If you’ve opened a design in Canva and found yourself looking at a timeline or a strip of thumbnails along the bottom, it can feel like something has gone wrong, especially if you’re not trying to create a video at all. Nothing has changed about your design. It’s a display setting, and it’s easy to fix.
This is a short one. The solution is a single click, but it’s not obvious if you don’t know where to look.
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Transcript
If you’re working in Canva and suddenly you’re seeing thumbnails across the bottom… or a play button and a timeline…
And you’re thinking,
“I’m not trying to make a video. Why is this here?”
In most cases, nothing has changed about your design — it’s just the way Canva is currently displaying it.
Certain design types, especially things like Instagram Stories or mobile-sized formats, often open in thumbnail view by default. If you choose a video-style template, you may also see the timeline appear.
But that doesn’t mean you’re required to work in that layout.
If you want to hide the thumbnails and remove the video-style editing features, go to the lower right corner of your screen and click “Pages.”
That switches your workspace back to the regular scrolling page view.
This is one of those hidden-in-plain-sight features. The Pages button controls how your workspace is displayed — but if you’re not in Canva regularly, it’s easy to miss how much that one toggle changes.
So if Canva looks like it’s in video mode and you don’t want it to be, just switch back to Pages view.
