Guides
DXF from a photo: how laser reads your part
Most quote platforms need a clean CAD file before they will talk to you. If the part you need exists only as a photo of the old one, a hand sketch, or a drawing on graph paper, you are stuck: the usual advice is to redraw it yourself or hire a CAD freelancer. laser was built for exactly this case — you send what you have, and the DXF is our problem, not yours.
What makes a photo quotable
A photo carries the shape but not the size, so the one thing that matters is scale. Put a ruler, a tape measure or a coin next to the part, shoot straight on (not at an angle), and keep the edges in focus. One part per photo is best. If it has holes or slots on both faces, send one photo of each side. A phone photo in daylight is plenty — no scanner, no light box, no special setup.
A sketch works the same way. Write the dimensions you know on the sketch itself — the overall size, the hole spacing, the material thickness if you know it. Anything you leave out, we have to guess, and a guessed part wastes metal and your time.
What happens to it
The photo is traced into an outline, the scale reference fixes the real dimensions in millimetres, and holes and cutouts become proper pierces in a cut-ready DXF. You see the result as a drawing of your part with every dimension marked, plus the material and thickness — mild steel at 2 mm by default, both changeable. You approve that preview before anything is cut, and that approval is what the finished part is checked against.
If the photo is too blurry or a dimension cannot be read, the source goes to our shop instead of the AI, and a person replies by email within a day. You never get a part cut from a guess.
What it costs and how fast it ships
Every quote comes from the same formula as a CAD-file order — material, cut length, number of pierces, setup — and lands on a fixed price step: €29 minimum, then €49, €99 and up for bigger jobs. EU shipping is included in every step, and parts ship from our own shop in France within three working days of your approval. No file conversion fee, no redraw surcharge for arriving with a photo instead of a DXF.
One honest limit: a photo shows a flat face, so bent parts need the bends described — a sentence like “bent 90° along the long edge” alongside the photo is enough. And if you already have a STEP or DXF, send that instead; it skips the tracing step and gets you to the same preview faster.
Ready to try it? Send your source on the home page — a photo, a sketch or a sentence, and the quote comes back in seconds. laser is run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, from the quoting you just read about to the order emails — which is how this guide stays true to what the shop actually does.