fenshot / Chess image to board

Chess image to board

You have a picture of a chess position. You want a real board you can move pieces on. That is exactly what fenshot does: paste the image, and about a second later the position is live with a free engine underneath.

Try it now — paste your image →

What counts as a chess image?

Call it what you like: a picture to board converter, a screenshot to board tool, a chess photo reader. The job is the same, and the input can be almost anything.

Anything where the board is drawn flat: a chess.com or Lichess screenshot in any theme, a frame from a YouTube video, a diagram photographed out of a book, a puzzle posted on Reddit or Twitter, a position a friend sent you in chat. If a human can read the position, fenshot usually can too.

From image to board in three steps

1. Copy or save the image.
2. Paste it on fenshot.com (Ctrl+V works anywhere on the page) or drop the file in.
3. The board appears: play moves on it, run the engine, or copy the FEN to any chess site.

Why not just set the position up by hand?

Setting up a middlegame position square by square takes a few minutes and one misplaced pawn ruins the analysis. The scan takes a second and you can still correct any square by hand afterwards, so the fast path and the careful path are the same path.

It stays on your machine

The recognition model runs in your browser via WebAssembly. The image is never uploaded, which is why it works offline once loaded and why there is no account, no quota and no cost.