SnapDiagram – Instantly Convert Hand-Drawn Diagrams to Digital with AI

Hey Hacker News,

I'm excited to introduce SnapDiagram, an AI-powered web app that allows users to seamlessly transform hand-crafted diagrams into polished, digital visuals. Whether you're sketching ideas during a brainstorming session or mapping out a quick process flow on paper, SnapDiagram can help you bring those rough drafts into the digital world, instantly and effortlessly.

How it works:

- Snap a photo of your hand-drawn diagram using your phone or upload an image from your computer. - Our AI processes the image to recognize shapes, text, and connections. - Get a clean, editable digital version that you can export in various formats, share, or enhance further.

Checkout how it works on this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2cq8B7vTXw

You can actually do this now - I've taken a great deal of my hand written workflow diagrams, snapped a picture of them, and asked chatGPT to convert them to mermaid UML.

It was one of the more impressive demonstrations of multimodal AI.

You can also import mermaid into Google's Draw.io app if you want to reflow or change the theme.

I feel like we are building a very large and complex interface between human beings and the internet, so that we are becoming more like mechanical nodes on the network, where slowly the idiosyncracies of individuality are being erased. That's not unique to AI, but AI is a major component of it now. I can imagine future scenarios where every part of our communication is passed through an AI filter until we are all perfectly tuned to be mindless consumers of information.

This SnapDiagram does it for sketches, and LLMs do it for text. Soon everyone will sound very similar and the system will be able to remove any aspect of individuality that is troublesome to it with a mere parameter tuning.

The little picture is just a conversion to a more readable diagram. The big picture is the slow erasing of the human spirit.

I don’t see why you need a seperate app / subscription for this. Claude does this very well, as do local VLMs such as InternVLM. They generate mermaid graphs which you can use directly or import to excalidraw.

@Tompreneur,

I would like to learn more about the features:

- What types of diagrams does this support? E.g., could the diagrams include some cartoons, artwork, icons, besides generic shapes like ellipses and arrows like shown in the video?

- What editable formats are supported? SVG?

- Privacy policy stuff. Would my diagrams be stored in the account? (I prefer not. I like it stateless.)

I am happy to try to find above answers myself, however, do not want to create a login just for trying. Also, I prefer site-specific login systems as opppsed to BigCo login IDs like Google mentioned.

I need to digitise about 15-20 diagrams. If it would work for these, I am ready to pay $10 for these. (I've seen the pricing at $3 for more diagrams than what I need.)

I was searching something like this to convert my maps, charts drawings in iPad to Obsidian. But 1 diagram/month is so not enough. Yes 3$ for 50 diagram/month is looks like a better option compared to the free but it's still a paid option.

It is cumbersome for me to start another paid service let alone another risk of trust I am putting myself in.

Make it free option 15 diagram/month and let people try your site fully so that who uses it that 15 diagram can switch to paid option.

Nice job! This is something I would use. However, the pricing plans are not friendly for occasional users. I maybe use it 10 times a year, but the only option is a monthly subscription. I wish they also had pay-per-use plans.

This illustrates the annoying trend for software products to insist on monthly subscriptions. I understand that businesses want recurring revenue, but many users would rather pay upfront or per use.

This is an outstanding first release. I hope stylizing the diagrams automatically for visual impact is on the roadmap.

Oh man this is a great idea. I can't count the number of times I've spent an hour in a meeting diagraming stuff on a whiteboard and then taken a picture of the whiteboard on the way out. This would be super useful for documenting the results of meetings like this.

Cool idea and implementation. Great job.

I personally hand draw diagrams and then recreate them in Balsamiq (old school).

I, myself, won't use it because there's a lot of creation and innovation that happens in the transition phase when going from hand-drawn sketches to creating the diagrams.

I want to go in the other direction: Take computer-generated math animation and make it look like Walt Disney was in his office "relaxing" while fifty artists drew each frame in a better version of my artist's hand.

I have a need for something like this. I want to convert hand written / drawn stuff to SVG. Not to a defined diagram schema though, just freeform SVG.

Any suggestions on alternative tools? For pricing reference, I would be incorporating this into my app, and users might convert 1 page a day. For what I would earn, your pricing model would be completely unusable.

I will have to build either a CV pipeline or use NNs, I imagine. Not sure which is the better approach for my task.

Credit card sign up not working. Would prefer to pay via Amazon Pay, Google Pay or Stripe given past history with Paypal.

What’s the “Editable file” format?

very cool and a very useful tool to integrate with drawio and lucidchards or visio maybe ?

Can't you do this with https://flowchart.fun?

One diagram per month for free.

No privacy policy link on your landing page is a red flag and will discourage users.

very cool tool.