How to Prepare Your Floor Plan Before Uploading to PlanSnapper

PlanSnapper uses an auto perimeter finder to detect the outer walls of your floor plan. The cleaner the image, the better it works. One step in an image editor before uploading makes a big difference.

The problem with most floor plan images

Floor plans from CubiCasa, Matterport, iGUIDE, and most appraisal sketch software include a lot of extra content around the actual floor plan: level labels like "Main Level" or "First Floor," deck outlines, dimension strings placed outside the perimeter wall, north arrows, and scale bars.

The auto perimeter finder looks for the largest enclosed polygon in the image. If your floor plan has a deck drawn at the edge, or dimension text floating outside the walls, those elements can confuse the detection and cause it to trace the wrong boundary.

What to remove before uploading

Strip out anything that sits outside or overlaps the exterior walls:

Level labels: Main Level, Lower Level, First Floor, Second Floor, Basement, etc.
Decks, patios, and porches drawn as outlines around the house
Dimension strings placed outside the perimeter wall
Scale bars, north arrows, and logo watermarks near the edges
Anything else floating outside the exterior wall boundary

You do not need to touch anything inside the floor plan. Room labels, interior dimensions, and furniture are fine to leave.

The fastest way to do it

Open the floor plan image in any basic image editor and paint over the unwanted elements with white. You do not need precision editing — just fill in the text and outlines until the exterior wall is the cleanest enclosed shape in the image.

On Windows: Paint works perfectly for this. Open the file, select the brush tool, set the color to white, and paint over the labels and extra lines. Takes about 30 seconds per floor plan.

On Mac: Preview works fine. Use the markup pen tool with white, or open in Photoshop if you have it. Any app that lets you draw over the image does the job.

What a clean floor plan looks like

After cleanup, your floor plan image should have one thing: the floor plan itself. The exterior walls should be the outermost shapes in the image with clear white space around them. No floating text, no deck outlines extending past the walls, no dimension strings along the outside edge.

Upload that image and the auto perimeter finder will snap to the exterior walls correctly on the first try.

Multi-story floor plans

If your floor plan image shows multiple levels side by side, crop or separate them before uploading. Upload each level individually. PlanSnapper calculates square footage per level and you can add them together for the total GLA.