Help

New accounts see a short guided tour (upload, search, boards, the browser extension) right after finishing setup — that's Getting started below. Didn't get it, or want to see it again? Every demo is replayable anytime, for any account:

1. Getting started — Upload, search, boards, and the browser extension — the tour every new account sees first.
2. Sharing — Sharing a board with people you've invited, or with anyone via a public link.
3. Search & organization — Finding images by text, tag, color, and filtering by where they came from.
4. Comments & TODOs — Discussing boards and images with people you share them with, and assigning TODOs.

You'll need to be signed in first; if you aren't, a demo link will ask you to sign in and then take you straight there.

1. Go to Settings → Email.
2. Enter the new address and your current password.
3. Click Send confirmation.

We email a link to the new address — your email only changes once you open that link and confirm, so your current address keeps working until then. Settings shows a pending note meanwhile, with options to resend or cancel.

You can only switch to an address that isn't already used by another Hoard account. If you see “already used by a different account” and that address is actually yours (you've forgotten which password goes with it), contact the site admin — they can reset it for you.

Hoard accepts JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, AVIF, and TIFF images (up to 25 MB each).

Some common types are not supported: HEIC/HEIF (the format iPhones use by default), SVG, and BMP. If you upload files of an unsupported type, Hoard skips them and tells you how many were left out. For iPhone photos, you can have your phone share them as JPEG (Settings → Camera → Formats → Most Compatible), or pick the “JPEG”/“Most Compatible” option when sharing.

Yes.

1. Click Upload.
2. Choose Save from URL.
3. Paste the image's web address.
4. Click Save.

Use the link to the image itself (it usually ends in something like .jpg or .png) — on most sites you can right-click the image → “Copy image address”. A link to the web page the image sits on won't work. The image must be one of the supported formats above.

Yes. You can select many files in one go. As they upload, your library fills in automatically — no need to refresh the page yourself.

If you upload more than 20 images at once, the rest keep uploading in the background so the app stays usable — you'll see a small progress count and the images appear as they finish. Just keep this tab open and signed in until it's done (you can still browse around Hoard in the meantime); fully reloading or closing the tab will stop an in-progress batch.

No platform's photo picker has a “select this whole album” button, and folder-picking itself works differently by device — these are limits of the phone or computer's own picker apps, not something a website can change. Jump to whichever applies to you:

From a computer

1. For any folder of image files: click Upload → Upload a folder and pick it — Hoard adds every image inside automatically. Non-image files (documents, videos, .DS_Store, etc.) are skipped, with a note on how many.
2. For a whole Google Photos album specifically: install the Chrome extension, then open the album — or the Albums list page, and pick one right from the extension's popup — and bulk-save everything in it. It reads the page directly instead of going through a picker, so there's no per-item cap and no album-browsing gap.

From an Android device

1. For a folder of files already on your phone: Upload → Upload a folder. Tap into a specific folder first (e.g. Pictures or DCIM) — Android blocks “Use this folder” at the top-level storage view for privacy.
2. For the real whole-album fix, with no per-item limit: install Firefox for Android, then install the Hoard extension there too — Firefox for Android supports real browser extensions (Chrome for Android doesn't), so the same Albums-list bulk-import that already works on a computer works from your phone in Firefox.
3. For a whole Google Photos album without installing anything: open it in the Google Photos app itself, select all of it, and use its download/save action to save the photos to your phone as regular files. Then in Hoard, use Upload a folder (or From your device) on wherever they landed — a folder of plain files doesn't have the same selection limits as browsing your Photos library directly.
4. Or use the Upload menu's “Import from Google Photos” option — good for browsing recent photos or searching, but (a genuine limitation on Google's side, not Hoard's) it can't browse or select a whole named album.

From an iPhone/iPad (iOS)

1. iOS browsers can't pick a folder at all — use From your device instead. You can still multi-select as many individual photos as you like in one go.
2. For a whole Google Photos album: open it in the Google Photos app, select all of it, and use Share → Save to Files to save them as regular files. Then in Hoard, use From your device, browse to that folder, and select them all.
3. For the stock Photos app or iCloud Photos: Apple doesn't offer the same kind of picker to outside apps, so the same “whole album” gap applies with no fix possible. Same workaround — Share → Save to Files, then From your device in Hoard on that folder.
4. Or use the Upload menu's “Import from Google Photos” option for browsing/searching — same album-browsing limitation as above.

