Release
Every pond calculator on the internet opens by asking you to type in your gallons. Pond Tools works them out instead, from one overhead photo and two tape measurements, using the outline you actually traced rather than a box drawn around it. Version 1 is the point where the measurement, the things built on it, and the site around it are one product. Here is what that is.
You photograph the pond from above, trace its rim on the photo, and mark two things you measured with a tape. From those two spans the tracer solves a scale for each axis of the picture, so a photo taken at an angle comes out right in both directions instead of being averaged into something that fits neither. The scale is then frozen; editing the outline moves area and volume the way it should, but never re-derives the scale from the shape.
Depth is not one number. The tracer models the pond as a stack of layers: the rim, a planting ledge, the floor, and more ledges if you have them. Each layer has its own traced outline and depth, and its own wall type, a vertical step or a slope. Volume is integrated between layers, a prism for a step and a frustum for a slope, which is how a real pond with a shelf is shaped. The cross-section it draws is the pond you dug, not a bathtub.
On the reference pond, the one the tool was built against, the box formula says 596 gallons. The traced measurement says 215. That gap is the whole reason this exists.
Eight calculators read the trace directly, so you never retype a number the tracer already knows: volume, liner size from the outline's true extreme spans with a fold allowance for irregular shapes, surface-area tools for aeration and de-icer sizing, a stocking check against both surface area and volume, pump turnover and head loss, salt dosing, ammonia toxicity from a test-kit reading to the free ammonia fraction that actually harms fish, and water changes. There is a report page that gathers it all. Exports go out as SVG, CSV and JSON, and a saved trace survives reloads in your browser, with an optional copy on the server so failures in the tool can be found and fixed.
If the pond does not exist yet, there is no photo to take. So the tracer can now open on a satellite image of your yard: search an address, frame the corner, take the view. The scale is known analytically from latitude and zoom, plan mode switches on because an orthographic image has no camera to correct for, and everything after that is the same tracer. The georeference is saved with the trace, so a reload rebuilds the same image from the same tiles. An optional 4x enhancer sharpens the composite before you trace. What the imagery really delivers, and what it doesn't, is its own article.
The pond the tool was built around has its own page: a six-week build log, hand-dug in dense San Francisco clay in a corner with no direct sun, every cost tallied from receipts. And a companion piece, the same six weeks from the other side of the conversation.
It means the foundation is finished and defended. Every number the site publishes can be traced to a measurement or a formula on the page. What comes next is built on top of it rather than beside it: the trace is a character sheet for a pond, and the next thing it should feed is a living one.
Next: Your first pond kit, the complete buying list from a real build