PNG to SVG
Trace a logo, icon or line drawing into vector shapes that stay sharp at any size. Your image is never uploaded.
Drop an image here or click to choose
PNG · JPG · WebP — traced into shapes on your device
Trace the image to see the vector here.
Tracing draws shapes that follow the colours it finds. It suits logos, icons, line drawings and flat graphics. A photograph has no flat areas to follow, so it comes out as thousands of blotches — coarse to look at, and usually a much larger file than the photograph was. Text becomes letter-shaped outlines, not text: there is no font left in the result, and nothing to edit or search.
Convert in three steps
- Choose or drop a PNG, JPG or WebP image.
- Pick the preset that matches the picture: a flat logo, detailed artwork, or black and white.
- Trace it, compare the two panes, and download the SVG.
What tracing can and cannot do
A PNG is a grid of coloured squares. An SVG is a list of shapes. Converting one to the other is not a format change like PNG to WebP — nothing in the pixels says where a shape begins, so the conversion has to guess. Tracing does that by grouping neighbouring pixels of similar colour into regions and drawing a smooth outline around each region.
That guess is excellent when the picture was made of flat regions to begin with. A logo, an icon, a screenshot of a chart, an inked drawing: the boundaries are real, and the tracer finds them. Enlarge the result to a billboard and the edges stay crisp, because they are curves rather than a magnified grid.
The same guess is poor on a photograph, and the failure is loud rather than subtle. There are no flat regions in a photograph of a face, only a continuous gradient, so the tracer carves it into hundreds or thousands of blotches. You get something that looks screen-printed and a file that is often several times the size of the original. If that is the effect you want, take it — but reach for it deliberately.
Getting a clean trace
Start from the largest clean copy you have. Tracing exaggerates whatever is already in the pixels: JPEG artefacts around a logo become real outlined shapes, and a blurry upscale becomes wobbly edges. A sharp 500 pixel PNG traces better than a soft 2000 pixel one.
Match the preset to the picture rather than reaching for the most detailed one. More colours is not more accurate — it is more shapes, and on a two-colour mark the extra allowance is spent on anti-aliased fringes along the edges, which is exactly the fuzz you were trying to get rid of. If a traced logo has faint outlines shadowing its real ones, that is the sign to move down a preset, not up.
For a scan, a stamp or a pencil sketch, black and white is usually the right answer. It picks the light-versus-dark split point from the histogram of your particular image, so a pale sketch and a heavy inked stamp both separate sensibly instead of both being measured against a fixed middle grey.
After you download
The file is a plain .svg: an XML document with a viewBox, its
original width and height, and one <path> per traced region. Any browser
will open it, and Illustrator, Inkscape, Affinity Designer, Figma and Sketch will all import
it as editable shapes with the fills intact.
Expect to tidy up. A trace is a starting point rather than a finished drawing: you will usually want to merge a few stray shapes, straighten an edge that should be geometric, and — if there were words in the image — set the type again properly, since the traced letters are outlines with no font behind them.
Frequently asked questions
Will my logo come out looking exactly the same?
Close, not identical. Tracing finds regions of similar colour and draws a smooth outline around each one, so a flat two-colour mark usually comes back almost indistinguishable, while soft edges, gradients and drop shadows get simplified into bands. Compare the two panes before you download; if the result is not good enough, the original vector file from whoever designed the logo always will be.
Should I use this on a photograph?
Only if you want the poster-paint effect on purpose. A photograph has no flat regions to outline, so the tracer invents thousands of small blotches, one path each. The picture looks coarse and the file is typically several times larger than the JPG you started from. The tool tells you the size in the result rather than letting you find out after downloading.
Why is my SVG bigger than the PNG?
Because a vector file stores instructions, not pixels. Each region becomes a path with a list of coordinates, and a busy image produces a great many of them. A simple icon might trace to a few kilobytes; a detailed illustration can pass its source. The result line reports the number of shapes for exactly this reason — it is the honest predictor of both file size and how the drawing will behave in an editor.
What happens to text in the image?
It becomes shapes that look like letters. There is no font in the output and no text to select, search, spell-check or re-type — an editor sees outlines. If the words matter, set them again in the vector editor over the traced artwork and delete the traced ones.
Is transparency kept?
In the two colour presets, yes, but as a clean cut-out rather than a fade. Every pixel is decided one way or the other before tracing, so a transparent background stays transparent and a soft shadow or a deliberate fade becomes a hard edge. That is not a shortcut: a tracer draws flat-filled shapes, and there is nowhere in a flat fill to put a gradient. Black and white is opaque throughout — reducing to two tones leaves nothing to record transparency with, so those pixels are placed on white before the image is thresholded.
What do the three presets actually change?
How many colours the tracer is allowed and how closely it follows an edge. Logo or icon keeps to eight colours with straighter, simpler outlines — right for flat marks. Detailed artwork allows twenty-four and follows curves more tightly, at the cost of many more shapes. Black and white reduces the picture to two tones, choosing the split point from the image’s own histogram rather than a fixed value, which is what makes it work on both a pale sketch and a dark stamp.
Is there a size limit?
Files up to 20 MB. Anything above roughly 1.2 megapixels is sampled down before tracing, and the tool says so when it happens. That ceiling is about time, not storage: tracing is arithmetic over every pixel for every colour, and an untouched phone photo would take minutes and produce an unusable number of shapes. The finished SVG still carries the original width and height.
Where does the tracing happen?
On this device. The tracer is a small JavaScript library that loads with the page and runs in a background thread in your browser, which is why the Cancel button can genuinely stop it. Your image is read locally and the SVG you download was assembled here.