Use arrow keys to move the keyboard cursor, Space to draw with the current tool, and Delete to erase the current cell.
The tool above converts an image into a fuse bead chart with a colour code in every cell, and tells you how many beads of each colour to buy. All of it runs inside your browser — your image never leaves your device. This page explains what the tool is good at, what to watch for at each step, and answers the questions we get most often.
Making a bead pattern from a photo was never hard because of "shrinking the image". The hard parts are these three:
Those three problems are why this tool exists.
The test is simple: cover the colours and look only at the outline. Can you still tell what it is? Line art, icons, cartoon characters and objects with a clear subject work best. Busy photo backgrounds, large soft gradients and group photos are the hardest. If you only have a photo, crop down to the subject in an image editor and raise the contrast a little — the conversion improves noticeably. Ten minutes here saves half an hour of fixing individual cells later.
Think in "cells along the long edge" rather than centimetres:
A rough conversion: cells × 0.5 cm ≈ finished edge length (5 mm peg spacing). A 60-cell pattern ends up roughly 30 cm wide.
Automatic conversion gives you the closest result, not the best-looking one. Check two things first:
Faces, eyes and logos affect the impression most. They are worth the extra time.
It is also worth saving the editable pattern (JSON). It is the raw record of every change you made; resizing or recolouring later starts from it far faster than from scratch.
More colours means a closer likeness, but more shopping and more risk of running short. For most projects 24–32 colours is plenty. Line art and icons compress well to 12–16. Only photos need 40 or more. If you plan to keep at this, keeping the colour count inside the range of codes you already own is more practical than chasing accuracy.
50-cell and 52-cell boards are not compatible. The same pattern on the wrong board will not line up at the edges. Measure the boards you own before ordering.
This tool uses a MARD-compatible 221-colour palette. If you buy another brand, the codes are not interchangeable — you need a physical colour card to map them once. On-screen HEX values are approximations only: always verify against a physical colour card before a large build.
Most "photo to bead pattern" sites upload your image to their server, compute there, and send the result back. What happens in between is something you have no way to check.
This tool does not do that. From the moment you pick a file it stays on your device; conversion, colour matching and counting all happen in the browser, and no step sends the image anywhere. That is not a marketing line — you can verify it yourself: download the offline build, unplug your network, open it, and make a pattern. Everything still works. That is only possible if it genuinely never depended on a server.
The side benefit is speed. There is no upload wait — even a multi-megabyte photo returns a result immediately.
For more detail, read the tutorials. To verify the "no upload" claim yourself, download the offline build. See also the privacy notice.