How exports are generated locally in your browser

A question I get a lot: “Where does my image go when I hit Export?” Short answer: nowhere remote. The file is built in your browser and downloaded to your device.

The pipeline

For Breaking News, Race Winner, and Starting Grid:

1. You edit a live DOM/CSS preview (the canvas you see on screen).
2. Export runs a client-side capture library (html-to-image) against that preview.
3. Fonts used in the graphic are available locally on the page so the snapshot matches what you designed.
4. The browser triggers a download of a PNG data URL — no multipart upload to F1 Tools.

Race Winner sets pixelRatio: 2 so a 1080 × 1350 design becomes a 2160 × 2700 PNG. Grid captures each of the two 1440 × 1880 pages. Breaking News captures 1080 × 1350 at 1×.

Stewards Notice does the same for PNG, and for PDF it draws the captured image onto an A4 page with jsPDF — still in the browser.

What that means for privacy

• Your driver photos are not stored in our database (we do not have one for user media).
• Closing the tab drops the in-memory image.
• Analytics, if enabled, may record that you visited /create or clicked around — not the pixels of your graphic.

Full policy: /privacy.

Why exports sometimes look different from the preview

Cause	What I see
Preview is scaled down	Softness on screen; export is full resolution
Custom font loading race	Rare; refresh and export again if type looks wrong
Huge source photo	Browser memory pressure; resize the upload if export fails

If export fails, try a smaller source image or another browser tab with fewer extensions. The work is happening on your machine, so device limits apply.

What we deliberately do not do

• No “render farm” or cloud image API
• No account gallery of past exports
• No server-side watermark pass

That keeps the tools fast and the privacy story honest. It also means you are responsible for saving the PNG if you care about it — we cannot recover a graphic you never downloaded.

See also the Guide — Privacy section and PNG versus WebP.