Your first print

Open My Filaments and tick every spool you own. Filafy only ever uses colors from that list, and it needs at least two of them to mix artwork. Nothing is ever added for you.

The catalogue holds over 11,600 filaments, so use the Brand → Material → Type panes to narrow it rather than scrolling. Only PLA is shown to begin with; turn on other materials under Settings → Filament visibility to see and own them. Hiding a material only tidies the list, it never affects a filament you already own or a conversion you already made.

Brand new to this, or nothing on the shelf yet? Take the guided tour. It lends you a shelf of filaments for the duration, brings a sample model, and offers Filafy's own sample pictures to pick from. You can watch a conversion happen before buying anything. The tour uses those pictures only, and it never spends a credit; your own uploads start the moment it finishes.

Two spools is the floor, not the target. What you own sets the ceiling on how close a print can get to your picture. That is why How close it gets leads with your shelf rather than with a setting.

Already track your spools in 3D Filament Profiles? Import the whole list in one go instead of ticking it by hand. Export My Spools there gives you a CSV, and Import on My Filaments matches it against the catalogue.

What the match actually does

• An exact match is brand, material, type and color name all agreeing. Most rows land here.
• A color match is the same brand and material, with the nearest color in that line. This is what catches a spool whose name you or the exporter spelled differently.
• A name match is the same brand, material and color name with the type ignored. It recovers rows where one side says PLA Basic and the other says PLA. A color far enough from the name vetoes it, so a near black maroon never gets read as a dusty red.

Matching across brands is opt in. Tick it, and a spool with no home in its own brand can match a different brand on color alone. The material and the type still have to agree. That is defensible, because a conversion only ever uses the color. It does put a filament on your shelf under a brand you do not own, so it is off unless you ask for it. It is labeled as a substitution when it happens.

Nothing is dropped quietly

Every spool that does not match comes back with the reason, and the reasons are different problems.

• We do not carry that brand yet.
• We carry the brand, but not that material.
• We have the line, but no color close enough.
• The row is missing a brand.
• It is a dual or gradient spool, which is not supported yet.

You can pick a match yourself for any of them, filtered to the right material.

Two things on My Filaments are easy to miss and worth knowing about.

• Priority. Every owned row has a High / Normal / Low select. It nudges the palette toward your High spools and away from your Low ones when the colors are close enough that it barely matters which. It is a tie breaker, not an override: it will not force a wrong color in, and it will not keep a right one out. Use it for the spool you have four kilos of, or the one you are nearly out of.
• Buy. Each row carries up to four shops that stock that filament. Restocking, or trying a color you do not own yet, is one click from the row you are already looking at. Set your country under Settings → Locale and the links point at your own marketplace instead of the US one.

There is nothing to configure for this to work. The Buy links are affiliate links, so Filafy may earn a commission when you buy through one, at no additional cost to you. They may carry a tracking identifier, and the destination retailer may set its own cookies and collect its own data. None of that decides anything about your print. Which filaments Filafy picks for your image is driven by the ones you tell us you own, and by nothing else. The Terms of Service set this out in full.

The Convert page asks for your printer the first time and saves as you pick. Choose the brand, then the model. If yours is not there, pick Other and everything still converts and exports.

Beside it sit your nozzle and your Max colors budget; your print quality tier and build plate live under Settings → Printer. Filafy sizes every line, dot and detail for whatever nozzle you set, so the nozzle is the one that changes what comes out. 0.4 mm is the common size and a fine default.

All of that is one screen. Your printer covers it properly, including what happens when you own several machines and what Other really binds.

Drop in your STL, OBJ or 3MF, or click to browse. Slicer project exports work, Filafy’s own painted 3MFs included.

Click the face you will print on. Its real size and exact outline fill in automatically, L shapes and faces with holes included. Every style then optimizes its detail and line weights for that exact face.

Turn the face if it came out sideways. Rotate model turns the printed face a quarter turn at a time, swapping its width and height. That is what you want for a model that left CAD lying on its side. It sits on the face picker while you are choosing, and again next to the preview afterwards. You never have to go back a stage to straighten a picture.

A model up to 50 MB MB and a million triangles is fine. Bigger than that and your slicer would struggle with it too.

With no model there is no face to pick, so the dropzone is open right away: drop the image in and shape the tile afterwards.

