After you select your designs and hit export, here is what happens behind the scenes. DesignExporter sends each design to Canva's export engine in the background, respecting rate limits and handling retries automatically. As each design finishes processing, it is downloaded and added to your ZIP archive.
For multi-page designs like certificates or name badges, DesignExporter optionally scans each page with OCR to detect unique text. This means a 50-page certificate design exports as 50 individually named files, each labeled with the recipient's name rather than generic "page-1, page-2" filenames.
Once all designs are processed and packaged, you receive an email with a direct download link. The link is pre-signed and expires after 7–90 days depending on your plan. You can download the ZIP as many times as you need within that window. After expiry, the file is automatically deleted from our servers.
The entire process is completely async. You do not need to keep the page open. Start an export before lunch, come back to a ready-to-download email. That is the difference between a native Canva download and a purpose-built Canva bulk download tool.