@Ancient_Luke - I just moved a sticky note over top of another sticky note and they did not become permanently grouped. So, that being said, can you please provide more context?

For example:

• what object types
• are they over top of another object, e.g., shape, in a frame, table, Kanban, user story map?

Screenshots are always good; a screen recording is even better, e.g., Loom is free and quite easy to use and share a recording.

Here is a loom showing the issue. It doesnt happen with overlapping shapes for some reason. It’s when I move a drawing over a shape or an image. The drawing gets attached to the image. And you can tell when it happens because a square appears around the image or shape as the drawing is moved over it

I frequently draw over images or shapes and only just yesterday did they start getting attached like this.

@Ancient_Luke - Thanks for the Loom! Yes, I see what you’re saying now. I don’t use the pen tool much, so I cannot speak to the past/intended behaviour.

I will open a support ticket and see what they have to say.

–

Support Team,

Are you able to confirm if pen drawings auto-grouping with objects when dragged on top of another object (tested with a basic shape and sticky note) is intentional or a bug?

In addition to @Ancient_Luke’s Loom, here is a GIF:

Note: Once the drawing is grouped, it can no longer be “behind” the other object, even if you set the other object to “Bring to front”.

Hey @Tolya Filippov - I saw you recently posted recently about improvements re drawings resizing with objects. So, I suspect those changes are now creating the behaviour reported in this post? 

Hi @Ancient_Luke and @Robert Johnson !

I frequently draw over images or shapes and only just yesterday did they start getting attached like this.

You are correct, we’ve released recently the long-awaited feature of drawing on objects (stickies, shapes, images, etc.) to help people write and annotate in Miro with a Pen tool.

@Ancient_Luke could you please elaborate on the use case when you draw on an object and you don’t want this drawing to be attached to the object?

I don’t think i ever want them attached. I draw and write on images all the time to help create visual aids, and often i need to adjust where i wrote it. If i want them attached, i can easily just group the image and writing parts, so that was never an issue. Now i can’t adjust where i draw or wrote anything. Needs to have an off switch to at least give people the option. It really lowers the versatility in adjusting and making edits to things, and for some things almost makes impossible to do without starting from scratch on everything. It’s unfortunately a really big deal for how i use the app. Things are exponentially more difficult to make edits now

@Ancient_Luke Thanks for this context!

Now i can’t adjust where i draw or wrote anything.

You still should be able to select the drawing and move it on the object (like on this Loom video), is this behaviour working for you?

Will you be open for a call so we’d better understand your use case and how we can help? If so, I’ll message a calendly link via a direct message.

I understand how to do that already, but when you’re talking about complicated drawings with lots of different lines and letters, you would have to individually click on every single thing, which for some drawings is actually almost impossible, Im talking on the order of hours to click it all. Also not being able to make a drawing “go to back” behind an image makes it more complicated as well. It makes layering images to create drawing effects non feasible. Yes i can do a call, however, I don’t see a way around that if this is an intentional feature and if im understanding how it works correctly

Memento is an exceptional alternative to the Wayback Machine because it aggregates several different sources, including the Wayback Machine itself.

https://essentialshoodiesofficial.com/

@Ancient_Luke - If it helps, to target all of the drawings for moving, you can target the drawings/Pen objects by using the filter:

@Tolya Filippov - Thanks for the clarification. So, as I understand the new, expected behaviour, if you want a drawing to be behind an object, you need to drag the other objects “on top/over” the drawings. However, as @Ancient_Luke has stated, he may want to draw on top of the shapes without them automatically grouping.

While the Send to back/Bring to front options disappear from a grouped Pen’s context menu, when you press the page down key, you get a warning of: You can’t send the card backward when it’s inside in interactive template. I have shared this with the support team. Here it is in action:

The response from the support team, as already confirmed by Tolya:

Thank you so much for your patience!
 
The team confirmed that the change you mentioned is related, and the grouping behavior is expected.
 
They also clarified that users should still be able to click on the object and edit the object itself or the attached drawing separately, as shown below:

 
Please let me know if you have any questions!

Some of the work arounds help a little, but there are some things like sending the drawing to back that are not possible anymore. Maybe most people don’t use miro to draw or make diagrams a lot, but for those that do this feature makes using miro really inconvenient, which is unfortunate because it’s a phenomenal app. But with this feature it’s just not realistic to use it to make drawings anymore. This is especially apparent for those that use the “copy as image” tool. I use that a ton on my own drawings because I can’t copy the actual drawing because it has too many parts. But now that there is less versatility when working with images that becomes a big problem. 

