PhotoCAD Guides
Old blueprints, scanned sheets, a plan photographed on a desk. Four ways to digitize them, what each costs, how long it takes, and what you get back.
Diazo prints, faded originals, the only surviving copy of a building's drawings.
Sheets that went through a scanner years ago and live as PDF or image files.
Attach the scan as an underlay in AutoCAD, scale it, and draw over it. Exactly what you draw, and nothing until you have drawn it.
Scan2CAD, or Raster Design in AutoCAD, follows the pixels. A clean scan gives lines; a faded one gives fragments to tidy manually.
A drafter redraws the sheet by hand: layers, editable text, the office's standards. Rush orders cost two to four times as much.
PhotoCADA flatbed or large-format scan is ideal. A phone photo works too: shoot as square to the sheet as you can, in even light, for the most accurate result. If the angle is off, PhotoCAD squares the photo up before it converts it.
Real conversions from PhotoCAD. Drag the slider to compare the scanned original with the vector drawing.
Most of the world's drawings are on paper. The buildings we live and work in, and many of the parts still being made, were drawn before CAD existed. When one of them comes back into play, a renovation, an extension, a part that needs re-making, somebody has to digitize the drawing and get it into CAD. For thirty years the answer has been to trace it by hand, or to send it away.
Scan-to-CAD software promised to end that, and for clean scans it half did: a raster-to-vector tracer follows the pixels and returns lines. But it follows every pixel, including the specks, the fold lines, and the fuzz around a faded stroke, so a bad scan comes back as a cloud of fragments that takes longer to tidy than the tracing would have.
PhotoCAD does something different. It reads the drawing as a drawing, then redraws it: a wall becomes one straight line, a curve stays a smooth curve, a room closes. Then it lets you finish the job where the drawing is: set the real size from one known dimension, add dimensions and notes, place it on a titled sheet, and download a DWG that opens at full scale.
A sheet with four details on it converts better as four uploads than as one.
Upload a scanned or photographed drawing and see it redrawn as clean linework.
Your first 3 conversions are free — no card required.
A drawing photographed on a desk or a site table, at whatever angle the room allowed.
A detail from a printed set, a marked-up drawing, or a hand-drawn sketch on graph paper.
Clean linework you can scale, dimension, lay out on an ISO, ANSI, or ARCH sheet, and issue.
Drop the file in. A multi-page PDF opens a page picker, so a 400-page set needs no splitting: scroll the thumbnails or jump to a page number, and only that page is converted. One plan, elevation, or detail per upload gives the sharpest result.
PhotoCAD reads the scanned drawing and redraws it as clean linework: continuous lines, smooth curves, closed shapes, without the paper texture or the scanner noise.
Click two points with a known distance between them and enter it. The whole drawing scales to match, in millimeters or feet and inches.
Add dimensions and notes, then put the drawing on a titled sheet at any scale, 1:50 or 1:100 say, 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 drawing opens at real size in model space, with the sheet as a layout.
3 free conversions. No card required.
Upload the JPG or HEIC straight from your phone. PhotoCAD squares up a photo before converting it; a page inside a PDF is converted as it is.
Dimensions on the original come back as linework. Add live dimensions and labels in PhotoCAD, in millimeters or feet and inches; they arrive in the DWG as editable text and dimension lines on their own layers.
Up to 150 MB, an A0 sheet at 300 dpi included. A TIFF shows a preview once our server has read it, a few seconds, then converts like any scan.
