How to make a tier list on your phone

Mobile · 4 min read

Most tier lists are made on phones now, which is awkward because dragging a small square with a fingertip is genuinely fiddly. Everything below is about working around that.

Tap to place instead of dragging

This is the single most useful thing to know. Tap an item once and it gets a blue outline, then tap anywhere in the row you want it in and it moves there. No dragging, no dropping it in the wrong place, and it works just as well with a thumb while holding the phone one handed.

Tapping the selected item again cancels the selection.

Adding photos from your camera roll

Press Add images and your phone offers its normal picture picker. You can select many at once. On iPhone you can also copy an image in Photos or Safari and paste it in. Nothing is uploaded anywhere, which is why it still works on a bad signal.

Fixing squashed rows

If a row is holding twenty items on a narrow screen, it becomes an unreadable brick. Three fixes, in order of how well they work:

• Add another tier and split the crowded row across two.
• Delete a row you are not using, which gives every remaining row more height.
• Turn the phone sideways while you sort, then turn it back to check the result.

Saving to your photos

Press Save image. The chart is drawn as a PNG and downloaded. On Android it lands in Downloads and appears in the gallery. On iPhone it goes to Files by default, and you can then use the share sheet to save it to Photos. The image is rendered at a size that stays sharp when posted rather than being a screenshot of your screen.

A note on screenshots

Screenshotting the page works, but you get the browser bars, the buttons and whatever the screen happened to show. The Save image button draws a clean chart with just the title, the rows and the items, so it is worth the extra tap.

Once it is saved, how to share a tier list covers where to post it and which format to use.