Detective Board Maker
Pin photos and notes to a corkboard, then drag from a pin to string them together.
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Pin photos and notes to a corkboard, then drag from a pin to string them together.
This is the wall of string from every detective show, made in your browser. One button opens the cork board, and it fills the screen with a single floating toolbar over it - no upload step, no sign-up, nothing to install. Add photos from the toolbar or drop and paste them straight onto the board, write sticky notes for names, dates and theories, and pull red string between the pieces that belong together. There is no watermark either: the whole evidence board is drawn on a canvas in your own browser, and the download is the same board at full size.
Every photo you add lands on the board as a white-framed polaroid with a red pushpin at the top, dropped at a slight angle so the board looks handmade rather than laid out on a grid. Add a whole batch at once with the photo button in the toolbar, or keep dropping and pasting images onto the page as you find them. Notes are yellow squares with a folded corner and your text in a handwriting face, wrapped to fit the sticky - short lines read best, exactly like a real note. Double-tap a note on the board when the wording needs to change and the editor reopens with the old text in it.
The string is the whole point of an investigation board, so it needs no mode and no menu. Press on the pushpin at the top of one card, drag across the board, and let go over the card you want it tied to - a red thread snaps between the two pins with a natural sag in the middle. Do it again for every link in your theory: suspect to location, photo to note, note to note. Changed your mind about a connection? Double-tap the string itself and it is cut. Moving a card afterwards drags its strings along, so the web stays correct while you rearrange.
The board takes over the whole screen, so the cards get room to breathe and the only chrome is one small floating bar. Tap any card to select it. A dashed outline appears with three handles: a red cross to remove it, a yellow ring above the card to rotate it, and a blue ring at the corner to make it bigger or smaller. Drag the card body to slide it anywhere on the board, and the rotate handle snaps back to straight when you get close, so a card can be deliberately crooked or perfectly level. Undo walks back up to fifty steps if a drag goes wrong, and pressing Delete removes whatever is selected along with the strings attached to it. When the board is finished, download it as a 3200 by 2400 pixel PNG, JPG or WebP, or copy it straight to the clipboard for a message or a slide.
No photo you pin here is uploaded anywhere. The images are read locally, the board is drawn locally, and the export is rendered locally, which matters when the pictures are case files, personal photos or an unreleased plot. If you want to know where a photo was taken before you pin it, the Photo Location tool reads the GPS tag out of the file on the same terms, and Add Arrow can mark up a single picture before it goes on the board. Both, like this one, are part of a much larger catalogue of image tools on the site - see what is live right now on the tools page.
Open the tool and press the start button - the cork board fills the screen straight away. Add photos and notes from the toolbar, or drop pictures anywhere on the page. Each picture is pinned as a polaroid card and each note as a yellow sticky. Drag from the pushpin on one card to another card to connect them with red string, arrange everything by dragging, and download the finished board as an image.
Yes. The whole tool is free, with no account, no trial and no watermark on the download. It runs entirely in your browser.
Yes. Photos come from your device through the toolbar button, or by dropping and pasting them onto the page, several at a time if you like, and notes carry whatever text you type. Notes can be rewritten later by double-tapping them on the board.
Press on the red pushpin at the top of a card and drag to the card you want to link it to. Releasing over that card ties the string between the two pins. To remove a string, double-tap it where it hangs.
The board exports at 3200 by 2400 pixels, twice the size you edit on, so text on the notes and detail in the photos stay sharp when it is printed or shown on a large screen. You can save it as PNG, JPG or WebP.
No. Every photo stays on your device. The board is drawn and exported inside your browser, and nothing is sent anywhere - once the page has loaded, the tool even keeps working offline.