Google Photos has an official picker Hoard can open to let you browse and import your photos directly — that's what powers the Upload menu's “Import from Google Photos” option. Apple doesn't offer an equivalent for iCloud Photos or the Photos app: the tools Apple gives developers for this (PHPhotoLibrary, PHPickerViewController) only work inside a native iPhone/iPad/Mac app, not from a website. Since Hoard is a website, there's no way to build a matching “Import from iCloud” button — this is a permanent limitation on Apple's side, not something planned for later.

The workaround is to export your photos as regular files first, then upload those the normal way:

On a Mac

1. Open Photos and select the photos or album you want.
2. File → Export → Export {N} Photos…, choosing the option for the original, unmodified quality rather than a resized copy.
3. Pick a destination folder and export.
4. In Hoard, use Upload a folder on that folder (or From your device to select the files individually).

Don't try to grab files straight out of the Photos Library package (right-click → “Show Package Contents”) — it's an internal database, not a plain folder of files, and reaching into it directly isn't something Apple supports. Export is the correct way to get real files out.

On iPhone/iPad

1. Open Photos, select the photos or album you want.
2. Tap Share → Save to Files.
3. In Hoard, use From your device and browse to wherever you saved them.

Chrome

1. Get it from the Chrome Web Store and click Add to Chrome — Chrome takes care of installing (and later updating) it on its own.
2. Open the extension's Options page.
3. Set the server address to https://my-hoard.app.
4. Paste an API token — create one under Settings → Chrome extension tokens.
5. Click Test connection to confirm everything works.

Firefox

Not on the Chrome Web Store — Firefox add-ons go through Mozilla's own signing process instead, so it's a direct file download rather than a store listing.

On a computer

1. Download the extension (a .xpi file).
2. Open the downloaded file, or drag it onto a Firefox window — Firefox will show an install prompt.
3. Open the extension's Options from Firefox's Add-ons Manager (about:addons).
4. Set the server address to https://my-hoard.app.
5. Paste an API token — create one under Settings → Chrome extension tokens (the same tokens work for both browsers).
6. Click Test connection to confirm everything works.

On Android

Worth calling out here: Firefox for Android supports real extensions and Chrome for Android doesn't, which matters if you want to bulk-import a whole Google Photos album straight from your phone.

1. Open this page in Firefox on your phone and download the extension.
2. In Firefox, go to Settings → About Firefox, and tap the Firefox logo 5 times to unlock a hidden developer menu.
3. Go to Settings → Install Extension from File and pick the file you downloaded.
4. Open the extension's Options (tap its icon, or find it under Firefox's Settings → Add-ons).
5. Set the server address to https://my-hoard.app.
6. Paste an API token — create one under Settings → Chrome extension tokens.
7. Tap Test connection to confirm everything works.

Yes — the extension has an optional hover-to-save button, like Pinterest's. Turn it on from the extension's Options page (“Hover-to-save button on web pages”), then hover over any image on a page to see a small Save button appear over it — no need to open the popup or right-click.

It's off by default. Turning it on asks Chrome to grant one extra permission (reading page content on any site), since that's what lets the button show up as you browse; turning it back off in Options hands that permission back. It only works on ordinary images — a few sites (like Google Photos) render their grids in a way it can't see, so the popup and right-click still cover those.

It opens your library in a new tab — whether the save succeeded or failed, so you can either see the image land or check what went wrong. That's a desktop notification from Chrome itself, not a Hoard in-app notification (see the bell icon in the topbar for those — likes and shares on your boards).

Nothing to do — Chrome updates it automatically once a new version clears Google's review. That review can take a while, so the Store version sometimes trails a version or two behind what's described elsewhere on this page.

Pinterest hides pins that scroll out of view to keep the page fast — they're removed from the page entirely, not just visually hidden — so a single snapshot at the moment you click the toolbar icon would only ever capture whatever happened to already be loaded. To find everything, the extension scrolls through the page for you, collecting pins as they load in, then scrolls back to the top when it's done.

It stops on its own — usually as soon as it reaches the real end of the board, and after about 45 seconds at the latest either way. It also knows to ignore Pinterest's own “More ideas for this board” recommendations feed that continues past where a board's actual pins end, so those never get selected alongside your real pins. There's nothing you need to do while it scrolls — just wait, and the picker opens automatically with everything it found.

This works on any Pinterest page — a board, your home feed, search results, or a single open pin.

