Projects & autosave

Every scene you build in Pixploder lives inside a named project stored in your account, and the editor writes your changes back to the cloud on its own. There is no Save button for the open project — editing it is saving it. Signing in is required, and once you are in you open or name a project before the editor appears. After that, the Projects panel is where you create, load, rename, and delete saved work.

Sign in, then pick a project

The editor never opens anonymously. If you are signed out, Pixploder shows a Sign in to start screen with a Sign in / Create account button; a free account is enough to get in.

Once you are signed in, if no project is open you land on the project-first gate — a centered Your projects heading with the subtitle "Open a project, or name a new one to start." and the full Projects panel rendered right there on the page (no window, no close control). You cannot reach Step 1 until you open an existing project or start a new one. Because no work is loaded yet, the create actions offer only New — Save current is hidden until a working image is loaded.

• New project name… — the text field above the list names the project you are about to create. Leave it empty and Pixploder files it as Untitled project.
• New — creates a fresh, empty project and drops you into a blank Step 1.

The gate is the same component as the in-editor Projects panel, so the saved-project list, Load, rename, and delete all work here identically — you can jump straight back into old work without ever seeing a blank editor.

The Projects panel

Inside the editor, the header Projects button (the folder icon) opens the panel as a window over the canvas; click the backdrop or the top-right close control to dismiss it. The header reads Your projects. One text field feeds two create actions, and every project you own is listed newest-first as a row with a thumbnail, its name, and a localized "last updated" time. The row of the project you currently have open carries a small open badge. When you have nothing saved, the list reads "No saved projects yet. Name one above and click New or Save current."

The create field and each row expose everything you can do to a project:

• New — wipes the editor to a blank Step 1 and starts a brand-new empty project. The blank state autosaves a moment later.
• Save current — forks your current work into a brand-new project and saves it immediately, then switches you into that copy. It appears only when a working image is loaded.
• Load — downloads the selected project's stored assets and opens it, replacing whatever is open now. A progress bar with a live "done / total" count runs while the assets download.
• Rename (pencil) — puts the row into inline edit mode with a name field, a green check to save (Save name) and an X to cancel (Cancel). A blank name keeps the old one.
• Delete (trash) — permanently removes the project and its stored images, after a confirmation.

Autosave

While a project is open, Pixploder saves automatically. Any change to the project — the current step, sprites, layers, background takes, key settings, the working image, prompts, model choices, saved images, tags, regions, shadows, extend takes, repixelize settings, and more — starts a short debounce timer; about 1.5 seconds after your last change, the whole project is re-serialized and written to the cloud. A fresh AI result is flushed immediately rather than waiting, so a newly generated image survives even an instant reload.

One thing is deliberately kept out of the triggers: selection. Which sprite is highlighted is never saved, so a project always reopens with nothing selected and clicking around the canvas never fires a save.

On desktop widths the header shows the open project's name followed by a live status word: saving… in amber, saved in green, or save failed in red.

What gets saved, and where

Projects live in a private, per-user cloud bucket; nothing is kept only in the browser, and you only ever see your own projects. To keep stored data small, Pixploder saves the sources it cannot rebuild and re-derives the rest when a project opens:

• Stored: your uploads, the working image, every raw sprite variant (this is where your generation history and picks live), AI-generated backgrounds and extend takes, and the reconstruction outputs that cannot be cheaply rebuilt (reconstructed cut-outs and inpainted layer images).
• Re-derived on load: a sprite's plain crop and, for sprites you have not reconstructed, its keyed cut-out — Pixploder re-runs the keyer instead of storing the result.

Raw variants are kept on purpose, so a project with a long generation history is legitimately larger. Each project also stores one thumbnail for its row (the working image, or else the selected or newest generation, or a rebuilt background). Loading a project downloads every stored asset with a determinate progress bar, then rebuilds the scene in memory — so a big project visibly reports progress instead of appearing to hang.

Saved images are content-addressed: re-saving an unchanged picture is a no-op, and a per-session cache skips re-hashing assets you already stored, so autosave only uploads genuinely new pixels. Because keyed cut-outs are re-derived on load, tweaking your key settings later never inflates a project's stored size — only new AI pixels cost storage.

Free accounts and the 14-day clock

Any signed-in account can create, save, and load projects — cloud saving is not limited to paid plans. The one catch is retention. When a Free user creates their first project, a 14-day clock starts; after it runs out, Free projects are deleted unless you subscribe. The same clock arms itself when a paid subscription ends: cancel (or let a plan lapse) and, once the period you paid for runs out, you land on Free with 14 days to decide. Subscribing to a paid plan clears the clock and keeps your projects indefinitely. While the clock is running, a red banner sits across the top of the app: "Your saved projects will be deleted on [date]. Resubscribe to keep them, or export them now." with a See plans button that opens pricing.

One more autosave consequence is worth knowing: replacing the image starts the project over. Replace image in Step 1 · Generate or Upload opens a Replace image — start over? confirmation, and because autosave writes the now-blank state seconds later, its amber warning notes that "its current contents can't be recovered." If you might want the old version, use Save current to fork it into a separate project first, then reset with Wipe & start over.