How six tools handle the screen full of work you already made, and six ways this app could do it.
Where this landed. The grid is what shipped, with Select for several sheets and a swipe on one for Share, Save and Discard. None of the six directions below were built.
Nijimi keeps every sheet on its own, with no save, no file name and no folder, so most of what these tools organise does not exist here. The survey is for the parts that do: finding one sheet among many, doing something to it, and starting the next one. Each option below is drawn at 393pt wide, the width of the phone, so a thumbnail that looks small here is small in the hand.
A grid of artwork. Drag one thumbnail onto another to merge them into a stack, or select several and choose More then Stack. Swiping a thumbnail to the left gives Share, Duplicate and Delete. Select mode lets you swipe a finger across thumbnails to pick several. Names are editable by tapping the title, and a new piece arrives as Untitled Artwork.
Grouping is made by hand, in the moment, with no folder to create first. Naming is offered and ignorable.
One library, grouped for you into Years, Months and All Photos. Pinch zooms the grid in and out, and view options control filtering and whether a thumbnail fills its square or is shown whole. Albums are a separate tab, not folders in the grid.
Nobody files anything. Time does the grouping, and the only control is how close you are standing.
Recents and Browse as separate tabs. A control switches between grid and list, and list adds date, size and tags as columns. Sorting is by name, kind, date, size or tags, and tags group files by colour.
Every organising idea at once, which suits a file system and suits nothing else.
The home screen leads with quick-start tiles for making something new or importing, with Your files as the tab holding cloud documents.
The home screen is about starting, not about what is already there. Work is one tab further in.
Recents first, with See all to go wider and Search as its own tab. A file thumbnail is the first page of the file unless somebody sets a frame as the thumbnail.
Recency plus search, with the thumbnail as the only description. No manual filing on the phone at all.
Sketches live in journals: tappable notebooks you paint into, rather than a single pile of drawings that you sort afterwards.
The only one of the six that groups before the work instead of after it.
Two things are true of all six. Grouping, where it exists at all, is one level deep and never a folder tree. And the thumbnail is the only description: not one of them leads with a file name.
After Procreate, Photos
Three columns of sheets, newest first, with blank paper sitting first in the grid as the way to start another. A tap picks a sheet back up. Select turns on the bulk bar for share, save and discard.
After Procreate
The same grid, but dragging a sheet onto another makes a stack, shown as one cell with a count. Tapping it opens the stack; a back control returns to the gallery.
Today
Earlier
After Photos
Headers break the grid into Today, yesterday and dates. Pinching the grid changes how many columns there are, so the same screen goes from a contact sheet to a few large sheets.
After Procreate, Files, Mail
The grid stays as it is. Swiping a sheet to the left slides it aside to show share, save and discard for that one sheet. Select mode stays for doing several at once.
Winter trees12
Rain studies5
Plum blossom23
Untitled2
After Paper by WeTransfer
The home is a shelf of books, not sheets. You open one and paint inside it, so every sheet lands in the book that was open rather than in one long pile.
After a sketchbook
No grid. The sheets run down the screen, one at a time and large, newest at the top, with how long ago beside each.
Swipe for one sheet, and days with pinch when the pile gets long. Those two are the only options that cost the painter nothing before the work: no book to choose, no stack to make, no name to think of. Journals and stacks both ask for a decision the app has spent its whole design removing, and the roll is lovely at ten sheets and unusable at a hundred. If one thing gets built first, make it swipe: the common case is one sheet, and today that costs four taps.