What is a .canvas (JSON Canvas) file?

Published 2026-06-20

If you have come across a file ending in .canvas and your computer does not know what to do with it, you are looking at a JSON Canvas file. It is the format behind the Canvas feature in Obsidian, the popular note-taking app, and the good news is that it is completely open and easy to read — even without Obsidian.

An open format, not a proprietary blob

JSON Canvas was released by the Obsidian team as an open specification (version 1.0, under the permissive MIT license) at jsoncanvas.org. The goal was to make “infinite canvas” boards — the kind where you scatter notes, images, and links on a zoomable surface and draw arrows between them — portable across apps, instead of locking them inside one program. Because the format is openly documented, any tool can read or write it.

What is actually inside a .canvas file

Despite the unfamiliar extension, a .canvas file is just plain text: it is a JSON document. Open it in any text editor and you will see two arrays:

• nodes — the boxes on the board. Every node has an id, a position (x, y), a size (width, height), and a type. There are four types: text (a card containing Markdown), file (a reference to a note or image inside your vault), link (a web URL), and group (a labelled container that visually groups other nodes).
• edges — the arrows. Each edge connects a fromNode to a toNode, optionally specifying which side each arrow attaches to, an arrowhead, a color, and a label.

Colors are stored either as a hex value like #ff0000 or as one of six preset numbers ("1" red through "6" purple), which each app maps to its own palette.

One important catch: external content is not embedded

A file node does not contain the image or note it points to — it only stores the path to it inside your Obsidian vault. The same is true for link nodes, which store a URL but no preview. This means that if you hand a single .canvas file to someone else, the embedded images and notes will not travel with it. A good standalone viewer is honest about this and shows those nodes as labelled placeholders rather than pretending the content is there.

It is not Canva (or Canvas GFX)

Worth clearing up: JSON Canvas has nothing to do with Canva, the online graphic design platform, nor with Canvas GFX, a technical illustration product. They just share a similar-sounding name. JSON Canvas is specifically the Obsidian board format.

How to open one

You have two options. You can install Obsidian, create a vault, and import the file — overkill if you simply want a look. Or you can use a browser-based viewer: our open a JSON Canvas file tool parses the JSON and draws the whole board instantly, with nothing uploaded. From there you can export it to a PNG for sharing. Either way, because the format is open, your board is never trapped.