Projects & drawings

How projects organise drawings, scans, surveys and engines, the three tabs, the project workspace, and moving and sharing work.

Kaleidoscope Plan organises your work into projects. A project is the unit of work, it owns its drawings, scans, surveys and engines in a single folder, so renaming, sharing or deleting a job is one operation.

The hierarchy

Project, the container for a job. Carries the filing an architect or surveyor needs: name, client, job number and notes.
Drawing (.kalar), what you edit: a building with floors and rooms, walls, openings, fittings, lights and heating. A project can hold many (one per building, per floor, or per design iteration).
Scan (.kalascan), a LiDAR capture you can convert into a drawing - or merge into an existing one.
Survey, a dated inspection built on a frozen snapshot of one of the project’s drawings, with numbered observations, photos and a PDF report. See Surveys.
Engine, a non-destructive overlay (3D, fire escape, fire alarm zones, CCTV & security, WiFi, network, deck plan, marketing) attached to a drawing. See Engines.

On disk, everything for a project lives inside that project’s folder, there’s no global pool. A separate Unfiled area holds anything you haven’t assigned to a project yet (and anything you import from Files).

How many projects you can have

Kaleidoscope Plan is free to download, and on the free tier you can keep up to five projects. Each project still holds as many drawings, scans, surveys and engines as you like - the limit is on projects, not on what’s inside them.

When you try to create a sixth project - or import a project archive that would push you over five - the app shows an upgrade screen instead of completing the action. Buying anything at all lifts the five-project limit for good, even the cheapest pack of export credits. A subscription or the one-off lifetime unlock also removes it (and unlocks clean, watermark-free exports). See Pricing for what each option includes; your existing projects are never deleted or locked if you stay on the free tier.

The three tabs

Projects, the home tab. Lists every project; tap one to open its workspace. Unfiled is the last row, and the + menu holds New project and Import .kaliarchive….
Library, a flat view of every drawing, scan and engine across all projects, with All / Drawings / Scans / Engines / Elements filter chips (the Elements chip opens your element library, and a toolbar menu shows or hides archived scans). For “I just want to find that file” - tapping a row opens it, but new work is always created inside a project.
Settings, units, styles, region and preferences (see Settings).

The project workspace

Opening a project shows:

A filing form, name, client, job number and notes, edited inline (changes commit as you leave each field; there’s no Save button).
A Drawings section, every drawing in the project, with New (name it and go straight into the editor) and Import (copy a .kalar in from Files).
A Surveys section, with New once the project has a drawing to snapshot.
An Engines section, with New once the project has a drawing to extend. Engine rows can be renamed or deleted, but never moved on their own - an engine always travels with its drawing.
A Scans section, with Import on every platform and New (a LiDAR capture) on iPhones and iPads with a LiDAR sensor. A toggle in the section header shows or hides archived scans. On a Mac you can import, move, archive and delete scans, but a scan opens for conversion on iPhone / iPad.

New drawings, scans and surveys land inside this project automatically.

Moving, importing and deleting

Move between projects, swipe a drawing, survey or scan row and tap Move, then pick the destination project. It’s an atomic file move - and a drawing’s engines move with it.
Import a .kalar from Files, into a project (it joins that project) or into Unfiled. An imported file’s previous project association is cleared, since the destination device doesn’t have the source project.
Rename, export or delete a project, swipe its row on the Projects tab, or open the same actions from the row’s context menu (right-click on Mac, long-press on iPhone and iPad).
Delete a project, removes the project’s folder and everything in it (with a confirmation that shows the item counts). To keep some items, move them to Unfiled first.

Because the folder is the project, sharing a whole job is one action: choose Export on the project’s row to get a single .kaliarchive file carrying the filing plus every drawing, scan, engine, survey and custom element. On the receiving device - Mac included - + → Import .kaliarchive… on the Projects tab expands it into a new, independent project; re-importing the same file creates a second copy rather than merging with the first. An archive made on a newer version of the app may be refused - update the app and import again.

On the free tier, importing an archive counts towards your five-project limit: if it would take you over, the app shows the upgrade screen first (see How many projects you can have).

File formats at a glance

Extension	What it is
`.kalar`	A drawing
`.kalascan`	A single LiDAR scan, shareable between devices
`.kalarelement`	A reusable element you defined
`.kaliarchive`	A whole project - drawings, scans, engines, surveys and custom elements - for sharing or backup
`.kalemarketing`	A saved Marketing template preset

Engines aren’t separate shareable files - each engine is saved alongside its drawing inside the project, and travels with it in a .kaliarchive. Full details in File formats.