Embeds on the canvas

An Embed puts someone else's page on your canvas: a video that plays where it sits, a Figma file, a Google Doc, or any website at all. They live in the palette's Media category, behind the Embed row — open it and pick the one you want.

Pick Website when the page you want isn't one of the named services. It frames the address exactly as you type it. Be aware that plenty of sites refuse to be shown inside another page (news sites and banks especially): when one does, the embed comes up blank. A website embed always carries an Open in a new tab control for exactly that case, and a link card is often the better tool from the start. See Website embeds for the detail.

Adding one

The tile you picked is only a hint. It names the empty card ("Add a Figma link") and the dialog, and the link is what actually decides: paste a Vimeo URL into a card you made from the Figma tile and you get Vimeo, because refusing a link that plainly works would be pedantry. There is no separate URL field to keep in step either, since an embed stores its address in the same place a link card stores its own, which is why double-clicking is how you change it.

The dialog is deliberately narrower than a link card's: an embed can only point at a web address, never at a tab or another diagram, because a video pointed at a tab has nothing to play. It checks the address as you type and again when you save.

Video cards are locked to 16:9 as you resize them, for the same reason an icon is locked square: a letterboxed or stretched video frame is never what anyone wanted. And like images and stickies, an embed keeps its own look across themes — somebody else's page is not yours to recolour.

Nothing loads until you ask

An embed does not start on its own. A YouTube card shows the video's poster frame and waits for you to press play; every other service shows a named card with a Load embed button.

That is deliberate, and not only for tidiness. A board with eight videos would otherwise open eight players every time anyone looked at it, and simply opening a diagram would report you to those services. YouTube embeds play through youtube-nocookie.com, which sets nothing until playback actually starts.

Keeping the canvas usable

An embedded page would normally swallow every click inside its rectangle, which would leave a hole in your canvas that you could not drag or select. So the player ignores the pointer by default, even while it is playing — you can always drag an embed around.

When you want to use the player itself, two small controls appear in its top-left corner while it runs:

• Use the player hands the pointer over so you can seek, change the volume or go fullscreen. Press it again to get dragging back.
• Stop closes the player and returns to the card. This is also how you pause, since pausing means clicking the player.