fenshot / Photo of a chess board to FEN

Photo of a chess board to FEN

Playing over the board, or reading a chess book, and want the engine's opinion? Photograph the position and paste it here: fenshot turns the photo into a live board with the FEN ready to copy.

Try it now — paste your image →

What works best

A photo of chess board positions comes in two kinds: flat pages and physical boards. Both can work; the flat kind works almost every time.

Flat, top-down views: book diagrams, magazine pages, tablet screens, printed worksheets. For a physical board, shoot from directly above the board rather than from your seat; perspective distortion is the main thing that confuses the reader.

Book diagrams are the sweet spot

Studying openings or endgames from a book stops being a set-up-the-board exercise: photograph the diagram, paste, analyze, and get back to reading. Ten diagrams in a chapter means ten seconds of scanning, not twenty minutes of setup.

When a photo comes out imperfect

Glare, angle, or an unusual piece design can produce a wrong square. The editor shows your photo beside the scanned board, so fixing a square takes one click; you are never worse off than typing the position from scratch.

Private by design

The photo never leaves your device. Recognition runs locally in the browser, so tournament preparation and private material stay private.