Importing and exporting

Bring diagrams in from the tools you already use, and take pictures of them out in the format your destination needs.

Importing

Everything is under File ▸ Import:

Format	Notes
draw.io Diagram…	diagrams.net / draw.io files, plain or compressed. Multi-page files import as multiple canvases: one per page, each keeping the name you gave it in draw.io. A single file may mix compressed and uncompressed pages; both come in.
Visio (.vsdx)…	Microsoft Visio documents. Each Visio page becomes a canvas.
OmniGraffle (.graffle)…	OmniGraffle documents, including multi-canvas files.
SVG as Shape…	Brings vector artwork in as a single reusable shape rather than a diagram. Also at Insert ▸ Custom SVG Shape….

Dragging a file onto the canvas is a separate, narrower route: it accepts SVG and raster images only (PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, HEIC, WebP) and drops them at the point you release. The diagram formats in the table above cannot be dragged in. Use File ▸ Import for those. Note that a dragged SVG comes in as editable shapes, not as the single reusable shape SVG as Shape… produces.

The import report

Every diagram import is summarized in the status bar, and a report opens whenever there is something to read: a warning, more than one page, or nothing imported at all. It lists each page with its node and connector counts, plus warnings for anything that came through degraded: a page that produced nothing, shapes that fell back to raw vector paths, or pages the importer could not bring in. A clean single-page import reports in the status bar and does not interrupt you.

Note

The importers are deliberately forgiving: unreadable input yields an empty diagram rather than an error. Read the report rather than assuming a silent import was a complete one. The report is derived from the imported result, so it can flag what arrived damaged but cannot report elements the source file’s importer discarded entirely.

Exporting

File ▸ Export… (⌥⌘E) opens the export sheet.

Format	Use it for
PNG	Slides, documents, chat and issue trackers. Choose a pixel Scale from 1× to 4×. Use 2× or higher for Retina displays and print.
PDF	Print and archival. Vector, so it stays sharp at any size; scale does not apply.
SVG	The web, and further editing in another vector tool. Resolution-independent.

Choosing what to export

• Canvas: when the document has more than one canvas, pick which to export.
• Selection only: export just the selected objects instead of the whole canvas. The option stays dimmed until something is selected, and always exports from the active canvas.

Then click Export… and choose where to save.

When an export cannot happen

An export that produces no file always says why:

• Nothing to export: the canvas, or the selection you chose, is empty. No destination is asked for, because there would be nothing to put there.
• Could not be saved: the file could not be written where you chose. The message carries the reason from the system, usually a full disk, a read-only location or a missing permission. Pick another location and export again.

A successful export is quiet: the status bar names the file that was written.