PhotoCAD for Surveyors
Scanning a building takes a day; drawing it takes the office several more. PhotoCAD drafts the plans, elevations, and sections from your scan exports in minutes, and your team reviews and finishes them.
A slice per floor from the registered cloud, in Cyclone, SCENE, RealWorks, ReCap, or Revit, drafted as the floor plan.
Four views, each an image exported from a laser scan or an orthophoto and converted in PhotoCAD. Drag the slider to compare.
Church ruin, Zobor Hill, Slovakia. Laser scan: P. Gawronek, CC BY 4.0, adapted.
A horizontal slice through the cloud. PhotoCAD draws both faces of every wall as closed outlines, with the openings.
| Method | Time | Cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your own CAD team | Hours per drawing | Drafting day rates | Tracing every wall, opening, and stone over the cloud. Often three days in the office for each day on site. |
| Point-cloud plug-in | Hours, partly automatic | From €1,200 a year per seat | Snaps lines to clean edges inside CAD. Masonry, ruins, and anything irregular are still drawn by hand. |
| Outsourcing | Days | Hundreds of dollars per elevation | A drafting bureau works from your scan. Another round of checking before it goes to your client. |
How PhotoCAD handles your clients’ data, what sets the accuracy of a drawing, and how to describe the work to a client.
| Topic | How PhotoCAD handles it |
|---|---|
| Client data | Never used to train AI models: not your images, not your drawings. |
| Retention | Kept until you delete it. Deleting a conversion permanently destroys the image and the drawing within 30 days, and PhotoCAD Stealth deletes everything after 30 days by default. |
| Accuracy |
In a measured building survey, or an as-built or existing-conditions survey, the fieldwork is the quick part. Scanning a building takes a day; turning the cloud into plans, elevations, and sections takes the office several days more, and that drafting is most of what the client pays for. It is also the part a small firm finds hardest to scale.
Tracing tools cannot help with that step: a point cloud or an orthophoto has no lines to follow. PhotoCAD works from a semantic understanding of the image. It recognizes the walls, openings, and masonry in the views your team already exports, a plan slice, an orthographic elevation, a section, and drafts each as clean, proportionally accurate linework in about a minute, set to scale, on your sheet, as DWG. Your drafters start from a draft and spend their time reviewing and completing it instead of tracing.
PhotoCAD does the initial drafting, not the survey, on an architectural survey and a heritage survey alike. Your team checks every drawing against the scan before it goes out, which is also what the RICS standard on AI expects of members. For confidential clients, PhotoCAD Stealth keeps processing on a contractual no-training chain and deletes on a schedule.
One floor, one wall, one cut. A whole building in one image keeps less detail than a close crop.
Export a view from a current job and see PhotoCAD draft it in a minute.
Your first 3 conversions are free — no card required.
Orthographic views of the cloud, in color or intensity, drafted as elevations and sections, one wall or cut per image.
Facade and floor orthophotos from your photogrammetry, drafted as measured elevations and plans.
Old surveys and archive sheets, scanned or photographed, brought into CAD at real scale.
Santa María de Melque, Spain. Laser scan: J. Raimundo, CC BY 4.0, adapted.
An intensity view of the front. PhotoCAD draws it stone by stone, with the door, the window, and the roof.
Church ruin, Zobor Hill, Slovakia. Laser scan: P. Gawronek, CC BY 4.0, adapted.
A vertical cut through the building. PhotoCAD draws the cut walls and the interior face beyond.
Santissima Annunziata portico, Florence. Photogrammetry: E. Pellis et al., CC BY 4.0, adapted.
A photogrammetric orthophoto of a portico. PhotoCAD draws the arches, columns, and doors, and reads the inscription.
 PhotoCAD | About a minute | ~$1 per drawing | A clean first draft of each view, at real scale, on your sheet, as DWG, for your team to review and finish. |
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Export each plan, elevation, and section as an image: slices and orthographic views from your point-cloud software, orthophotos from photogrammetry, or scans of existing drawings.
PNG, JPG, or TIFF up to 150 MB each, one view per file. PhotoCAD drafts each view in about a minute.
Compare each drawing with the image and the cloud. PhotoCAD drafts; your team’s review is what makes it a survey drawing.
Set the real size from a surveyed length, the longest one in the view.
Add dimensions, room names, door and window tags, callouts, and notes, with leader arrows where they point to something.
Lay several views on one sheet at their own scales, add your title block, and download a DWG that opens at real size in AutoCAD or Revit.
| Review | PhotoCAD can occasionally misread a small feature or an illegible inscription, which your team’s check against the source catches before issue. |
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| Disclosure | Describe it as AI-assisted drafting from your scan data, checked by your team. The RICS standard on responsible use of AI asks members to tell clients in writing. |
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| Deliverables | DWG, DXF, SVG, and PDF: the linework on one layer, with your dimensions, labels, and title block on layers of their own. |
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For your due diligence file: our AI supplier information sheet (PDF) answers the RICS standard’s supplier questions point by point, and the Trust page covers data handling, retention, and sub-processors in full.
Turn off measurements, cursors, grids, tags, and markers before export, so they stay out of the drawing.
Use the highest resolution your software offers, then crop to the part you are drawing.
The longest surveyed length in the view sets the scale best.