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/Guides/Aerial image to CAD

PhotoCAD Guides

How to Turn an Aerial Image into a CAD Drawing

A drone photo of a site, an orthophoto from a survey, open imagery from a public archive. Get the buildings, roads, and edges into CAD at real scale.

  • Your own drone photos

    A nadir shot, straight down, from a consumer drone. The most common source, and the best.

See it in action

Real conversions from PhotoCAD. Drag the slider to compare the aerial with the drawing.

Original photo of Barbican Estate London Aerial
Barbican Estate London aerial vector line drawing, curved Barbican Centre terrace, residential towers and sawtooth slab block rooflines.
Download Barbican Estate London Aerial from the gallery
Original photo of Industrial Estate Site Plan
Industrial estate site plan vector line drawing, warehouse footprints, parking layouts and internal access roads, for architectural drafting reference.
Download Industrial Estate Site Plan from the gallery
Original photo of Florence Cathedral Aerial View
Florence Cathedral aerial vector line drawing, Brunelleschi dome segments, cruciform nave plan and surrounding Baptistery.
Download Florence Cathedral Aerial View from the gallery

Four ways to get an aerial image into CAD

Trace it by hand

Time
Hours a site
Cost
Your time

Attach the image in AutoCAD or QGIS and draw over it. Exactly what you draw, line by line.

AI linework service

Time
Days
Cost
$17 to $35 an acre

Software extracts most of the linework from your orthomosaic, a technician finishes it, and you get a layered DXF.

Topographic survey

Time
Days
Cost
Quoted per site

A surveyor measures and draws the site: levels, boundaries, services, everything an aerial cannot show.

PhotoCAD

Time
About a minute
Cost
~$1 per drawing

The visible site as linework at real scale, dimensioned and sheeted, opened in CAD.

The PhotoCAD way, step by step

A drone has made the aerial photograph ordinary. Ten minutes over a site gives a picture of everything on it: the buildings, the access, the paving, where the trees are, where the fence really runs. It is the best site record most projects will ever have, for the surveyor's client, the civil engineer's appraisal, and the landscape designer's base plan, and it is a picture. CAD wants lines.

The traditional route is to trace it: attach the image in AutoCAD, or georeference it in QGIS, and draw around every roof and curb yourself. It is not hard; it takes an afternoon, and the afternoon is spent on the drawing rather than the design. For a large site there are services that extract the linework with software and finish it by hand, priced by the acre.

PhotoCAD reads the aerial as a site, not as pixels, and drafts what it shows: building outlines as closed shapes, roads and paths as lines, the edges of planting and paving, a first pass at the planimetric linework, with nothing for the texture of roofs and grass. Set the scale from one length you know, add what you need, and the site opens in CAD at real size. What it draws is what the camera saw. Property lines, levels, and underground services are not in the photograph, and a survey is still the answer when the drawing carries legal or construction weight.

For the best result

  • Start with your own imagery

    Your own drone gives the sharpest, most recent picture of the site; an orthophoto you commissioned is flat and to scale. Open sources such as USGS NAIP and OpenAerialMap cover much of the rest.

Ready to try it?

Upload a drone photo or an orthophoto and see the site drafted as linework at real scale.
Your first 3 conversions are free — no card required.

Convert an aerial image

Frequently Asked Questions

Your own drone photos give the sharpest and most recent picture, and an orthophoto from a survey is already flat and to scale. Open imagery covers a lot of ground: USGS NAIP in the US, OpenAerialMap, and the national mapping agencies. Google, Bing, and Apple maps have excellent aerial imagery of almost everywhere and it converts well; it is the provider's imagery, so check their terms of use for what you are making.

No. It opens at real size on a local grid, with no coordinate system attached. To place it on a national grid or a survey, align it in CAD or GIS from two points whose coordinates you know, the corners of a building on the survey, for example. That is a two-minute job in either.

As accurate as the image and the scale you set. A true orthophoto is flat and consistent across the site; a single nadir photo from a consumer drone is close to that near the center and stretches a little towards the edges, more so for tall buildings. It is an interpretation of what the camera saw, not a measurement, and it is right for design studies, site appraisals, and the base of a plan, not for a boundary or a setting-out.

Click two points on the drawing with a known distance between them and type it. The length of a building you have measured, a fence panel, a standard parking bay, or the ground distance from your drone's flight data all work. The whole site scales to match, in meters or feet.

Not on its own. A permit site plan needs the property lines, which are legal boundaries a photograph cannot show, and usually levels and setbacks. Use the aerial drawing for the existing buildings, access, and features, and take the boundaries from the title survey.

It draws the visible edges: roofs and building outlines, roads, paths, curbs, fences, walls, the edges of paving, tree canopies, water. It leaves out texture, shadow, and anything under a roof. Cars and people are drawn if they are there, so shoot when the site is quiet. A whole-site orthomosaic is best converted a region at a time: on one image of a large site, manholes, road markings, and curb lines are too small to survive.

Keep exploring

Categories

Architecture & BuildingsMaps & GeographyProducts & Objects

Use cases

ArchitectureHeritage & ArchaeologyIndustrial DesignPatent Drawings

Converters

JPG to DWGPNG to DWGImage to CADPDF to DWG

Guides

Point cloud to CADArchaeological drawingOrthophoto to CAD

Orthophotos and orthomosaics

The rectified image from a drone survey or a mapping flight, already flat and to scale.

  • Open imagery

    Public-domain and openly licensed aerials: USGS NAIP in the US, OpenAerialMap, national mapping agencies.

  • Historic aerials

    A scanned aerial from an archive, for a site as it was before the current buildings.

    • 1

    Get an image straight down

    Fly the drone over the middle of the site and shoot with the camera pointing straight down, around midday so shadows are short. An oblique photo has perspective a flat drawing cannot use.

  • JPG
    2

    Upload the image

    Drop in the JPG, PNG, TIFF, or a PDF page, up to 150 MB and 2,000 megapixels. One site per upload; a whole development is several.

  • 3

    Convert

    PhotoCAD recognizes what the aerial shows and draws it as linework: building outlines, roads and paths, curbs, fences, the edges of paving and planting, without the texture of roofs and grass.

  • 30 m
    4

    Set the scale

    Click the two ends of something whose length you know, a building, a fence, a parking bay, or the ground distance from your drone's flight data, and type it. The whole drawing scales to match.

  • SITE PLANDRAWN BYSCALE1:100
    5

    Dimension, label, and sheet it

    Add dimensions and notes, put the site on a titled sheet at 1:200 or 1:500, on any size from A4 to A0 or Letter to ARCH E, and fill in the title block.

  • site.dwg
    6

    Open it in CAD

    Download DWG, DXF, SVG, or PDF. The site opens at real size in model space, on a local grid: align it to your coordinate system in CAD or GIS from two known points.

    • Convert an aerial image

    3 free conversions. No card required.

    Straight down, short shadows

    A nadir image with the sun high gives clean edges. Long shadows read as shapes, and an oblique angle stretches everything on one side.

  • Know one length on the ground

    A building you have measured, a standard parking bay, a fence panel. One known length sets the scale for the whole site.

  • It draws what it can see

    Roofs, roads, curbs, fences, tree canopies. Not property lines, levels, or services: those come from a survey, not a photograph.

    • Yes, but the drawing keeps the photo's perspective, so distances are not consistent across the site and the scale step can only be right in one place. For a drawing you can measure from, shoot straight down or use an orthophoto.

    DWG, DXF, SVG, and PDF from the one conversion. The DWG opens at real size in model space in AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Revit, or SketchUp, with a titled sheet as a layout if you laid one out.