PNG to SVG
Trace a PNG or JPG into vector paths — best on logos, icons, and line art.
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or drag it here
PNG, JPG, WEBP, or GIF · flat artwork traces best
Your file never leaves your browser during processing
How it works
To convert a PNG to SVG, drop the image onto this page and press trace — the picture is flattened to a small palette and the boundary of each colour region is fitted with vector paths, entirely in your browser, which works well for logos and line art and poorly for photographs.
Converting a raster image to SVG is not a format change, it is an interpretation. A PNG is a grid of coloured pixels with no notion of shapes; an SVG is a list of shapes with no pixels. Getting from one to the other means guessing what the shapes were. The tracer does that in three steps: reduce the image to a small palette of flat colours, walk the boundary between regions of each colour, then fit straight segments and curves along those boundaries and write them out as paths.
That process suits artwork that was drawn from shapes to begin with. A logo, an icon, a screenshot of flat graphics, or a scanned line drawing traces cleanly, and the result is genuinely resolution-independent afterwards — the whole reason to do this. A photograph does not. There is no small set of flat regions in a photograph, so the tracer produces thousands of blobby paths that are larger than the JPG was and look worse at every size. The result panel reports path count and file size against the original so you can see that happening rather than take it on faith.
The controls map to the steps. Colours sets the palette size — fewer means flatter and smaller. Noise removal discards paths below a length, which clears up the speckle around edges in a compressed source. Smoothing trades fidelity for fewer, cleaner curves. Pre-blur helps when the source is a JPG whose artefacts would otherwise be traced as detail.
Tracing cost grows with pixel count, so images are sampled down to 1000 pixels on the long edge first. For flat artwork that is more than enough boundary detail, and it keeps a trace to a few seconds rather than locking the tab. The tracing engine is only downloaded when you use this tool.
FAQ
Can I convert a photo to SVG?
You can, and you almost certainly should not. Tracing a photograph produces thousands of irregular paths that are typically larger than the original JPG and look worse. Tracing is for flat artwork: logos, icons, and line drawings.
Will the result look exactly like the PNG?
No. It is an approximation — the image is flattened to a limited palette and its edges are re-drawn as curves. On clean flat artwork the difference is hard to see; on detailed or noisy images it is obvious.
How do I get a cleaner trace?
Start with the highest-resolution source you have, reduce the number of colours, and raise noise removal to drop speckle. If the source is a JPG, a small pre-blur removes the compression artefacts that would otherwise be traced as real detail.
Why is my traced SVG bigger than the PNG?
Because the image had more detail than can be described economically as paths. That is the signal to keep the raster, or to trace with fewer colours and more noise removal.
Does the image get uploaded?
No. Decoding and tracing both run in your browser. The tracing library is loaded before the network monitor starts, so the monitored window contains only the tracing itself.