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cameronsuorsa
October 25, 2022

Add auto layout to Sections

  • October 25, 2022
  • 101 replies
  • 13979 views

There are times when having sections free of constraints is nice… but my design team has become addicted to using auto layout with frames. In many cases when using sections, it would be amazing to perfectly space the inner sections out using auto layout.

101 replies

Henrique_Baptista_da_Silva
November 7, 2024

I love auto layout but I hate that it’s a frame. I’d much prefer it to be a section because:

  1. It hides the names of the frames inside and makes it hard to select them;
    and
  2. When exporting all frames to pdf, it exports it as a single pdf image of all your frames organised, making me have to remove all the frames from inside the auto layout frame before exporting.
Dustin_Hansen2
Active Member
April 4, 2025

Just adding a +1 for this feature, very much needed

Erik_van_der_Neut
New Member
April 6, 2025

My goodness Figma! How is this STILL not a feature? This has been requested for years, would be so easy to add, and would be so powerful! 

 

** Disappointed and frustrated **

Luigi_Chelli
New Member
April 17, 2025

+1 much needed

florenfibtg
New Member
May 8, 2025

Is there any updates on this feature? 🤔

Thanaban_Saetan
New Member
May 9, 2025

Update to this feature please.

 

Alec Ditonto
New Member
May 14, 2025

Wow, I can’t believe this doesn’t natively exist. This is a must have feature. Please add it.
 

In my mind, I totally thought that it did exist.

 

Our team uses sections to organize screens for development, screens for client presentations, and organize our component libraries.


The pain points we have that auto-layout on sections would solve are:

  1. We want sections to auto size based on the content I add -- so that we don’t have to spend time manually adjusting the overall width and height of our sections whenver we add more content.
  2. We want the content inside to both horizontally and vertically space so that it looks tidy automatically as new screens / components are created within sections -- would save us lots of time
  3. We want sections to still display the names of the top level frames within them so that we can use the frame names as automatically visible labels for the components and screens we have within the sections.  (for instance if we add pages to frames instead of sections, we lose that default behavior and creates an opportunity for inconsistencies across large teams).
  4. We’d also like sections within sections or section templates/layouts that can allow us to for instance, have an automatic gutter for annotations or visible component variants next to screens to make it faster and easier for us to organize our content for developers, stakeholders, and clients.
Margot_Gabel
Active Member
June 4, 2025

Section are a great idea but currently we are reluctant to use them fully because of the lack of options.. Why is the auto-resize arbitrarily based on the nudge amount? (We have 8px so the auto padding is always 80px. 

When creating dev handoff file, we want to give breathing space to the hundred of the frames that are laying next to each other, split into sections, but we have to manually make room around them (400 px is nice for example) which is very cumbersome and would be super quick with auto-padding/auto-layout options..

Using Figma since 2018.
Polina_Cheremisinova
New Participant
July 29, 2025

Figma, it’s been 2 years.. when we can have this feauture?😓

Aleks
New Participant
July 30, 2025

I have layouts where “hug” on sections works fine. There was a way to do this by converting the autolayout to a section but now this trick doesn't work. 

 

This is a damn convenient thing. You don't have to get distracted and do the size adjustment command. And adding autolayout to sections will make the process as convenient as possible. 

Many are waiting for this from you, Figma developers. 😍