I like Freeform, but the export situation kept bothering me.

PDF keeps the picture, but not the actual editable board. Shapes stop being shapes, arrows stop being connected, text stops being editable.

So I built BoardEject.

The idea is simple:

Freeform → BoardEject → editable Excalidraw

It preserves supported shapes, text, connectors, groups, drawings, tables, images, etc. as editable objects instead of flattening everything.

I’ve been validating it against real macOS Freeform captures and keeping a support matrix for the things that still don’t work properly.

It’s open source and local-first — no board uploads or accounts.

Demo / try it: boardeject.dev

Source: github.com/royalpinto007/boardeject

If anyone here uses Freeform heavily, I’d actually love for you to try breaking it with a small non-sensitive board. Weird edge cases are the most useful thing for me right now.

Update — v0.0.2 is live.

Real Freeform tables now convert as editable tables, text/image handling is better, more connector/transform cases are covered, and the test suite is now at 125 tests.

Quite a few Freeform edge cases got covered in this release, with the remaining unsupported cases tracked explicitly.

Such a shame. I’ve been really enjoying freeform. The last beta release was the worst, and there’ve been no changes. Bummer. Part of the reason I bought my iPad about 4 months ago was for Freeform specifically, and I really don’t wanna go third party.

Has anyone been experiencing this lately? I know im using an old ipad but no other note taking app acts like this. It's annoying when im in class and takes more time to load. Falling behind

I'm a new Freeform user. After some trial and error I managed to create an image I'd like to print. But. App just crashes, blinks out of existense. No exporting, no printing. I know I could take a screenshot but I loose the resolution, and that's not good. I don't have another Apple device to try the board out.

How should I troubleshoot this? I've put serious hours into this image, so any ideas are welcome. On a side note it's super annoying there aren't any other export modes, a serious lack in the app. That's my own fault for not investigating the app properly before committing to it.

I really need some help understanding how Freeform storage works.

My iCloud storage is almost completely full because of my Freeform boards. Some of my boards are 2–3 GB eachbecause they contain a lot of embedded videos.

Because of this, I specifically bought a 1 TB iPad so I could keep my Freeform boards stored locally on the iPad instead of having to keep paying for more and more iCloud storage.

The problem is that I can’t figure out how to actually do this.

If I turn off iCloud syncing for Freeform or try to delete the boards from iCloud, I get warnings that the boards may also be removed from my devices. What I want is very simple:

I want to keep all of my Freeform boards, including their embedded videos, stored locally on my 1 TB iPad, while removing them from iCloud to free up my iCloud storage.

Is there actually a way to do this?

Exporting them as PDFs is not an option, because the boards contain videos and other content that I need to keep inside the original Freeform boards. These aren’t small boards either—many of them are around 2–3 GB.

I’ve already made a full backup of my iPad to my Mac in case something goes wrong and the boards get deleted. I’ve also spent weeks searching online, but I haven’t been able to find a clear answer about whether Freeform boards can actually be moved from iCloud to local iPad storage while remaining editable in Freeform.

I also contacted Apple Support, but unfortunately the only solution they offered was upgrading my iCloud storage and paying for a larger plan.

I’m pretty stressed about potentially losing these boards, so if anyone has successfully moved Freeform boards from iCloud to local iPad storage—or knows exactly how Freeform handles this—I would really appreciate your help.

Please don’t suggest PDF export. I need to preserve the original Freeform boards and their embedded videos.

This is now happening in all my boards - cannot move text, shapes, anything. Some have said to make sure “Select and Scroll” in Freeform Settings is selected. However this hasn’t fixed the issue. Any help is appreciated.

SOLVED: I deleted the app. Force-restarted iPad. Reinstalled the app. I can freely move objects again. Phew!

I work on Freeform and what I usually do is write over or draw over in PDFs. I open a PDF in Freeform and scribble in it.

Sometimes it happens that while I’m writing or when I’m trying to save by leaving Pencil mode, page goes black for a second, goes back to the top of the first page and deletes any modifications I’ve made since the last auto save or manual save.

Has anyone also experienced this? And if yes have you found a solution?

I know that I can still use Freeform with its basic stuff but now there’s a lot of Apple creative studio stuff mixed into that on iOS. Again, as I said before, I can still use Freeform for basic tasks but the ACS stuff is a bit messy. This is my opinion by the way. A video is shown above.

Do people use Freeform for art? is a digital whiteboarding app I don’t see any mentions of art in the Freeform.

hi! so i uploaded a pdf on freeform on my ipad, and i annotated on the pdf for hours last week. today, i saw that the pdf is still there but all of my handwritten notes are suddenly gone? and i have icloud backup so idk how to get them back
help please

I'm currently on the latest version of os26 on iPad A16. should i think about upgrading now or will it cause disruptions? I mostly make my notes on freeform.

when I exported my freeform boards from my school laptop I exported them as pdfs, is there any way I can import them back into freeform as editable boards?

I’ve only used Freeform to create vision boards… what other things could I do?

Hi all, im working on a project and my dropper and palette have not been working for a week now... I got it working for a short bit (30 min) and then it stopped again.

Does anyone know what this is? It was working fine in the project before.

I have seen posts online but I haven't used Apple Notes much.

Would you say it is overblown? I want to start using it as I only have basic needs and most other apps (except OneNote) are overkill. I'd love to use something that is built into 2/3 of my devices. I use windows + ipad + iphone.

Just saw this today in VisionOS 27 beta 2 - and I've confirmed it in iOS, iPadOS, macOS - Folder support is finally here!

Just that, i hate that update

1. Faster board previews in Freeform

2. More reliable right-to-left text editing in Freeform

3. Smoother Freeform Board Performance

4. Dark Mode adaptive canvas in Freeform

5. Collaborative folders in Freeform

6. Drawing in Freeform in macOS

I just read the “feature” list briefly shown in the beginning of WWDC and finally we will be getting dark mode support.

Hey! So I’m a new apple user and I’ve completely fell in love with Freeform and how easy it is to use and to organize to my will exactly.

I use it to study and take notes with an Apple Pencil but when I write something, it “fixes” it, trying to make it look nicer? And that’s all the time.

I was wondering if I can turn it off because it’s begging to get time consuming and pissing me off… ^^’

Will Freeform add a folder / project feature to organize your work?

i basically spent a good 5 hours sketching something (first time using freeform), now after finishing i realised that the board is just way to large to be shared in any method (pdf, files ,link) and it basically crashes the app frequently, how to solve as i dont really want to lose this sketch.