Embroidery machines—both commercial and home use a wide range of file formats. The good news? We can digitize nearly all of them. In the rare case that a specific format isn’t supported, it’s very likely your machine accepts multiple file types, and we’ll find a compatible one that works perfectly for you.
Over the years, we’ve worked with thousands of designs and rarely encountered a case we couldn’t handle. Below is a list of the most common embroidery file formats we support.
We recommend that you prepare your artwork or ask your client to submit artwork in one of these formats:
| Format | Description |
|---|---|
| JPG | good choice for images with many colours, photos, scanned images, etc. |
| PNG, GIF | ideal for designs with fewer colours, especially larger areas of solid colours. e.g. text, logo. |
| PDF, EPS, AI | these are vector formats meaning the artwork can be easily scaled. Don't forget to convert fonts used in the design into outlines. |
| DOCX | some clients do send these, it is ok. Just keep in mind that instead of embedding an image to a Word document that may lower its quality, you can just send that image. |
| TIFF, BMP | these will work, but the file size may be huge. Alternatively, JPG may be a better format to use. |
| PSD | Photoshop file is not ideal, it may show up differently on our computer especially if it contains font layer. Please save it as JPG, PNG or PDF format. |
| CDR, SVG | Sorry we can't open these files, please save them as JPG, PNG or PDF format. |
If you've got a different format, send it anyway - we'll let you know if we can't open it.
Two important factors to consider - image size and file size. We suggest that you submit a relatively large image, ideally at 300dpi resolution (e.g. if the desired size is 3" x 3", at 300 dpi, the image size will be 900 x 900 pixels). However, please prepare a relatively smaller file size, recommended to be below 2MB. Again, keep in mind that generally JPG and PNG are good in compression, while TIFF and BMP may be 10 times bigger.