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, it fills the screen, and a single toolbar of tools floats over it - no upload step, no sign-up, nothing to install. Pin photos and sticky notes, stamp SUSPECT across a card, tape things down, pull red string between the pieces that belong together, and even take the scissors to a photo and keep both halves. Your board saves itself locally as you work, so closing the tab loses nothing, and there is no watermark: the download is your whole board at full size.
The toolbar reads left to right like a detective's desk drawer. Photos land as clean prints, and typing a caption on one grows a handwritten strip under the picture by itself. The text button covers yellow sticky notes and big marker labels in one place, with ready-made phrases like MOTIVE? and FOLLOW THE MONEY a tap away. Pushpins stamp out one per tap for marking a map or a route. Tape pulls out like an arrow - press and drag - and lands as a torn translucent strip at any angle, any length, any width, in any color and opacity you like. The pen scribbles freehand, the marks menu carries question marks, stamps, a newspaper clipping, a case plaque, a calendar and a blank A4 sheet you can type a report onto, and every tool stays armed so you can lay ten pins or ten strips without going back to the bar.
Strings need no mode: press the pushpin on one card, drag, and let go over another - a red thread ties itself between the two with a natural sag. Tap a string to label it, recolor it with a full color picker, or switch it between slack, tight and springy. The scissors are the fun part: drag the blade across a photo or a note and it splits into two separate pieces along your cut, each with its own pin, each movable on its own. Cut a string and both halves stay, dangling from their pins - grab a loose end later and drop it on any card to tie it back up. Nothing on this board is precious; everything can be re-cut, re-taped and re-tied.
Tap anything to select it: corner handles resize, the knob above rotates and snaps back to straight when you get close, and the bar under the board keeps just the controls that matter for that piece. Tap the select tool a second time and you can drag a box around several things at once - the group gets one wide frame that moves, scales and deletes everything together. Undo walks back fifty steps. When the board is done, one blue button holds the rest: download as PNG, JPG or WebP, copy the image to the clipboard, or save the whole thing as a project file you can open again later on any device.
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. Drag from the pushpin on one card to another card to connect them with red string, tape and pin things where you want them, and download the finished board as an image when the theory holds together.
Yes. Arm the scissors and drag a straight cut across a photo or a note - it splits into two independent pieces along the blade, and each piece keeps its own pushpin. Cutting a string leaves both halves hanging loose, and a dangling end can be dropped onto any card later to reconnect it.
Both. A selected tape strip has a color swatch and an opacity slider, so it can be classic translucent white, colored washi or a barely-there film, and its ends re-tear naturally as you stretch it. Strings take a label, any color from a full picker, and a slack, tight or springy hang.
Yes. The whole tool is free, with no account, no trial and no watermark on the download. It runs entirely in your browser.
Yes, twice over. The board autosaves in your browser as you work, and reopening the page offers to continue where you stopped. For a copy that survives a different device or browser, save it as a project file from the download menu and open that file later - photos and strings come back exactly as they were.
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.