Saving, Publishing & Exporting

Understand Gootaku's auto-saved drafts, Save vs Publish, who can see published work, and how to export your manga, comic or GIF as a file.

Comic, Manga, and GIF projects have three related-but-different actions, plus a background one you never have to think about.

Draft (automatic, always on)

Your edits and generated panels are saved to a small draft in your browser's local storage as you work (within about half a second of each change). This is what protects you from losing work if a tab closes or crashes -- reopening the same maker restores exactly where you left off, including in-progress art the server finished while you were away. You don't do anything for this to happen.

Save

Save copies your current project to your Gootaku account on our servers. Do this when you want the project to survive clearing your browser data, be reachable from another device, or just exist as a permanent copy rather than only a local draft. Free accounts can save up to 3 projects; hitting that limit shows an upgrade prompt rather than silently failing. Buying any token pack removes the limit.

On a free account (one that has never bought a pack), generated images in projects you haven't published are deleted after 7 days -- publish them, or buy a pack, to keep them.

Publish

Publish does everything Save does, and additionally posts the project to the public Explore community feed, where anyone can view, vote, and comment on it. A published project needs at least one generated panel/frame. If a weekly contest is running, you can also submit to it at publish time. Dialogue, SFX and narration appear on the published page once they pass our content check.

There's no unpublish button yet -- if you need a published project taken down, contact us (see Getting Help).

Video clips can be published to Explore too, with the Publish button under the finished clip in the Video Maker.

Exporting a file

Exporting produces an actual downloadable file -- this is separate from Save/Publish and doesn't touch your account.

Comic/Manga: Export offers Webtoon Strip (.png) (one tall PNG

image, panels stacked) or Comic Archive (.cbz) (one image per page, readable in any comic reader app). CBZ export needs a token pack.

GIF Maker: Export GIF builds and downloads the animated file

directly.

Wobble Maker: see Using the Wobble Maker -- export

works the same way but the first one is free.

Watermarks

Free accounts export with a small Gootaku watermark, at up to 1024px. Buying any token pack (once) removes the watermark and the size cap.