Share a diagram by URL — send the whole scene as a link

Sometimes you don’t want to send a file — you just want to send a link. drawtonomy can pack an entire scene into a single URL. Copy the link, paste it into Slack, an email, a GitHub issue, or a review thread, and whoever opens it sees the exact figure you were looking at — instantly, in their browser.

No account. No upload. No server stores anything. The diagram is the URL.

A scene copied as a URL, then opened in a fresh tab — every lane and vehicle reappears from the link alone.

Why share by URL

A link is the lowest-friction way to put a diagram in front of someone:

• Zero setup for the recipient. They click the link and the scene opens in drawtonomy. Nothing to install, no login, no download step.
• Nothing leaves your machine for the server. The scene is encoded into the link itself — drawtonomy doesn’t upload your diagram anywhere. The data travels with the URL.
• Perfect for review. Drop the link in a pull request, an issue, or a chat message when you want a teammate to look at a road layout or scenario, not necessarily edit a file.
• Re-editable on open. Whoever opens the link gets a live, editable scene — not a flat picture. They can move shapes, tweak lanes, and copy a new link back.

If instead you need a file you can version-control, attach, or re-open later, use drawtonomy.svg. URL sharing is for send-and-look-now; the file is for keep-and-re-edit.

Copy the link

1. Open the menu (top-left).
2. Click Export.
3. Click Copy URL.

The button flashes Copied! and the link is on your clipboard. Paste it anywhere.

Share just part of a scene

Select shapes first to share only those. With nothing selected, Copy URL packs the whole scene. Select a single intersection, a lane group, or one vehicle, and the link carries only that — handy for pointing a teammate at one detail.

Open a shared link

Just open the URL. drawtonomy loads the scene automatically, centers the camera on it, and — if the diagram was drawn over a map — restores the original map position and heading, so satellite context lines up the way you left it. The scene arrives fully editable.

The ?snapshot=… parameter is cleared from the address bar after loading, so the URL stays clean once the scene is in.

What the link carries

Everything needed to rebuild the figure: every shape, lane connection, shared point, color and style, stacking order, the camera framing, and the map origin (latitude, longitude, and heading). The link round-trips the scene losslessly.

Under the hood, drawtonomy strips default values, compresses the result, and encodes it into the URL — so even a fairly detailed scene fits in a single, paste-anywhere link.

Big scenes: the local fallback

URLs have a practical length limit. When a scene is too large to fit (very dense layouts with many shapes), drawtonomy falls back to storing the snapshot in your browser’s local storage and puts a short key in the link instead.

That fallback link only works in the same browser that created it — it references local data, not data carried in the URL. You’ll see a notice when this happens. For sharing a large scene with someone else, export drawtonomy.svg and send the file.

See also

• Export your scene — drawtonomy.svg and the static image formats, for when you need a file instead of a link.
• Share points between shapes — a different kind of “sharing”: locking vertices together inside a scene.