1. Open the page with the pins you want, then click the extension's toolbar icon.
2. Wait for the brief auto-scroll described above (there's nothing to scroll for on a single pin, so it's instant there).
3. Every pin found is pre-selected by default — click any you don't want to deselect it, or use Select all / Deselect all to toggle everything at once.
4. Click Save selected.

Open the board itself — a URL that looks like pinterest.com/<username>/<board-name> — rather than your home feed or a search.

1. Click the extension's toolbar icon.
2. It auto-scrolls to find every pin on the board, selects them all, and pre-fills the Board field with a matching Hoard board name (creating that board if it doesn't exist yet).
3. Click Save selected — the whole board saves in the background, so you can close the popup and keep browsing. A badge on the toolbar icon counts progress.

The board-name pre-fill only happens on an actual board page — your home feed, search results, and a single pin still select everything found, but save straight to your library rather than into a board unless you type one into the Board field yourself.

Boards up to about 100 pins have come back completely reliably in testing. If it does come up short, the picker shows a note comparing how many it found to how many Pinterest itself reports for the board (e.g. “Found 149 of ~150 pins”), so you'll know rather than finding out later that a few are missing.

That comparison relies on Pinterest showing a pin count in the first place, which isn't always the case — a section (sub-board) owned by someone else doesn't display one the extension can read, so the warning won't appear there even if the import comes up short. Worth a quick manual spot-check if you're importing someone else's section.

For boards bigger than ~100 pins, splitting them into a few smaller boards or sections of around 100 pins each tends to import much more reliably than one giant board. You can also just reopen the popup and re-run the import if you suspect it came up short — each attempt scrolls and collects from scratch, independently of any previous try.

No — this is expected and means it worked correctly. Pinterest's own pin count counts pins, but a single pin can be a multi-photo listing (common for shop/product pins) that shows several distinct photos under one shared caption. The extension picks up every one of those photos as a real, separate image, which can put its count a little above Pinterest's own number — e.g. a board Pinterest reports as “100 Pins” coming back with 104 selected because one pin was a 5-photo listing. All of the extra photos are real content from the board, not something to deselect.

Boards are private by default — only you can see one until you share it. To share:

1. Open the board.
2. Click Share.
3. Type the person's username (or email) and click Share.

You can also click Copy link in the Share panel to send a direct link. The link isn't public — they'll need to sign in, and it only opens for accounts you've shared it with.

The person must already have a Hoard account. Once shared, the board appears under Shared with me in their sidebar. To stop sharing, open Share and remove them.

Yes — separately from your private Notes (which stay just for you, unless you share them). Comments are a discussion anyone with access can take part in, both on the board as a whole and on individual images.

Off by default, same permission style as Notes: in the Share panel, turn on “Let all viewers comment” for everyone at once, or tick Comment for just one person. Grid boards only for now — canvas board comments are coming later.

When adding a comment, tick “Make this a TODO” and pick someone to assign it to (anyone with access to that board, including you). They get a notification, and either they or the board/image owner can mark it done once it's handled — or reopen it later if needed.

Yes — you can create a public link for a board (both grid and canvas boards work) that anyone can open in a browser, with no Hoard account needed.

1. Open the board and click Share.
2. Under Public link, click Create public link.
3. Tick the box to confirm you understand the board will be viewable by anyone with the link and that you're responsible for what you share, then click Create public link.
4. Copy the link and send it to whoever you like.

The link is unlisted — it won't show up in Google or any search, so only people you give it to can find the board. Public viewers can only look: they can't edit the board, and they can't see your library or your other boards.

You stay in control: Turn off revokes the link instantly (it stops working for everyone), and Replace link swaps in a brand-new link while killing the old one. There's a separate “Show my notes to public viewers” toggle — off by default — that controls whether your image notes appear on the public link, independently of notes sharing with individual accounts.

A public canvas board that embeds another board has one extra wrinkle — see that question for how sharing cascades (or doesn't) to embedded boards.

Not as a separate feature, but tags do the job. Any board shows a row of tag chips for the tags used on its images — click one to narrow the board to just that tag, click “not” next to a tag to show images without it, or click the dashed “No tags” chip to find images you haven't tagged yet. It works the same way in your library, and on both ranked and unranked boards.

Tag a group of images the same way (e.g. appetizers, desserts) and clicking that tag on the board acts like jumping straight to a Pinterest section or sub-board, without needing a separate board for each group.

Pinning bookmarks a board for quick access — on the boards list or an open board, hover the small pin icon (top-left of the card, or next to the heart button at the top of an open board) and click it. Pinned boards then show up in a “Pinned” section of the sidebar, right below Library/Boards/Tags.

