Quite cool!
Can I ask a potentially super dumb question? How does one center the design to the tile pre-forge?
In my head I create a layer the size of the item, center the image I want to forge in my software, line my entire shape over the camera shot, set that layer to do absolutely nothing, then forge. Did I over-engineer that?
Nope that’s a good way. A box the size of the tile but is either 0 width or not sent to the laser is still part of the design. My big laser lets me adjust the head’s starting position and hit a test button that will send the head around the material starting from my zero point in a rectangle that will encompass the full engrave even without a bounding box. That’s a little more kludgy and trial & error but it eliminates the possibility I forget to turn the bounding box line off and it tries to cut it 
Regarding exact positioning for viewing, I learned that the bottom line is it must please the eye. Not often, but I have seen instances where because of viewing angle, it just didn’t look right centered.
I also learned that the eye is remarkably accurate. looking at a picture on a wall, when you think maybe it is tilted, you could measure it and find you detected a difference of a couple of hundredths on an inch from across the room.
If it doesn’t draw the eye, don’t get anal about it. 
Darn. Thanks for confirming! I was hoping the GFUI would edge-detect and allow a centering within the GFUI. That’d guarantee the center rather than eyeballing the design over the camera image.
@dan is this idea hopper-worthy? Also, maybe consider setting up a @hopper account so we can just send things straight to it? Save you the effort?
Oh, sure! There’re all sorts of guidelines for “centering” when you’re not really centering. But I may want to absolutely horizontally center something then eyeball the vertical, for example. Being able to do that definitely has its uses.
That’s about it. You have to have the tile square in the bed (the whole jig, 0,0, registration mark thing!!) Then have a box outline in the design file of a particular color, doesn’t have to be a separate layer. That will import as a specific operation. Align your image over the tile. then choose ignore that step and process the design.
At the moment you can’t rotate rastered images or bitmaps that you bring into the workspace, but you can a pure vector that you later can mark as an engrave.
Good to know! Thanks!
What the WHAT?! So whataya do… rotate the object and take a new pic until it all lines up?!
Two camps of people on this one. One: It drives OCD people nuts. Two: it’s fairly common to weight in framing/matting pictures because of perception.
I just eyeballed that one but I always use a masking on everything, so you could easily mark the position or center of the tile on the masking. If you did the design yourself you might place an X at the center of your design with a different color and when it comes time to cut, just assign “Ignore” to the X.
A little bit of a pain but it gets very good accuracy when you zoom in.
Takes me 5 minutes to engrave the tile, but an hour and a half to decide what category to place a new topic in.
My family is from Hurricane WV, I’m pretty sure the main reason they’re excited about me working for Glowforge is the future potential to put flying WVs on everything they own. 
Yes, learning how to align the things in the bed to the axes is a skill. Most of the time it works with few issues. This is one case where cutting a jig to leave in the bed and then placing the tile in it for multiple tiles one after the other.
Nice eyeballs!
Great… another skill I need to acquire. I’m gettin’ too old for this …
This is where a draggable guide rule would be useful.
Looking at you GFUI Team. Looking at you.
Just 15 minute drive from my house to the hurricane exit.
Yes, many times I had an interior designer make me wait to place furniture so she could get a tape and split a measure exactly. She wouldn’t have been able to sleep otherwise.
Hoppered!
I’ll put that in the hopper. 
The ability to auto align the artwork relative to the edges of the blank should fall out of the double sided cutting implementation. It would be a bit bonkers if it auto aligned the second cut after it was flipped but we had to manually align the first cut from the top.
This would get around the need for a repeatable zero and the need to use alignment jigs.
Numeric entry for positioning would fix both of these issues, and many more. I’m hoping they will implement it. That includes numeric scaling/sizing, as well as positioning.
To do this perfectly accurately is a bit tricky right now. You can use optical, but you might be off by a tiny little bit. I prefer to use jigs for things like this.
