StitchCalcs

Image to cross-stitch pattern generator

Choose a picture, how many stitches wide and how many colours, and get a symbol chart with a colour key and the finished size, all in your browser.

PNG, JPG, GIF or WebP. It stays in your browser and is never uploaded. Until you choose one, the chart shows a sample heart.
From 10 to 150. Fewer stitches are quicker; more show more detail.
From 2 to 30. Between 8 and 20 suits most pictures.
Sets the finished size.
Chart style

How to use it

  • Choose a picture. Simple pictures with clear shapes and a plain background, such as a logo, a drawing, a flower or a pet, make the best charts. Busy photos need more stitches and more colours.
  • Set how many stitches wide the design should be. The height follows the shape of the picture.
  • Choose how many colours to use and your fabric. The result shows the finished size and a chart with a key.
  • Use Print chart to print the chart and key, or Download chart to save a PNG picture of the chart with its key.

How it works

The picture is shrunk to one pixel for each stitch. Then the colours are grouped: the calculator starts with the most common colour, then keeps adding a colour that is both common and very different from those already chosen. It moves each colour to the average of the picture colours closest to it, and repeats up to 25 times, or until nothing changes. Every stitch gets the closest of the final colours. "Closest" is measured in CIELAB, a colour space designed so that the distance between two colours roughly matches how different they look. Each colour gets a symbol, using letters, digits and a few signs that are hard to mix up (there is no O or 0, for example).

stitches high = stitches wide × picture height ÷ picture width, rounded
finished size = stitches ÷ (fabric count ÷ threads stitched over)

Example: the sample heart is 240 × 200 pixels. At 40 stitches wide it is 40 × 200 ÷ 240 = 33.3, which rounds to 33 stitches high. On 14-count Aida, 40 ÷ 14 = 2.9 in wide and 33 ÷ 14 = 2.4 in high.

Tips

  • Use your own pictures, or ones you have permission to use.
  • The colour codes in the key are how the colours look on screen. Screens and thread dyes differ, so match them against a colour card for your thread brand before you buy.
  • Transparent areas become white. If your fabric is white, you can leave the white stitches out.
  • A chart wider than about 80 stitches gets small on a printed page. Use the PNG to zoom in on screen, or make the chart narrower.
  • If a small detail disappears, try more stitches or more colours. If the chart looks speckled, try fewer colours.
  • Not sure how much fabric to buy? Use the cross-stitch fabric size calculator with your chart's stitch counts.

Last updated 2026-10-03. How these calculators are made.