titles and look, connections included. Pictures inside them are saved to your image gallery.
- Shapes that can't be read are left out, and the report says how many.
You can have up to 100 shape libraries, each holding up to 1,000 shapes (a bigger draw.io library keeps its first 1,000). A library must also fit in the same space as one tab, just under 2 MB; a larger one is left out and named in the report. You can't make a library from shapes on the canvas yet: only an import makes one.
Placing a shape
Open Library on the palette strip, which sits right after Shapes, to see your libraries. It appears once you have a library with at least one shape. Each library has its own section, newest first, and each shape shows a small preview with its title (or "Shape 1", "Shape 2" when it has none). The Search my shapes box at the top finds shapes by their title or by the library's name.
- Click a shape to place it in the middle of the view, or drag it to where you want it. Placing a shape closes More; open it again to place the next, which lands beside the last instead of on top of it, so a run of placements lines up left to right.
- It arrives selected, ready to move, and one undo takes it back.
- What you place is ordinary shapes and connections: edit them like anything else.
With the keyboard, Tab to a shape and press Enter or Space to place it in the middle of the view.
My shapes isn't offered on a view-only tab, in Plan mode, or in Draw mode, whose dock replaces the palette. The palette loads your libraries when the editor opens, so after importing or changing a library, reopen the document to see the change.
Managing your libraries
The Explorer's Shape libraries page, under Library in the sidebar's More group, lists your libraries, newest first, with how many shapes each holds and a preview of the first eight.
- Rename a library in place: type the new name and press Enter, or Escape (or click away) to keep the old one. Names must be unique among your libraries, up to 120 characters.
- Delete a library after confirming. Its shapes leave My shapes; documents where you placed them keep them.
- Show shapes lists every shape in a library, each with its own Delete. Deleting a single shape takes effect straight away, without a confirmation; deleting the last shape leaves an empty library until you delete that too.
Deleting a library or a shape never changes a document: what you placed is ordinary elements.
To add more libraries, use the draw.io button in Import from at the top right of this page, or of any page that offers it (such as Recent or My documents). Diagrams picked alongside libraries here land at the root of My documents.
Shape libraries belong to you, signed in or not. If you start as a guest and later sign up, your libraries come with you.
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