Pinning and unpinning is a desktop-only action for now, but pinned boards are still there for you on your phone — open the More menu in the bottom bar and they'll show up in their own section above Tags/Settings/Help. You can pin any board you can see, including ones shared with you.

Yes. On the Boards page, click Select, then pick the boards you want (or Select all). You can delete them, share them with someone, or stop sharing them — all at once.

Only boards you own can be selected (boards shared with you appear dimmed). Deleting boards never deletes the images inside them — those stay in your library.

In your library or on a board you own, click Select, then click images to pick them (or use Select all). A toolbar lets you act on the whole selection at once — add one or more tags at once (type a tag and press Enter to stage it, repeat for more, then Apply), remove a tag, add to / move / copy to a board, remove from the board, or move to trash.

Yes. Select all picks every image currently loaded on screen. If you have more than that, a “Select all in your library” option appears that grabs everything matching your current search and filters — not just what's scrolled into view.

To keep things fast in your browser, a single selection is limited to 10,000 images. If your library is larger and you need to act on more (or just want a more relevant set), narrow it first — search for a word, or filter by a tag, a color, or your starred images — then Select all. You can repeat that for each filter to cover everything in manageable, on-target batches.

Yes, for both grid and canvas boards. Open the board and use “Copy all to” (on a grid board) or Copy → “Copy all images to…” (on a canvas board) to copy everything on it into another board of the same kind that you can edit, or “Duplicate board” to create a brand-new board with the same contents. Duplicating a canvas board copies the whole scene — every shape, drawing, and embedded board tile, not just placed images.

This works even on a board someone else shared with you — you don't need edit access, just the ability to view it. Copying only reads the shared board and writes to a board of your own; it never changes the original board or anything in it.

Open a canvas board and click Colors next to Add image in the toolbar. It has everything in one place:

1. Stroke (or Font color, when you've selected text) — select one or more shapes/text first, then pick a color.
2. Background — the fill color for selected shapes (not shown for text, which has no fill).
3. Canvas background — the color of the board itself, applied whether or not anything is selected.

Changing a stroke or background color applies to everything currently selected at once.

Yes. Under Canvas background in the Colors panel, click the dashed + circle to save whatever color is currently applied — it appears as a small dot you can click anytime afterward to reapply it instantly, on any canvas board, without re-typing or remembering its hex code. Click the × that appears on hover to remove one you no longer want. You can save up to 12.

These saved colors live in this browser — they won't follow you to a different computer or browser, and they're separate from your browser's own built-in “custom colors” memory in the color picker itself (a browser feature, not a Hoard one, that isn't available or guaranteed to stick around in every browser).

Yes. Open a canvas board and click Import board next to Add image, then pick one of your grid boards from the list. Every image on it gets added to the canvas in one go, laid out in a simple grid — it's all-or-nothing (no picking individual images, and a ranked grid's numbering doesn't carry over).

Yes, fully — open a canvas board and click Share for everything a grid board has: share it with specific Hoard accounts (pick who can view it, and optionally let them edit or see your notes), or turn on a public, no-account-needed link that anyone with the URL can view.

Yes. Open a canvas board and click Embed board next to Add image, then pick one of your other grid boards. It appears as a live tile showing that board's cover, name, and image count — click the tile to open the real board in a new tab. Unlike Import board (which copies the images in as separate elements once), an embedded tile stays linked: if you add, remove, or reorder images on the embedded board later, the tile updates to match next time the canvas loads.

If you make the canvas board's public link visible to anyone, an embedded board doesn't automatically become visible to those visitors too — a public viewer only sees a real preview for an embedded board that is itself public. When you turn on (or turn off) a canvas board's public link and it has embedded boards, you'll get an explicit choice: share just the canvas board, or the canvas board and its embedded boards together. Choosing “together” only ever turns on a public link for an embedded board that isn't already public — it never touches one you made public on its own. Turning sharing back off is the same in reverse: anything that was made public purely as part of that “together” choice is safely turned back off automatically, but if an embedded board was already public independently (or shared as part of a different canvas board), you'll be asked to confirm before its public link is touched — so turning off one canvas board's sharing can never silently take away a link someone else is relying on for an unrelated reason.