The Shape & size tab on the Style & convert screen carries the shape, the size and the thickness. The shapes are Original (your image’s own silhouette, and the default), rectangle, square, circle, oval, star and hexagon. On any of the parametric shapes you stamp the image onto the tile exactly as you would onto a model face.

Optional extras, each offered where it applies:

• Rounded corners, on a rectangle or a square.
• A hanging hole, on any shape except Original. It keeps a safe margin from the edge for you.
• A border, on Original only. It is a filament 1 margin level with the art that follows its silhouette. It joins separate pieces into one solid thing you can pick up.

Original holds a single picture, since there is no tile frame to arrange a second one in. The chip grays out as soon as your print carries more than one. Every other shape takes up to 10.

Drop your picture onto the Set up screen, then press Continue. On a model the dropzone opens once you have picked a face; on an art print it is open right away. Set up waits while you add as many pictures as you want on the one print. Each is listed with a thumbnail, so you can check it or take it off. Continue moves you to Style & convert, where everything below happens.

Stamp the picture where you want it. Drag to place it, drag a corner handle to resize, and use the knob above it to rotate. Snap to edges lines it up flush with the face, and on an art print with the other pictures' edges and centers too. Switch to Free form to put it anywhere.

Pictures come straight off an iPhone (JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC). An SVG is rendered in your browser first. Flatten external fonts or linked images into the file, or upload a PNG instead.

Remove background cuts a picture’s subject out of its photo so only the subject prints, on either path. Open the picture’s row in the Images tab and switch it on, per picture. A Sensitivity slider fine tunes the edge. On a model, everything the subject does not cover prints in filament 1; on the Original art print shape the cutout becomes the tile’s silhouette.

Pick one of the 25 styles and watch the live preview re render as you tweak. Previews are free and never cost a credit, so there is no reason to be careful with them.

Hit Convert. Filafy picks the best of your filaments, never more than your Max colors budget. It lists exactly which spools to load, with the percentage of the print each one covers. Every conversion is saved to My Projects for 30 days, so you can come back, adjust and re convert without starting over.

High contrast pictures with a clear subject convert best, and fewer colors often looks more striking than more. Logos, mascots, posters and cartoon style art work brilliantly; busy photographs less so.

The preview is not just a picture of the result. It is where most of the work happens, and it has more in it than it looks.

• Flat or 3D. The 3D Preview toggle swaps the flat artwork for the actual printed object, on both the Style & convert screen and the download page. Drag to turn it, scroll to zoom. It is the honest answer to “what will this look like on the shelf”. It matters most for an art print with a border or a hanging hole.
• Hold to compare. Press and hold to flip the preview back to your original picture. It stays flipped for as long as you hold, in either view. It is the fastest way to judge whether a style is doing what you hoped.
• Zoom. The magnifier in the corner zooms the flat artwork and pans it, or dollies the camera in the 3D view. Both surfaces that show a print have one.
• Undo and redo. Under the preview, and on the keyboard as Ctrl+Z, or ⌘Z on a Mac and Ctrl+Shift+Z, or ⇧⌘Z on a Mac. A whole slider drag counts as one step, not thirty, so undo goes back to where you actually were. It never crosses a project boundary: a fresh upload starts a fresh history.
• Name the project. The name field at the top of the download panel names the project in My Projects, and names the file you download. A folder of prints is then readable a month later. Rename it there or from any project card later on.

Open the Printer & slicer tab on the download panel. Confirm which printer this file is for and which slicer it should open in, then download. The slicer list is narrowed to the ones your chosen printer can actually use, so the two can never disagree. Under them sits a locked Nozzle field. It shows the nozzle this conversion used. To change it, change it in Print setup and convert again.

Open the Finish tab for how the print is made. Print painted side down sets which face meets the plate. Separate color parts sets whether each color becomes a part of its own. Color depth is how far the color reaches into the tile, or into the face you picked on a model. Each control carries a ? with the rest.

Do not rename the downloaded file. The filament presets inside a 3MF are tied to its exact filename. Renaming it, or letting your browser save a duplicate like “file (1).3mf”, makes the slots fall back to unnamed presets. The colors still load. Re download instead of renaming if it happens.

PNG and layered SVG are there too, for CAD embossing, vinyl work and any pipeline of your own. The PNG is flat artwork in your exact filament colors, and the SVG carries one named layer per filament.

That is a finished print. Print it well is the difference between a print that works and one you are pleased with.