Photo2PatternFree Minecraft pixel art generator
Minecraft pixel art generator with the block list and the courses
Drop a picture and get a wall: the plan on a ruled grid, an exact count of every block it costs written in stacks and shulker boxes, and the courses listed from the ground up in the order you lay them. Sixty-one block colors are on offer and fifty-one of them are full cubes, which is the default, because a slab or a door leaves a dent in a flat face. Nothing to pay for, no account, and the picture is opened in the tab rather than sent anywhere.
- 100% free
- No signup
- 51 full-cube colors
- Counts in stacks
- Courses from the ground
Press Ctrl+V anywhere on the page to drop in a screenshot you took a moment ago — no need to click the field first.
16 to 256; the height follows the shape of the picture. A wall 96 blocks across spans 6 chunks, so it has to be staked out before you start rather than grown from the middle.
Every color the match found stays in, however few cells it covers.
Every cell takes its own nearest color. Flat areas stay flat and the color count stays low — the right choice for anything worked by hand.
How to plan a block wall you can actually gather for
Width, then palette, then the gathering list — each one narrows what the next is allowed to be.
Decide how wide the wall is before you look at the colors
Width in blocks is the one control that changes everything downstream, because the height follows from the shape of your picture and the block count follows from both. Sixty-four across is a wall you can take in from one spot; 128 is eight chunks and needs surveying before the first block goes down. The height is checked against the 384 placeable layers a world has had since 1.18 — y minus 64 at the bottom to y 319 at the top — and a picture that would run past the top of the sky is refused with the widest version that does fit offered as a button.
Leave the palette on full cubes unless you are in creative and do not care
Ten of the sixty-one colors are only reachable through a block that is not a cube: a slab fills half its space, stairs carry a notch that catches the light, a door is two blocks tall and hinged, a sapling needs soil under it, kelp needs water, a snow layer is an eighth of a block deep and lava is a fluid that also sets fire to things. Each one leaves a visible dent or a hazard in a flat face, so the default drops all ten and matches against the remaining fifty-one. Turning the filter off is worth doing once, to see how little the extra ten actually buy you.
Read the gathering list before you read the picture
The list under the plan is the part that decides whether this gets built. It gives the exact block count for every color, the same figure written as stacks of 64 with the remainder, and the total as shulker boxes at 27 slots each. If one color shows a count in the teens, set the cutoff above it: that color is a trip to another biome for something nobody standing on the ground will ever notice, and its cells go to the nearest survivor instead. Then take the course list, which numbers the rows from the ground rather than from the sky, and start at course 1.
Technical specifications
| Block colors | 61 base colors from the game's own block color data, each with one common obtainable block named. 51 of them are full cubes, and those 51 are what the default matches against |
|---|---|
| Held back by default | 10 colors whose named block is a slab, a stair, a door, a sapling, kelp, a snow layer, a cobweb, glow lichen or lava — none of which makes a flat vertical face. One checkbox puts them back |
| Wall size | 16 to 256 blocks across; the height follows the proportions of your picture and is refused above 384, which is every placeable layer of a world from 1.18 onwards (y −64 to y 319) |
| Gathering list | Per color: the exact block count, the same count as stacks of 64 with the remainder, and inventory slots. In total: slots, shulker boxes at 27 slots each rounded up, and 36-slot inventory loads. A cutoff of 10, 25, 64 or 128 drops any color you would need less than that of |
| Course list | Every row collapsed into runs and numbered from the ground up, so course 1 is the first one you lay and no course number has to be subtracted from anything |
| Blocks flagged where they appear | 4 that hold the color but cost you something: sand falls, a grass block under another block reverts to dirt, ice melts beside a block light of level 12 or more, and shulker boxes stack to one |
| Files it hands back | The plan as PNG, the gathering list as CSV with block, count and share, and the courses as a plain text file to keep open on a second screen. Printing gives the two lists rather than the grid |
| What runs on a server | Nothing at all — the snapping, the counting and the run-length encoding of every course are done by the JavaScript already loaded on this page |
Frequently asked questions
How many blocks does a wall this size actually cost?
Multiply the width by the height and you have it, because every cell is exactly one block. A wall 96 across from an ordinary 4:3 photograph comes out 72 courses high and 6,912 blocks, which is 108 full stacks and at least three 36-slot inventory loads. Slots, not blocks, are what a shulker box holds, and every color's part-stack takes one of its own, so a twenty-color plan needs nearer five boxes than the four the raw total suggests — which is why the page counts slots rather than dividing 6,912 by 1,728. Doubling the width to 192 does not double that figure, it quadruples it to 27,648 — the count grows with area, which is the single thing people underestimate when they sketch one of these out. The gathering list does the arithmetic per color as well as in total, because the total is never the constraint; one awkward color usually is.
Why does the tool hold ten of the colors back by default?
Because the block that carries each of them is not a cube, and a face made of non-cubes stops being a picture. A slab sits at half height and leaves a shadowed step across the wall; stairs put a notch in every one of their cells and take the light differently from the blocks either side; a snow layer is an eighth of a block deep so those cells sink in; a door is two blocks tall, hinged, and can be opened by a wandering mob. Lava is worse than any of them — it is a fluid, it flows out of the face, it arrives one bucket at a time and lava buckets do not stack. None of that is a judgment about the color, which is why the filter is a checkbox and not a deletion.
