String art
A customer uploads a face, a pet or a logo, and the algorithm resolves it into thread paths on a circular board, rendered live with progressive zoom, pan and mobile-aware batching.
Try it, right here
The board arrives already wound on a sample photo. Drop in your own and it re-solves in your browser (240 nails, one continuous thread, tone-mapped so an ordinary phone picture works) and the thread swatch recolours it without solving again.
A solver, not a filter
String art is not an image effect. The generator places pegs around a circle and then repeatedly picks the chord that most reduces the error against the source image: a greedy solve, thousands of lines deep. The result is genuinely line art, which is why it holds up printed large and why it reads as craft rather than as an Instagram filter.
- Peg count
- Controls how fine the geometry can get.
- Thread count
- Controls density and contrast. The single most important dial.
- Progressive render
- Lines draw in as they solve, so the shopper watches it appear.
It has to survive a phone
Solving thousands of chords in a mobile browser is the part that kills naive implementations. The renderer batches work across frames, respects the device's frame budget, and supports zoom and pan on the partially-solved result, so a customer on a mid-range Android sees progress rather than a frozen tab.
- Frame-budgeted batching
- Work is chunked so the UI thread never blocks.
- Progressive zoom and pan
- Inspect the detail while it is still solving.
- Deterministic
- The same photo and settings solve to the same artwork every time.
Why this is niche, and how it differs
Almost nobody offers customer-uploaded string art, because it needs a solver in the browser and a print pipeline that can render tens of thousands of thin lines without moiré. Competing apps that mention string art ship pre-made designs. Here the customer's own photo goes in, and the print file that comes out is line geometry at full resolution rather than an upscaled raster.
Specifications
The numbers, so you can check them against what your production partner actually needs.
- Input
- Customer photo upload, with resolution gate
- Controls
- Peg count · thread count · board size · thread colour
- Rendering
- Progressive, frame-budgeted, zoom and pan
- Output
- Line geometry rendered at print resolution
- Moderation
- Uploads run through automatic checks plus an optional review queue
Keep reading
Next step
Try it on your
own product.
Install Customei, attach an option set, and see this working on a real listing. Every plan ships with a 14-day trial. No card.