Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Turn any diagram image into an editable Draw.io file. No more redrawing

imagetodrawio.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 46 posts

Re: Turn any diagram image into an editable Draw.io file. No more redrawing

#21

Post by riedel »

mellosouls wrote: post #19

This is a paid service but the website wording piggybacks on Draw.io to imply it's a free service, I'd avoid it as it comes across as very underhand. "It's that free diagramming tool that just works. No credit card, no trial periods, no BS" , etc

I just thought the same and thought this was really some dark pattern not adding any trust. Also there is no really good examples or performance metrics.

There is stuff on GitHub that actually does similar stuff [0] [1] . We tried some pipelines a year ago for a project (understanding compliance relevant process diagrams) and it was still quite a challenge . Wonder what the state is now with all those vision llms and even if commercial how good that stuff is.

[0] https://github.com/Zackriya-Solutions/diagram2graph

[1] https://github.com/modhtom/Pic2Chart

Re: Turn any diagram image into an editable Draw.io file. No more redrawing

#23

Post by jimmySixDOF »

account-5 wrote: post #2

I really like draw.io, I've used it for a number of things including wireframing an app and creating cheatsheets for things. It's definitely not as frictionless as excalidraw though. Excalidraw, whilst not as powerful as draw.io has the interface down correctly.

tldraw is also something very easy to use but surprisingly powerful and I know they are compared a lot to Excalidraw, not so sure about draw.io - but could be worth adding to your list. It is a very extendable library with some fun genai hooks like makereal.tldraw

Re: Turn any diagram image into an editable Draw.io file. No more redrawing

#24

Post by noahjk »

account-5 wrote: post #2

I really like draw.io, I've used it for a number of things including wireframing an app and creating cheatsheets for things. It's definitely not as frictionless as excalidraw though. Excalidraw, whilst not as powerful as draw.io has the interface down correctly.

What do people use for creating artifacts at their jobs?

Architecture diagrams, data flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, network diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams ...

I'd really like to find an option which can preferably be version controlled and doesn't require hard-to-remember schema (ex. plantUML).

At work it's always tough to find something which works, and which is free or already licensed (no chance to get new licenses), and which is easy enough for teammates of varying technical abilities to contribute to.

For Arch Diagrams, most people seem to jump to Draw.IO, which is nice, but I'm not sure how easily it can be version controlled (although I haven't tried). At work it usually falls into the "did you put your latest version on SharePoint" black-hole (we don't pay for the cloud syncing version of draw.io). I wanted to try Figma, since it's at least a bit more collaborative, but there aren't any good first-party templates, so maybe it's not the right place, either.

For DFDs, I'd like to try Mermaid, or D2, or PlantUML (scared by the syntax on that one, though). I've not tried any of these, right now we usually do these in draw.io too, but I feel like code-defined ones would be an easier to maintain option and can live in a repo easier.

Sequence Diagrams are currently usually done using the sequencediagram.org engine, which I'm not a huge fan of, but at least it's relatively easily handled text. I don't think there was a good VS Code integration last time I checked (I think it was some web emulator, not a built-in engine?).

ERDs, I'd also like to find a good local tool to probably just use SQL on the backend, so that it's one less conversion. I'm open to all suggestions for that, though.

Re: Turn any diagram image into an editable Draw.io file. No more redrawing

#25

Post by xtracto »

noahjk wrote: post #24
account-5 wrote: post #2

I really like draw.io, I've used it for a number of things including wireframing an app and creating cheatsheets for things. It's definitely not as frictionless as excalidraw though. Excalidraw, whilst not as powerful as draw.io has the interface down correctly.

What do people use for creating artifacts at their jobs? Architecture diagrams, data flow diagrams, sequence diagrams, network diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams ... I'd really like to find an option which can preferably be version controlled and doesn't require hard-to-remember schema (ex. plantUML). At work it's always tough to find something which works, and which is free or already licensed (no chance to get…

I've been doing diagrams with Mermaid. The beauty is that I use Gemini to ask it to add stuff to the diagram. And there are a bunch of plug-ins for Google docs to visualize the diagrams. I just wish Confluence had a free way to do it.

Re: Turn any diagram image into an editable Draw.io file. No more redrawing

#28

Post by geor9e »

majkinetor wrote: post #7
AIorNot wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to make money - should the have open sourced the tool?

They should have let us tried the tool without signing in, that is only natural. Why would I give you my time and my personal information because you claim you do something? It is deceptive and unfair to our time to ask me to sign in as the final step. Instantly closed. The new generation of developers should learn some manners.

They didn't even let my try it, after signing in. I hit the "insufficient credits" paywall on my first upload. So, having folks sign in served no purpose at all. Just an extra layer of customer-repellant.

Re: Turn any diagram image into an editable Draw.io file. No more redrawing

#29

Post by 4ndrewl »

efskap wrote: post #10
majkinetor wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should have let us tried the tool without signing in, that is only natural. Why would I give you my time and my personal information because you claim you do something? It is deceptive and unfair to our time to ask me to sign in as the final step. Instantly closed. The new generation of developers should learn some manners.

These multi modal LLMs are too expensive to run for that

The problem is that it's really easy to say 'blah blah our service can do xyz' but we know all too well that when using LLMs most often it doesn't live up to the hype (worse still you know different users will get different diagrams from the same source).

The 'trust us, give us your money, it'll work' model isn't viable given the current state-of-the-art of LLMs.

Re: Turn any diagram image into an editable Draw.io file. No more redrawing

#30

Post by gukoff »

Draw.io already allows creating editable PNGs and SVGs: it embeds the diagram definition in the image metadata. You can then import this image like you would import any other .drawio diagram

The VSCode integration is the cherry on top. All files with the correct extension (such as xxx.drawio.png) will automatically open for edit in the draw.io UI embedded in the IDE.

I use this feature often to build on top of the previously made diagrams.

Post reply on HN