Image to SVG Converter (Vectorizer)

About the Image to SVG Converter (Vectorizer)

Turn a pixel image — a logo, icon, signature, stamp, sketch or flat illustration — into an SVG made of filled vector shapes that stay sharp at any size. Tracing uses vtracer, an open-source vectorizer, compiled to WebAssembly and run on your device: the image is never uploaded.

Choose Colour to keep every flat colour as its own shape, or Black & white for line art, signatures and anything you will cut with a laser, vinyl cutter or CNC machine. An overlay preview puts the SVG over the original so you can check the fit, and the page shows the number of shapes, colours, path nodes and the file size. Optional SVGO clean-up makes the file smaller, and DXF export writes closed outlines in millimetres for cutting software.

Photos are the exception: a photograph has smooth gradients and millions of colours, so tracing turns it into thousands of flat blotches and a very large file. Keep photos as JPG or WebP.

Common uses

• Recreate a logo as SVG for a website, print shop or embroidery file when only a PNG or JPG is left.
• Turn a signature, stamp or hand-drawn sketch into clean outlines for documents, engraving or vinyl cutting.
• Make a crisp, scalable version of a small icon or pixel-art sprite.
• Prepare shapes for a laser cutter, CNC router or plotter as DXF.

Which settings matter most

• Colour precision (1–8): how many significant bits of each colour channel are compared. Lower values merge similar colours into fewer shapes.
• Gradient step: how different two neighbouring colour layers must be to stay separate. Lower values split gradients into more bands (and more shapes).
• Filter speckle: patches smaller than this many pixels across are dropped — the quickest fix for noise and JPEG artefacts.
• Curves: Smooth fits curves (best for logos and lettering), Polygon uses straight segments, Pixel follows the pixel grid exactly.
• Corner threshold, Segment length and Splice threshold decide where a curve keeps a sharp corner, how smooth it is and where it is split.
• Stacked shapes lie on top of each other, which gives smaller files; Cut-out shapes never overlap — use it when every shape will be cut or filled separately.
• Trace at sets the resolution that is traced. More pixels mean finer detail but slower tracing and more nodes; the SVG keeps the original width and height either way.

Photos, gradients and why files get huge

Vector tracing finds areas of flat colour and draws an outline around each one. A logo has a handful of such areas; a photo has none — every pixel differs a little from its neighbours. Tracing a photo therefore produces thousands of small blotchy shapes, files of several megabytes and SVGs that open slowly. The page warns you when an image looks like a photo or the result is very large. Photo (poster) gives a deliberate posterised look, but it is an effect, not a faithful conversion — for a sharper photo, keep it as JPG or WebP (see the image converter).

DXF for laser cutters, CNC and vinyl cutters

The DXF file is the AutoCAD R12 format (AC1009 in its header), the simplest and most widely readable DXF version. Every traced shape becomes a closed POLYLINE: curves are flattened into short straight segments within 0.05 mm, and the Y axis points up as in CAD. One drawing unit is one millimetre, at the width you enter — R12 files cannot store a unit, so choose millimetres when your software asks. Each fill colour gets its own layer (named like C_FF0000) and the nearest of the seven standard AutoCAD colours, so you can give each colour its own cut or engrave setting.

For cutting, Black & white or Cut-out shapes are usually what you want: with Stacked shapes, lower shapes continue underneath the ones above them, so their outlines overlap.

About the SVG file

The file uses plain SVG path data (as defined in the W3C SVG 2 specification): one <path> per shape with a fill colour, a viewBox in traced pixels and width/height equal to the original image, so it appears at the same size as the picture it replaces. There is no embedded bitmap, script or font. SVGO clean-up (default preset, several passes) shortens the path data and merges what it can without changing how the image looks; untick it to get the tracer’s output unchanged.

Limitations

• Tracing works on flat colours: photos, soft shadows and gradients become many flat bands and very large files.
• Text in the image becomes outlines (shapes), not editable text; small text below about 12 px usually loses detail.
• Images are traced at up to 4,096 px on the longest side (16 megapixels); larger images are scaled down first. Large, detailed images take longer to trace, especially on phones — a smaller “Trace at” size is faster.
• Anti-aliased edges against a background can leave thin outline shapes; raising Filter speckle or Gradient step usually removes them.
• DXF output contains outlines only (no fills, hatches or text); its colours are the seven standard AutoCAD colours, while the exact colour is kept in each layer name.
• HEIC photos open natively in Safari; other browsers first download a free HEIC decoder (about 1.4 MB, once).

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