Questions and answers

It is free and there is no account. There is nothing to sign up for, no export limit, and no watermark on the files you download. The site is funded by advertising, not by charging for exports.

No. The conversion is JavaScript that runs inside your browser, and the site has no server to send images to — it is a static site. You can verify this by opening your browser's network tab while converting: no request carries your image.

It works on any current mobile browser; the conversion runs in a Web Worker so scrolling stays smooth while a large image is processed. It needs a connection for the first load, after which the page has to stay open — there is no offline app.

Source images can be up to 15 MB, up to 8192 pixels on a side, and up to 24 megapixels. Higher resolution does not improve the pattern — the image is averaged down to your chosen bead grid anyway — so a 2000-pixel image is plenty.

The pattern itself can be up to 174 beads wide, which is six standard boards across.

The counter under the preview gives the exact total, and the materials CSV breaks it down by color code. As a rough guide, a 58 × 58 piece is about 3,400 beads and a 116 × 116 piece about 13,500.

Order roughly 5% extra of each color. Batch-to-batch color variation makes topping up mid-project visible.

With sorted beads and a printed sheet, most people manage 600 to 1,000 beads an hour once they settle into a rhythm. A single board is an evening; a four-board piece is a weekend. Unsorted beads roughly double those numbers.

Usually not. Smooth transitions (Floyd–Steinberg dithering) imitate gradients by alternating beads, which looks better from a distance on photographs but scatters isolated single beads, increases the number of colors you must buy, and slows down placing every row.

Leave it on clean blocks for illustrations, logos, and anything with flat color. Try it on photographs at 87 beads and wider.

Faces need resolution. Below roughly 58 beads wide, a face has too few cells for the features that carry a likeness — the eyes end up two beads each.

Crop tightly to the head and shoulders, brighten the image slightly, and convert again. Cropping helps far more than increasing the width, and costs no extra beads.

Bead palettes contain many light tones and comparatively few dark ones, so several distinct shadows land on the same nearest color. Raise the brightness and reduce the contrast of the source image before uploading, or cut the subject out and let the background be transparent.

Use Maximum colors in the tool and set it to the number of bead codes you are willing to buy. The dominant colors stay, while rarer colors are re-matched to the closest retained shade. If the result is still too speckled, switch off smooth transitions or reduce the pattern width.

Print at 100% scale, not “fit to page”, so every board sheet keeps the same cell size. Greyscale is fine, because you read the color codes rather than the printed color. One board fills one A4 page at a comfortable reading size.

The file is UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, which every current spreadsheet application reads correctly. If characters look wrong, the file was opened by importing it with a different encoding — reopen it and choose UTF-8.

Not on this site. It converts, previews, and exports. If a few cells bother you, the practical fix is to adjust the source image and convert again, or to place a different bead than the sheet says — the pattern is a guide, not a contract.

The tool does not check what you upload, but copyright still applies to the image you use. Converting someone else's artwork or a character from a film or game into a pattern for yourself is generally a private matter; selling the result is not, and rights holders do enforce this.

If you plan to sell finished pieces, start from artwork you made or licensed for commercial use.

No. This is an independent tool. Brand names appear only to say which bead color codes a pattern is compatible with, and the color data used for matching is a compatibility list maintained in this project rather than a manufacturer's chart.