Figure Studio saves everything you build into your project’s figure gallery, and — crucially — a saved figure reopens as the thing that made it, so you are always editing the source of a figure rather than a dead image.
The gallery
Figures you create and images you import appear in the gallery, reachable from the editor sidebar and the Figures page. Thumbnails render the real content — including PDF and SVG figures — so you can find the right one at a glance.
The round-trip
Open a saved figure and it comes back in the tool that built it:
- a chart reopens in the Chart builder with its data
- a diagram reopens in the Diagram tab
- a coded plot reopens in the Code editor or Notebook
- a TikZ figure — including one extracted from an imported paper — reopens in TikZ mode
- an equation reopens in the Equations tab
- an imported image reopens in Annotate
Editing and saving updates the figure in place rather than creating a duplicate. This works because a figure remembers how it was made and follows that reference back to its source.
Update mode, at a glance
When a figure is open for editing, a green ✎ Update mode badge shows in the left rail and the code toolbar, naming exactly which file a save will update. No open figure means the badge reads ＋ New figure — a save creates one instead of touching anything. “Save as new” always branches off a copy.
Figures that are actually referenced by your paper carry a green “in LaTeX” badge in the file lists — both here and in the editor sidebar — so you can spot orphaned figures before a cleanup.
Shared projects
On a shared project, collaborators see the project’s figures and their thumbnails, and can open them subject to their access — a view-only collaborator can look but cannot overwrite a figure.
Note: Insert and Export both draw from the same saved figure, so a figure you insert into your paper and later edit in the gallery stays the single source you update.