.out-of-scope/offset-duplicated-shapes.md
labelme places a duplicated or pasted shape at exactly the source coordinates. The copy is not nudged, shifted, or otherwise offset to make it visible, and there is no setting to turn such an offset on.
An in-place copy is a deliberate workflow, not an oversight. A common pattern is to duplicate a shape and then edit the copy — change its label, flags, or group id, or trim a few vertices — while keeping the geometry identical to the source. Any automatic offset destroys that: the user would have to drag the copy back onto the source by hand and could never recover the exact coordinates. Copy/Paste across images relies on the same guarantee to transfer annotations between frames of one scene.
The cost of the current behavior is discoverability: a copy hidden under its source can be stacked without the user noticing. That is a visibility problem, and the acceptable answers to it are ones that do not move the copy — a selection highlight, a shape-list entry, or a status-bar hint. Making the offset a setting was considered and rejected too: it adds a mode that changes where saved geometry lands depending on configuration, for a problem the label list already surfaces.
PR #2536 implemented a full placement search (zoom-scaled step, in-bounds clamping, widen-then-narrow search for a free slot) and was closed for this reason, not for code quality.