My grass blocks went brown a few days after I finished. What happened?
A grass block with an opaque block sitting directly on top of it reverts to dirt, and in a standing wall every course but the highest one has exactly that. It is not a bug in the build and there is nothing to place differently — the grass simply has no light reaching its top face. Either accept dirt as the color, which is a different and browner entry in the list, or use the top course only for grass. The plan flags it under the gathering list wherever grass appears, alongside the other three that misbehave: sand falls, ice melts beside a block light of level 12 or more, and shulker boxes take an inventory slot each.
Is this buildable in survival, or only in creative?
Survival is what the gathering list is for, but it changes which pictures are worth starting. Wool and terracotta are the workhorses because both are dyeable and both come in sixteen colors you can produce at home, while the gold, diamond and emerald blocks in the palette price a single cell at nine ingots. Set the cutoff to 64 on a first survival build: it drops every color you would need less than a stack of, re-matches those cells onto colors you are already gathering, and typically takes a thirty-color plan down to twelve without changing anything you can see from the ground.
Should the picture stand up or lie flat on the ground?
This page assumes it stands up, and that assumption is in every number it gives you. A standing wall shows the side face of each block, is read from a distance at eye level, and needs its columns supported wherever sand appears. A picture laid flat on the ground shows the top face instead, which is a different color on grass, podzol and any block with a distinct top texture, and it can only be seen properly from the air. If what you want is the picture inside a map item hung in a frame, that is a genuinely different build with a genuinely different palette and it lives on the map art generator.
Why does one color list only one block when several would do?
Because sixty-one colors cover far more than sixty-one blocks, and naming all of them would make the gathering list unusable. The palette carries one common, cheaply obtainable block per color, and any other block sharing that color substitutes with no change to the plan — which is the escape hatch when the named one is expensive or awkward. That is also why the swatch is worth trusting here in a way it never is for thread or paint: this number is defined in software rather than digitized off a physical sample, so what varies is your resource pack and the light in the room, not the measurement.
The whole wall came out gray and brown. Is the matching broken?
Almost certainly not — that is a flat-lit photograph meeting a palette built for terrain. Sixty-one colors sounds generous until you notice how many of them are terracotta and stone, and a picture shot in overcast light occupies a narrow band that lands on those and stays there. The gathering list is the diagnostic: if two colors hold more than half the blocks, the source has nothing in it for the other fifty-nine to describe. Raise the contrast before you bring the picture here, or pick something with a strong flat subject and a plain background, which is why logos and game sprites build so much better than family photographs do.
About building a picture out of blocks
The color this page matches against is the game’s own. Every block carries a single color value in Minecraft’s data, and that number is the honest thing to snap a photograph to — far more honest than sampling a texture, which holds four or five colors at once, is tinted by biome on grass and leaves, is repainted by whatever resource pack the reader happens to run, and shifts with the light of the block next to it. Sixty-one values cover a great many more than sixty-one blocks, so the list names one common obtainable block per color rather than pretending there is a single right answer; any other block carrying the same value substitutes without touching the plan. That escape hatch matters more than it sounds, because the palette contains the gold, diamond and emerald blocks, and a single cell of emerald is nine ingots.
What decides whether one of these gets finished is not the color match, it is the arithmetic. A wall 96 across from an ordinary photograph is 72 courses high, 6,912 blocks and 108 stacks; widen it to 192 and that quadruples rather than doubling, because the count grows with area. Nearest-color matching is also indifferent to your afternoon — it will happily spend a color on eleven cells, and eleven cells is a trip to a different biome for something nobody on the ground can see. That is what the cutoff is for, and setting it to 64 on a first survival build routinely takes a thirty-color plan to twelve without changing anything visible. The same problem in a different material is a brick mosaic, where the constraint is which colors are still being molded, and a fuse-bead chart, where it is how many of one bead come in a bag.
Four of the blocks hold their color and then do something about it later, which is why they are flagged rather than removed. Sand falls, so a sand cell wants a supported column. A grass block with anything sitting on top of it reverts to dirt, which in a standing wall is every course but the highest. Ice melts beside a block light of level 12 or more, so the torch you place to build by opens a hole in the picture. Shulker boxes stack to one, so four hundred of them is four hundred inventory slots. Then there is distance: a block is a meter on a side and the default field of view is 70 degrees vertically, so a wall 72 courses high only fits on the screen from about 51 blocks back, and everything you are about to decide about dithering should be decided from there rather than from arm’s length. If the picture is meant to hang in a frame inside your base instead of standing in the landscape, that is the map art generator and a different palette entirely. If you only want to see how a photograph behaves when it is reduced to big square cells before committing anyone to gathering, pixelating it answers that in a second, and reducing it to line art is the quickest way to find out whether the subject survives losing its color at all.
Product and company names shown here are the trademarks of their respective owners. Photo2Pattern is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any of them.
Where the blocks get counted
Your picture is opened by JavaScript running in the tab you are reading this in. It is never uploaded, never sent to a server and never stored anywhere — there is no upload step to undo, because there is no upload. Close the tab and nothing of it remains.
The two files you take away are made the same way. The gathering list and the course list are assembled from the chart already in memory and handed to the browser as a blob it saves itself, so even downloading them opens no connection to anything.