The inability to send the drawing to the back/front is really killing me. My board is a large locked image to form a background over which there are a vast amount of pen drawings and other, smaller images, sticky notes etc. So far I’ve had the different types of pen drawings grouped (group sizes of 100+ seperate pen drawings) in order to send them to back to get them out of the way as they represent different data that may not be required to be shown, but this no longer works.

It has made the board significantly harder to use since to get the prior effect of removing a “layer” group of pen drawings I now need to drag the whole thing off to the side then drag it back on again when I need it which is not sustainable.

Sorry you’re experiencing the trouble, but it is a little vindicating to hear im not the only one. Its a super frustrating update. Especially, given that the added feature was already possible if they just grouped the sticky note with what they are writing, and this update only lowered the versatility of the board. I agree this type of work is not sustainable. I can make it work for a short time, but will have to find a new app to use long term. Super sad because miro was the best option by quite a big margin in my opinion

@THE GOBBLER this doesn’t help with the layers, but for selecting multiple pieces of a drawing that are layered over an image, hold shift and it will allow you to drag and select without moving the image. But this just helps with selecting multiple elements at once. You still need to then click on the option in the tool bar that pops up and click on the option “pen elements” to move just the drawing parts. And this doens’t help with layers. 

I wouldn’t say this is ‘ SOLVED]’…

As architects, our most common way of using Miro is to sketch over images and drawings together. Often we need to change the layer order or even remove the background object. None of this is possible now. 

Though I love working in Miro, this recent change has made it so difficult to use that I will need to look for an alternative platform for drawing in.  It’s a real shame. 

Could Miro at least provide an option for this feature to be disabled?

@R Marks I met with some people from the Miro team, and they are aware this is a problem and are working on getting it addressed. They were super helpful to meet with and very concerned with the issues with overlapping. They definitley are not just ignoring the issue

Thanks @Ancient_Luke - good to know. I got a helpful response from the helpdesk too. 

Hope this can be fixed soon!

Best,

R

I agree with R Marks, an option to disable this feature would be nice.  “turn on or off autogroup”

I think I found a work around…. group all your lines and images together, then double click and it isolates the group, now you can send the object to front or back.  Note: for some reason Miro doesn’t like groups inside groups, so I had to ungroup a nested group and it worked fine...for now.  But it’s not intuitive so please help fix this bug or give us an option do disable automatic grouping and give us a shortcut to the option when the error message pops up “You cant send the card backwards when its inside an interactive template”

Our team has been struggling with this issue as well. Results in groups we can’t separate and objects that are too large to be pasted.

I also find this ‘auto group’ feature a step backward and wish it were possible to disable it. I design 3D sculptures for public spaces. A typical workflow is I’ll take photos of the space, bring them into Miro, quickly sketch some sculpture ideas over that image and then want to drag the sketched elements off the image and sketch a different concept. A few months ago, whenever I would try to drag the sketched elements off the background image, the background image would come with them. I simply want to drag one set of sketched elements off the background image, put it in its own area on the board and then draw another concept. Please allow us to disable this auto grouping of drawing elements with background images. A typical sketch includes hundreds of lines, so selecting them individually is not practical.

@Tolya Filippov @Robert Johnson @all
Adding my +1 !!  here. 

Sorry, in advance, for how blunt this post is… I’m rarely this opinionated or negative, frankly, about the enjoyably-rare buggy behavior in Miro or beta/new features or the like - I never want to stifle innovation or boundary pushing at Miro … but here I’m making an exception as this is a highly under-thought-out and un-tested feature addition which is significantly ‘destructive’ of prior dependably-consistent UI behavior. IMO, this auto-group pen on other items functionality should never have been released this half-baked.  Its super inconsistent and incomprehensible how it works, its exceedingly difficult to know when its going to work, and how and overall it amounts to a degradation of functionality.

Watch the video of me putting this ‘feature’ into action and ask yourself if you don’t hear in your mind what I hear in mine, which is a product manager in charge of this saying, “you know… we didn’t think of that case,” or, “we never actually resolved our approach to that.”  

This ‘feature’ now makes working with the pen:

1. less dependable / less trust worthy
2. less predictable
3. less forgivable
4. less impressive / poses a real possibility of making me look clunky and disorganized in front of clients/stakeholders/teammates I lead. It makes
5. Miro look low quality, like its an inferior product like Mural or Lucid. This is the legacy bad UI behavior of the under-invested whiteboarding tool UIs we came to know, expect and hate a decade ago.  

I feel the pen is now unreliable and am going to reach for it FAR LESS now that I can’t understand how its going to work.  This “feature” is untenable and this low quality product management can’t persist at Miro lest we find ourselves in a year or two with a highly degraded and inferior product. 

Why is this marked “Solved”? 

Allow the feature to be turned off.