PhotoCAD Guides
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.
A nadir shot, straight down, from a consumer drone. The most common source, and the best.
Attach the image in AutoCAD or QGIS and draw over it. Exactly what you draw, line by line.
Software extracts most of the linework from your orthomosaic, a technician finishes it, and you get a layered DXF.
A surveyor measures and draws the site: levels, boundaries, services, everything an aerial cannot show.
PhotoCADThe visible site as linework at real scale, dimensioned and sheeted, opened in CAD.
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.
Real conversions from PhotoCAD. Drag the slider to compare the aerial with the drawing.
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 and redraws 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.
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.
Upload a drone photo or an orthophoto and see the site redrawn as linework at real scale.
Your first 3 conversions are free — no card required.
The rectified image from a drone survey or a mapping flight, already flat and to scale.
Public-domain and openly licensed aerials: USGS NAIP in the US, OpenAerialMap, national mapping agencies.
A scanned aerial from an archive, for a site as it was before the current buildings.
Drop in the JPG, PNG, TIFF, or a PDF page, up to 150 MB. One site per upload; a whole development is several.
PhotoCAD reads the aerial and redraws what it shows as linework: building outlines, roads and paths, curbs, fences, the edges of paving and planting, without the texture of roofs and grass.
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.
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.
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.
3 free conversions. No card required.
A nadir image with the sun high gives clean edges. Long shadows read as shapes, and an oblique angle stretches everything on one side.
A building you have measured, a standard parking bay, a fence panel. One known length sets the scale for the whole site.
Roofs, roads, curbs, fences, tree canopies. Not property lines, levels, or services: those come from a survey, not a photograph.
