HTML5 Canvas Save Drawing as an Image

To save the canvas drawing as an image, we can set the source of an image object to the image data URL. From there, a user can right click on the image to save it to their local computer. Alternatively, we could also open up a new browser window with the image data url directly and the user could save it from there.

Note: The toDataURL() method requires that any images drawn onto the canvas are hosted on a web server with the same domain as the code executing it. If this condition is not met, a SECURITY_ERR exception is thrown.

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Code Editor

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
  <head>
    <style>
      body {
        margin: 0px;
        padding: 0px;
      }
    </style>
  </head>
  <body>
    <canvas id="myCanvas" width="578" height="200" style="display:none;"></canvas>
    <img id="canvasImg" alt="Right click to save me!">
    <script>
      var canvas = document.getElementById('myCanvas');
      var context = canvas.getContext('2d');

// draw cloud
      context.beginPath();
      context.moveTo(170, 80);
      context.bezierCurveTo(130, 100, 130, 150, 230, 150);
      context.bezierCurveTo(250, 180, 320, 180, 340, 150);
      context.bezierCurveTo(420, 150, 420, 120, 390, 100);
      context.bezierCurveTo(430, 40, 370, 30, 340, 50);
      context.bezierCurveTo(320, 5, 250, 20, 250, 50);
      context.bezierCurveTo(200, 5, 150, 20, 170, 80);
      context.closePath();
      context.lineWidth = 5;
      context.fillStyle = '#8ED6FF';
      context.fill();
      context.strokeStyle = '#0000ff';
      context.stroke();

// save canvas image as data url (png format by default)
      var dataURL = canvas.toDataURL();

// set canvasImg image src to dataURL
      // so it can be saved as an image
      document.getElementById('canvasImg').src = dataURL;

</script>
  </body>
</html>

< Load Data URL Clear Canvas >

More Examples

Modified on April 9th, 2013 by Eric Rowell