If you believe an image shared on Hoard — for example through a public board link — infringes a copyright you own or are authorized to act for, email contact@my-hoard.app and include:

1. Identification of the copyrighted work you believe was infringed.
2. Identification of the specific content you're reporting and enough to locate it — in particular the public board link (URL) and which image(s) on it.
3. Your contact details: full name, email address, and a mailing address and phone number.
4. A statement that you have a good-faith belief the use isn't authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
5. A statement that the information is accurate and — under penalty of perjury — that you're the owner or authorized to act for the owner.
6. Your physical or electronic signature (typing your full legal name is fine).

On a complete report we'll remove or disable access to the content and may disable the board's public link. Full details are on the Terms & copyright page.

30 days. Deleting an image moves it to Trash, where it's fully recoverable — nothing is actually removed yet. Each image in Trash shows how many days it has left; after 30 days it's automatically and permanently deleted, so if there's anything in there you don't want gone, restore it back to your library before then. This keeps storage usage in check and stops a big cleanup from turning into a permanently growing pile.

Delete forever in Trash still works at any time if you want an image gone immediately rather than waiting out the 30 days.

Yes. In Trash, click Select, then pick images (or Select all) and click Restore to bring the whole selection back to your library in one go — handy if you've got a lot sitting in Trash and only want to keep a few of them.

That's the color bar. Click any dot to show only the images that contain that color. Click it again (or clear the search) to go back to everything.

It matches by color family, not an exact shade — so picking blue finds light blue, blue, and navy together, rather than only one precise tone. You can combine a color with a tag or a text search to narrow things further.

When you save an image, Hoard looks at it and automatically pulls out up to about a dozen of its most prominent colors — covering both the large areas and smaller but distinct splashes of color, including neutrals like black, white, and gray. Those colors are what the color bar searches against, so a new image is findable by its colors right away — nothing for you to tag by hand.

Yes. Open any image and look under Colors for its palette:

1. Click a dot to find your other images that contain that color.
2. Click the × on a dot to remove a color you don't want associated with the image.
3. Click the dashed eyedropper to add a color. The eyedropper lets you pick any pixel on your screen — for example, a specific shade right out of the image itself.

Edits save automatically and feed straight back into color search. On browsers without the eyedropper (Firefox and Safari) the button opens a normal color picker instead.

Yes, by default. Hoard is invite-only with no public feeds or discovery, and only you can see your own library. Boards stay private unless you choose to share them.

The one exception is opt-in: you can create a public link for a grid board (see Boards & sharing above). That single board becomes viewable by anyone you give the link to — but it's unlisted (not searchable), you can turn it off anytime, and it never exposes your library or your other boards.

Tags are labels you add to images to keep things organized — think of them like sub-folders that an image can be in more than one of at once. They make images easy to search and filter, both across your whole library and within a board.

For example, say you're making a board to plan a birthday party. If you tag the relevant images balloons, you can later filter the board (or your library) by that tag to pull up just the balloon ideas — without hunting through everything else. Add as many tags as are useful; an image can carry several at once.

As your tag list grows, one long flat list gets hard to scan. Sub-tags let you nest a tag underneath a related one, turning your tags into an organized tree instead — handy once you have a lot of them. For example, instead of scattered tags like birthday-cake and wedding-cake, you could nest both under a cake tag, making the whole list easier to browse and manage in one place.

Nesting is purely organizational — each tag, parent or child, still filters independently by exactly what's tagged with it; searching cake won't automatically include images only tagged wedding-cake.

1. Go to Tags.
2. When adding a new tag, use the Under dropdown to nest it beneath an existing tag (or leave it at “(top level)” for a regular tag). You can nest more than one level deep.

A tag's parent can only be set when you create it — there's no way to move an existing tag afterward, only rename or delete it. Deleting a parent also deletes its sub-tags (images are just untagged, never deleted).

Yes. In your library, each tag chip has a small “not” button next to it — click it to show images that don't carry that tag, instead of ones that do. There's also a dashed “No tags” chip that finds images with no tags at all — handy for spotting things you haven't organized yet.

Yes. The dashed “Unorganized” chip in your library shows only images that aren't on any board — grid or canvas. It's independent of tags, so you can combine it with a tag filter (or “No tags”) to zero in on things you've neither tagged nor filed away.

Yes, for two specific sources: the Source chips in your library let you show (or, by picking the other one, effectively exclude) images saved via the Chrome extension's Pinterest board import, or via Google Photos import. This covers bulk imports specifically — an image saved with a single right-click or the hover-to-save button isn't tagged with a source, even from a Pinterest or Google Photos page. Other sources (device upload, saving from a URL) aren't broken out separately, to keep the filter simple.