New in the Tynker App: Upload Your Own Pictures, Artwork, and More!

We’ve talked to dozens of kids who use the Tynker app to learn about what we could be doing better. Over and over again, we heard the same thing: let us upload our own pictures and artwork!

Well, here it is!

How It Works

Just download the latest version of the Tynker app from the App Store or Google Play Store to be able to import images from your tablet straight into your project.

Already, we’ve seen kids uploading hand-drawn art that they’ve made themselves in other apps, pictures of their dogs, and images they’ve downloaded from the internet. They use these assets to make beautiful storytelling projects, science projects with high-quality illustrations, and much more.

Here are a couple of projects that users have made in the past week!

Play “autumn” Play “The flying penguin game”

Updated Publishing Guidelines

It’s deeply important to us that our users are safe on the Tynker app, so we’ve revised our publishing guidelines to keep up with the potential dangers of uploading pictures to a public site.

All published projects are reviewed by a Tynker employee before being added to the Tynker community for other kids to see. This means if a project includes bad language, gore, or personal information, it will never be seen by anyone.

Any projects that include any information or pictures that could be used to identify an individual are rejected and never added to the community. Examples of this include:

• Pictures of faces (with the exception of easily recognizable famous people; you can still make a report on Albert Einstein in Tynker and publish it–in fact, we hope you will!)
• Full names (again, with the exception of easily recognizable famous people)
• Contact information (including phone numbers, email addresses, YouTube channel names, usernames on social media sites, etc.)
• Unique personal identifiers (including license plate numbers, social security numbers, etc.)

Additional Precautions

For the security of our users, our uploading process strips all information about the picture. For example, some pictures are encoded with data about where the picture was taken, the camera that took it, etc. When a picture is uploaded to Tynker, this information is removed.

Get Started

You can download the Tynker app for your iPad for free!

Note: This feature has been available on computers, desktops, and Chromebooks for years and this will not be changed by this app update.