Stringify!

A string-art generator — any photo, redrawn as one continuous thread.

Stringify turns a photograph into string art: a single thread wound between 240 pins on a circular board, chosen one line at a time by a greedy solver that keeps score against its own error. You upload a photo, frame the subject inside the circle, and watch the picture surface out of the tangle in real time — about thirty seconds from upload to finished piece. Free, no account, and it works on a phone.

Gallery

Development notes

My first project completed with Claude, and the reason I finally paid for a subscription. The math came first and alone: SSIM was the obvious loss function and the wrong one, so what shipped scores each candidate thread as one dot product against a running error image — a line costs its own length, not the whole canvas. Then it sat in a notebook for a month because I knew nothing about web development, until five days and 44 commits put it live on Railway with WebSocket previews and a Postgres job store.

What's in it

• — One continuous thread between 240 pins, solved a line at a time
• — A buildability score that grades your crop before you spend the render on it
• — Automatic tonal fixes when the score says the photo needs them
• — Uploads deleted the moment the render finishes; nothing kept but the artwork