Photo2PatternFree PNG to DST converter
PNG to DST converter that prices the file first
A flat-color PNG becomes a Tajima .dst here: the artwork is resampled onto a grid whose pitch is the fill row spacing, each cell takes one of two to eight threads pulled out of the picture, and every run of one color becomes a line of stitches at the length you set. What the file will cost is shown before it can be downloaded — needle count, jumps, thread changes, covered area, run time at your own machine speed, and the stitches under a millimeter that break thread. It is free and needs no account, and a picture that is really a photograph is measured and turned away rather than converted into something unusable.
- 100% free
- No signup
- Writes a real .dst
- 2 to 8 threads
- Stitch count before the download
Press Ctrl+V anywhere on the page to drop in artwork copied out of a design program — no need to click the field first.
How to get a stitch file out of a logo
The cost panel at the end is where the money is, and it is the screen people close without reading.
Bring artwork a fill can actually hold
Flat areas of color with hard edges convert well; anything with a gradient, a soft shadow or photographic texture does not, because a row fill has no way to blend. The page measures this rather than guessing at it — it counts how much of the picture your chosen number of threads accounts for, and refuses outright below half. Transparency is respected: a PNG with a cut-out background leaves that area unstitched instead of covering it in white, which is usually the difference between a badge and a rectangle. If the background is opaque white, leave the lightest-thread box ticked and it will be skipped anyway.
Set the finished width, because everything else follows from it
Embroidery has no resolution of its own; it has a physical size and a row spacing, and the two together decide how many stitches exist. Set the width in millimeters first — 70 to 90 mm is a left-chest logo, a cap front rarely clears 130 — and the row count, the stitch count and the run time all move with it. This is also where small artwork fails honestly rather than quietly: if the width and spacing you asked for need more fill rows than the PNG has pixels across, the page says so instead of upsampling and pretending the detail was there.
Read the cost panel before you download anything
The numbers under the preview are what you are actually buying: penetrations, jumps, thread changes, covered area, run time at the speed you set, and the count of stitches shorter than a millimeter. Stitch count is the industry's unit of price and of risk — a 12,000-stitch left-chest logo is ordinary, a 40,000-stitch one on the same 80 mm is a design that will pucker and take twenty minutes. Then check each stop on its own in the preview selector, because a color that turns out to be a scatter of specks is obvious alone and invisible in the stack, and run the first copy on a scrap of the same fabric with the same backing.
Technical specifications
| Artwork it takes | PNG, and JPEG, WebP or GIF if that is what you have. Alpha is honored — a transparent background is left bare rather than stitched |
|---|---|
| Finished size | 20 to 300 mm across, set in millimeters. Height follows the artwork's own proportions and is never stretched |
| Fill it lays down | horizontal tatami: one row per grid pitch, runs walked in alternating directions, a traveling stitch between runs closer than the stitch length and a jump beyond it |
| Row spacing and stitch length | 0.25 to 0.80 mm between rows, default 0.40; 1.5 to 5.0 mm per stitch, default 3.5. Both are editable and both move the stitch count directly |
| Threads | 2 to 8, chosen from the artwork by median cut in Oklab. The lightest may be dropped as background with one checkbox |
| Where it refuses | when the requested threads cover under half the picture, when the fill grid is finer than the source is wide, past 800 fill rows across, and above 45,000 stitches |
| What you can download | the .dst itself, a PNG of the fill, and a CSV stop list carrying the mark, the hex, the exact cell count and the stitch count per thread |
| Costs it reports first | penetrations, jumps, thread changes, covered area in cm², run time at your own machine speed, and every stitch under 1 mm |
Frequently asked questions
Will the .dst this makes actually run on my machine?
Yes, in the sense that it is a valid Tajima file with a correct header, correctly encoded three-byte records and a proper end marker — and the site's encoder was verified by round-tripping every movement the format can express before it was used here. What that does not promise is a good result on your fabric. This file has no underlay, no pull compensation, no shaped stitch angles and no satin borders, all of which a person digitizing the same logo would add. On stable woven goods with a cutaway backing a simple fill behaves; on a knit polo or a towel it will sink into the pile and shift. Sew the first one on a scrap of the same material, not on the garment.
What row spacing should I use?
0.40 mm is the standard tatami density and the default here, and the useful range is roughly 0.35 to 0.50. Tighter than 0.35 the needle perforates the fabric along a line often enough to weaken it, and the piece puckers because each stitch pulls the cloth slightly and there are now more of them percentimeter than the backing can hold flat. Looser than 0.50 the fabric shows between the rows, which reads as a stripe rather than as a solid color and is worse on dark cloth under a light thread. Change it and watch the stitch count move: the count is inversely proportional to the spacing, so going from 0.40 to 0.35 costs about 14 percent more stitches for coverage nobody will see.
Why was my photograph refused instead of converted?
