Lasers are widely used for material processing (cutting, drilling, cleaning, film deposition, etc.). A recent application is for nanoparticle fabrication. Pulsed laser ablation is by far the fastest and clean method to fabricate nanoparticles directly from bulk targets. For this purpose, target ablation is performed in vacuum, in gas atmosphere, or in liquids with fast (nanosecond) and ultrafast (picosecond, femtosecond) laser pulses. Mostly metal but also semiconductor and ceramic nanoparticles were fabricated. In the early stage of this technique, the main problem was the large size distribution of the produced nanoparticles. But the possibility to independently handle laser pulse characteristics (wavelength, power density, pulse duration, etc.) and the accurate control and optimization of the ambient parameters is leading to an efficient tailoring of the nanoparticle size, due also to helpful theoretical and numerical models. A review is presented of the most important studies and of the obtained results.