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Ali Ismailov

Ali Ismailov

A floor plan picture is not a drawing

2 min readNov 4, 2026

I build Horezmi, a tool that redraws photos and scans of plans as CAD, so read this with that in mind.

FloorAI is a good tool. You give it a photo of a plan and a couple of minutes later you get a clean picture that looks like it came from a listing brochure. On an old catalogue plan of a small Cape Cod house it did better than any tracing tool we have tried. The room names and the overall 34 by 30 feet came across almost exactly.

Then we gave it something harder: a phone photo of a marked-up photocopy of a bar, with small handwritten areas. Both versions it made looked tidy. The numbers did not survive. The hall, written as 72.4 m², came out as 42.7 on one version and 7.43 on the other. A 30 m² room became 3.27. Both versions added a total area and a scale bar that the original never had.

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Nothing in the picture tells you which numbers moved. You find out only by checking every label against the original, which is the job you wanted to skip.

That is the difference between a picture of a plan and a drawing. In a picture the sizes are lettering. In a CAD file they come from geometry you can measure. Horezmi gives a DWG with walls, doors, rooms and dimensions on their own layers, and the colour plan is drawn from that same file, so the areas match. On the bar plan the 30 m² room and the 72.4 m² hall came out as written. The big bar hall did not: 980 SF against about 1,015 on the sheet, and Horezmi said so under the drawing.

If you need a nice plan for a listing and nobody will measure from it, FloorAI is quicker and prettier. If someone will build, quote or permit from it, you want numbers you can check.

The full test with all the pictures: https://horezmi.com/blog/horezmi-vs-floorai?utm_source=medium

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