If you have ever organized a workshop with 3D printed inserts, you know the pattern. You trace your set of Knipex Cobras for a top-drawer tray. A month later you want the same Cobras laid out differently in a Gridfinity bin. So you upload the photo again. You trace again. You set the dimensions again. You hand-tweak the contour again. Same tools, same tracing work, second time.
We just shipped a feature that fixes this. Trace any tool once, save it to your library, and the next time you build a tray you pick it from a grid of thumbnails and drop it into the new project. Same shape. Same dimensions. Same hand-edited contour points. None of the work.
The Problem with Single-Project Tracing
Most photo-to-STL tools treat each project as its own island. You trace, you export, the contour data lives inside that one file. Open a new project and you start over from a blank canvas.
That worked fine when people were making one tray at a time. It does not scale once your shop has a dozen drawers, a wall of Packout boxes, and a Gridfinity grid. The same set of pliers might appear in three different organizers, each with a different layout. Tracing them three times is busy work. Tracing them once and reusing the shape is the obvious answer.
How the Tool Library Works
Open the editor, upload a photo, run the trace, edit the contour points to clean up any rough spots, set your real-world width and depth. Now you have a tool that fits exactly. Click the Save button in the Tools panel. Give it a name like "Knipex Cobra 250mm" and an optional category like "Pliers."
That saved tool now lives in your account. It travels with you across browsers and devices. A week later when you start a new drawer tray, click Library, find your saved Cobra, click it. The full traced shape lands in your project as a new tool, pre-locked so your earlier edits do not get overwritten by a fresh auto-detect pass.
What Gets Saved
Saving a tool captures everything needed to drop the same shape into any future project:
- The traced contour points, including any manual edits you made by hand
- The original photo so you can re-edit later if you need to
- The real-world width, height, and depth you set
- Tolerance, sensitivity, and the lock state on your edits
- A small thumbnail for the picker grid
Everything is per-account. Other users do not see your library, and you do not see theirs. Saved tools survive across browsers, sessions, and devices. Clear your browser cache, switch laptops, log in on your phone, your library is still there.
Where This Pays Off
A few real workflows that go faster with a saved library:
Multi-drawer toolboxes. Most rolling toolboxes have four to eight drawers. You probably want a wrench tray in one, a plier tray in another, a screwdriver tray in a third. With a saved library, you trace each tool one time and mix and match across drawers. A long Cobra goes in the deep drawer. A short Cobra goes in the shallow one. Same saved tool, two different trays.
Iterating on a layout. First version of a tray rarely lands on the perfect layout. Maybe you want to rotate two pliers, add a third, swap the order. Without saved tools, every revision is a re-trace. With them, you build version two from the same source shapes in a couple of minutes.
Gridfinity plus drawer trays. A lot of makers run both at once. Gridfinity bins on a workbench grid, drawer trays in the rolling toolbox. Same tool collection, two different organizing systems. Saved tools work in both. The contour data feeds into Gridfinity bins, custom drawer trays, and flat 3D object exports identically, so you trace once and the saved shape plays in all three modes.
Building catalogs. If you sell or share inserts, having a clean library of every tool you have traced means you can spin up a tray for a new customer or model number without going back to the photos.
The Edit Lock
While we were in there we also fixed something that had been bugging us. Previously, switching between tools in a multi-tool tray could re-run edge detection on the active tool and wipe out any manual edits you had made. The new behavior is that the moment you drag, add, or delete a contour point, the tool locks. Sensitivity changes will not re-trace. Switching tools preserves your edits. There is a visible amber banner that tells you the tool is locked, with an unlock-and-re-detect button if you want to start fresh.
Saved tools come in pre-locked, since the saved trace is the trace you wanted. Same unlock button is there if you ever need to redo it.
Try It
Both the library and the edit lock are live now. Open the editor, trace a tool you use a lot, and click Save. Next time you start a tray, the Library button is right next to the New Tool button. The first three credits are still on the house, so you can build a few trays and exports while you stock the library.
If you have feedback, ideas for what should be saveable next (categories? tags? sharing?), or anything broken, the contact page reaches a human.