Because it was measured and it failed. The page samples the picture, sorts the colors by how much of it each one covers, and adds up the share held by the number of threads you asked for; below fifty percent, the artwork is a continuous-tone image and a fill built from it is a file that nobody can run to a usable result. Sites that accept the same photograph and hand you a .dst are not doing something cleverer — they are producing a design of tens of thousands of stitches in eight arbitrary bands that will look like nothing on fabric. If you want the assessment rather than the refusal, with the numbers behind it and the stitch controls to see how far it can be pushed, the digitizer is the page for that.
How long will a design take on the machine?
Divide the penetrations plus the jumps by your machine's stitches per minute, then add about forty-five seconds for every thread change, which is what the run-time figure here does with the speed field you set. The default of 700 is realistic for a home machine on flat goods; commercial single-heads run 800 to 1,000 on the same work and slow down on caps. Treat the answer as a floor rather than an estimate: it counts none of the hooping, none of the trimming, and none of the first attempt that told you the density was wrong.
Why do the edges come out as a staircase?
Because a raster fill has no outlines to follow — it only has cells. Every boundary in this file is the edge of a grid at your chosen row spacing, so a diagonal edge is a stack of steps that size, and at 0.40 mm they are visible from about a hand's width away. What fixes it in real digitizing is a satin border, which lays thread across the edge rather than up to it and gives a curve a clean rolled finish. That is a shape operation rather than a grid operation, so it belongs on the digitizer page, where narrow areas are detected and sewn as satin instead of fill.
Does it add underlay, and does that matter?
It adds none, and on some fabrics it matters more than anything else on this page. Underlay is a light layer of stitching put down before the fill: it flattens a nap so the top stitches sit on the surface instead of sinking into it, it anchors the fabric to the backing so the fill does not drag it, and it gives the top layer something to bite on. Without it, embroidery on a piqué polo or a fleece disappears into the texture and the edges wander by a millimeter or two. A single fill layer is fine on a firm woven cloth with a cutaway behind it, which is exactly the case this page is scoped to.
Can it give me Madeira or Isacord numbers for the threads?
No, and it will not guess them. The colors listed in the stop table are hex values read out of your own artwork by the quantizer, which is an honest statement about the picture; a thread number would be a claim about a physical spool of polyester, and this site does not ship a machine-thread chart it could source. Take the hex values to your supplier's own conversion chart, or match against the physical card, which is the only method that survives contact with a dye lot. The site does carry a hand-thread range for stranded cotton, but that is floss for stitching by hand and not what goes on a cone.
About tatami fill, and the arithmetic that decides what a design costs
A machine fill is simpler than it looks. Rows of stitching are laid across a shape at a fixed spacing, each row broken into stitches of a fixed length, and the rows offset slightly so the penetrations do not line up into a visible channel — that is tatami, and it is what covers every solid area in commercial embroidery. Two numbers control it and they multiply. Row spacing is the density: at 0.40 mm a square centimeter holds 25 rows, and at 0.35 it holds 29, so a fifth of a millimeter costs you a sixth of the stitch count. Stitch length decides how many penetrations each of those rows contains: at 3.5 mm a 40 mm row is twelve stitches, at 2.5 mm it is sixteen. Multiply the two and you have the number the whole industry prices by — roughly area ÷ spacing ÷ stitch length — which is why this page puts the count in front of the download rather than behind it.
The honest limit of converting a PNG is that a raster has no shapes in it, only cells. A person digitizing the same logo works from outlines: they decide which direction each area’s stitches run so the light catches the form, they put an underlay down first so the fill does not sink into a knit, they widen shapes slightly to cancel the inward pull that thread tension applies across the stitch direction, they order the areas so registration does not drift, and they finish the edges with satin so a curve is a curve rather than a staircase. None of those decisions is available from a grid of colored squares, and no converter that starts from pixels can make them — which is why the panel at the bottom of this page lists them by name instead of quietly leaving them out. Within that limit the output is genuinely useful: a two- to four-color logo at 60 to 100 mm on a firm woven fabric, which is most of what anybody actually needs a .dst for.
Everything past that limit is a judgment call about your artwork rather than about the tool, and it is worth making before you buy thread. The digitizer takes the same pipeline further — it measures the artwork and tells you what it will and will not survive, sews narrow areas as satin instead of fill, and adds underlay and pull compensation — and it is where a photograph should go to be assessed rather than converted. Once you have a file, the DST viewer will open it and count what is actually in it, which is the only way to check a design somebody else sent you. And if the thread colors are the problem rather than the stitches, the site’s Anchor to DMC conversion makes the same point about hand threads that this page makes about machine ones: a color match between two ranges is a substitution somebody decided on, not an equivalence.
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 fill is computed
Your file 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 .dst is assembled from that same in-page arithmetic and handed straight to your browser’s download. No copy of the artwork or of the stitch file exists anywhere outside this tab, which matters here because logos usually belong to somebody who has not agreed to have theirs sent to a stranger’s server.