How to plan a room from a photo of your floor plan

You don't need CAD software or exact drawings to plan a room well. If you have a phone photo of a floor plan, a page from a listing, or even a hand sketch, you can turn it into an accurate, to-scale layout in a few minutes. Here's the workflow in Fittro.

The quick version: to turn a photo of a floor plan into a to-scale plan, (1) import the image as a backdrop, (2) calibrate it by clicking the two ends of one wall whose real length you know and typing that length, which rescales the whole image, (3) trace each room over the backdrop, and (4) place doors, windows, and real-size furniture. Because the scale comes from a known measurement, every wall and every piece is at its true size, so you can trust whether things fit. It works from a phone photo, an estate-agent plan, or a hand sketch, and takes a few minutes in your browser with no CAD software.

1. Import your plan

Open the app and drop in your image, a photo, a screenshot, or a scan of a sketch. It becomes a backdrop you'll trace over. Don't worry if it's skewed or at an odd angle; you can rotate and reposition it so the walls sit straight.

2. Calibrate to real size

This is the step that makes everything trustworthy. Pick one wall whose real length you know, a doorway is 0.9 m, a known room edge, anything measured. Click one end, click the other, and type the real length. Fittro scales the entire image so every pixel now maps to real millimetres. Calibrate once and the whole plan is to scale.

3. Trace your rooms

Draw each room as a shape over the backdrop. Corners and edges snap as you go, so rectangles come out square and adjacent rooms line up. Non-rectangular rooms are fine too, add a jog by dragging an edge, or drop in extra corners for alcoves and bays. Fittro labels each wall's length and each room's area automatically.

4. Place openings and furniture

Add doors and windows along the walls, they stay anchored even if you resize the room. Then pull in furniture from the library. Every piece uses real standard sizes: a queen bed, a three-seat sofa, a fridge. Drag them around and they snap to walls and to each other, so “it fits” is a real answer, not a guess. Use the tape-measure tool to check clearances.

Common problems (and quick fixes)

• The photo is skewed or shot at an angle. Rotate the background so one long wall sits level before you trace, then calibrate along that straightened wall.
• You don't know any exact measurement. Measure one thing you can reach. A standard interior door is about 0.8 m wide, which is enough to calibrate from.
• The plan has no scale bar. You don't need one; any single known length works as the calibration reference.
• Rooms won't line up. Drag an edge to add a jog, or nudge a piece with the arrow keys; corners snap to each other as you get close.
• The numbers look off after calibrating. Re-check the wall you used, and prefer a longer wall: calibrating along a long edge is more forgiving than a short one.

Save, export, or share

Plans save in your browser for free. Export a clean PNG or PDF to take shopping, or, with the $5/year cloud plan, save to the cloud and share a read-only link so a partner or roommate can weigh in.