Every control, indexed and searchable.

1.1 About Framewaltz

Framewaltz turns a handful of your own photos into an animated motion-graphics showcase — a spinning wall, an orbiting ring, a comet-tail trail, a Figma-ready still — built entirely in your browser tab. Photos never leave your machine unless you explicitly export or hand off to the Figma plugin.

1.2 Three tiers, one application FreeProStudio

Free, Pro, and Studio run the exact same tool — nothing is a trimmed-down preview. Tier controls three things: how many effects you can play, how many photos you can load at once, and export ceiling (resolution, speed range, and a small set of Studio-only finishing tools). Section 2 has the full limitations table.

1.3 How to read this handbook

Sections 3 onward follow aircraft-manual convention: numbered sections and subsections, a tier tag on anything gated, and Note / Caution call-outs for behavior that's easy to miss. Use the search box or the tab index on the left to jump straight to a control — every entry below is indexed.

2.1 Photo capacity

Sphere-shaped effects (Section 4.1) pad a thin photo set out to a denser sphere by repeating your own photos with no adjacent duplicates — this padding is not tier-gated, every visitor gets it.

2.2 Effect library access

Studio is a strict superset of Pro, which is a strict superset of Free — nothing you can do on a lower tier stops working on a higher one.

2.3 Export ceilings

3.1 Loading photos Free

Click any slot in the grid to load a photo, or select several files at once to fill that slot and the ones after it. Photos stay in the browser tab's memory only.

3.2 Frame ratio & device frames

Free Pick 1:1, 4:5, 16:9, or 9:16 for the stage. Pro Device Frame presets swap that ratio for a real screen resolution — Laptop, Desktop, Tablet, Phone, Watch, or TV, each with named real-world sizes (e.g. MacBook Pro 16", iPhone 15 Pro Max, 8K TV).

3.3 Spin Speed FreeStudio extends range

A single slider, thumb centered by default. Center is always exactly 1x regardless of tier — the bottom half of the bar covers 0.1x–1x (slow motion), the top half covers 1x–3x on Free/Pro or 1x–6x on Studio.

3.4 Travel Direction — heading indicator Pro

A compass dial, aviation convention: 0°/360° is North (up), 180° is South (down), clockwise in between. Drag the dial or use the arrow keys; effects with directional motion travel toward wherever it points.

3.5 Attitude — pitch & yaw Free

A two-axis flight-stick styled as a real attitude indicator (sky/ground horizon disc, fixed yellow wings marker). Drag vertically for pitch (climb/dive, ±45°), horizontally for yaw (turn, ±60°) — rolls the entire structure, every card, in whichever effect is playing. Yaw is deliberately kept off the heading indicator (3.4) and onto this gauge instead, matching this control's own axis rather than duplicating the compass.

3.6 Altitude Free

Raises or lowers the whole structure on the Y axis. Kept in sync with Location (3.7) — dragging the stage updates this slider, and vice versa.

3.7 Location — drag to pan Free

Click and drag anywhere on the stage to move the whole structure on both axes at once. A drag under 4px is treated as a click, so opening a photo by clicking it still works normally. Double-click the stage, or press Recenter, to snap back to center.

3.8 Card Gap Free

Widens or tightens the spacing between cards on every grid-based layout (Reveal & Wipe, Iris/Curtain/Blinds and similar) — live, with no rebuild. Free-form effects (Spin & Orbit, 3D & Perspective, Showpiece) don't lay cards out on a grid, so this control has no effect on those.

3.9 Card Size Pro

Scales the entire composition up or down around its center, 50%–200%, live.

3.10 Card Shape & Totem Wall advanced tuning FreeCustom shape is Studio

Pick a card shape preset and tilt from the Card Shape panel. When Totem Wall is the active effect, an additional advanced panel appears with per-effect sliders (columns, drift, depth, curvature, scatter, and more) plus its own Direction dial. Uploading your own artwork as the card shape is Studio-only.

3.11 Background & logo Free

Solid background color is free on every tier. Gradient background, transparent background, and logo overlay are Pro.

4.1 Families

4.2 Showpiece Studio only

The Studio-exclusive family: 161 effects spanning curve orbits (Lissajous, rosette, and Spirograph epi/hypotrochoid curves), comet-trail renders of those same curves, and golden-angle or ring-grouped particle bursts — plus set pieces like Rubik's Cube, Rock Fall (real rigid-body physics), and Square Tunnel (a four-wall perspective tunnel).

4.3 Sphere Wall & thin photo sets

Sphere Wall arranges photos on a Fibonacci lattice for even coverage. With fewer than 24 photos it pads the sphere out to 24 by repeating your existing photos — a deterministic shuffle each lap around the set, so no two copies of the same photo ever land next to each other and every photo gets used a roughly even number of times. This applies to every visitor regardless of tier.

5.1 Video recording Free

Records the effect playing right now to a downloadable clip. Choose Native, 720p, 1080p, 2K, 4K, 5K, or 8K — each tier is capped per Section 2.3; picking a resolution above your tier opens the matching upgrade card instead of silently downgrading it.

5.2 Design export — SVG / PNG Pro

Freezes the current frame and hands it to a design tool. SVG keeps every photo as its own named, movable layer at up to 4× pixel density — drag it straight onto a Figma canvas. PNG is a flat image, free on every tier.

5.3 Send to Figma plugin Studio

Goes further than the SVG export: the Framewaltz Figma plugin rebuilds every photo as a real, re-croppable Figma rectangle instead of a vector group. Install once via Plugins → Development → Import plugin from manifest… in the Figma desktop app, choose the plugin's manifest.json, then click Send to Figma plugin here to save a .framewaltz.json file — nothing is uploaded, the file never leaves your machine. Open the plugin in Figma and drop the file in.

5.4 Embeddable code snippet Pro

Copies a self-contained snippet that reproduces this exact effect, with your current photos, anywhere on the web.

6.1 A slider snaps back to where it started

That control is gated to a tier you don't currently have — dragging it opens the matching upgrade card once per drag rather than repeatedly, then reverts the value. Check the tier tag next to its label in Section 3.

6.2 The structure looks tilted, panned, or scaled oddly

Check Attitude (3.5), Altitude (3.7), Location (3.7), and Card Size (3.9) — all four persist independently of which effect is active. Recenter (under Location) resets pan to zero; the Attitude gauge resets by dragging it back toward center.

6.3 A recording comes out blank or blocked

The browser's screen/tab-share picker must have "This Tab" selected — sharing a different tab or the whole screen records the wrong content.

If the picker never appears at all, or recording stops immediately with "Screen access was refused", the block is usually the operating system rather than the browser. On macOS, open System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording, switch it on for the browser you are using, then quit and reopen that browser — the permission only takes effect after a restart. Recording a tab is how Framewaltz captures the stage: the effects are live HTML, so the browser's own recorder is the only thing that can see them. Nothing is uploaded.

6.4 A sphere effect looks sparse or dotty

This shouldn't happen — Sphere Wall pads thin photo sets automatically (Section 4.3). If it still looks sparse, confirm at least one photo is actually loaded (Section 3.1); zero photos means zero cards regardless of padding.