Rasterlessvector

Turn the image you already have into an SVG

Most people who need an SVG do not arrive thinking in file formats. There is a picture — a badge a designer emailed over, a sticker saved off a phone, a mark screenshotted from an old slide deck — and it has to become a vector before it can be cut, printed or scaled. The extension is the least interesting part of it. Three raster types come through here: PNG, JPEG and WEBP.

Working out which one you are holding takes a moment: Properties on Windows, Get Info on a Mac, the details sheet on a phone. When the name and the contents disagree — a photo a chat app handed you as logo.png that is really JPEG data inside — the file's own signature settles it and the conversion runs anyway. A GIF, an iPhone HEIC or an old TIFF scan is a different story: re-save it as PNG in any editor first.

What genuinely changes your result sits one level above the format. A two-colour silhouette, a flat logo, a sticker with soft shading, a photograph and a pencil line drawing each want a different number of colours, and that number has nothing to do with whether the bytes arrived as PNG, JPEG or WEBP. Sort your picture into one of those kinds and the settings follow.

Drop an image here

or click to choose one

PNG · JPG · WEBP

How it works

  1. Drop in the picture — PNG, JPEG and WEBP are the three accepted types, and the bytes decide, not the extension.
  2. Name the kind of picture you have: flat logo, sticker or badge, photograph, or line drawing.
  3. Set the colour count from that kind — 2 for a silhouette, 4–10 for a flat logo, 12–20 for a sticker, 24–48 for a photograph.
  4. Leave Draw style on Fill shapes and Shape stacking on Cut-outs unless you want contours only.
  5. Open the preview at full size, then sign in with Google (free) to download the SVG.
A four-colour badge — dark teal frame, teal field, cream triangle and orange triangle — shown as the original raster picture and as the traced SVG — source image A four-colour badge — dark teal frame, teal field, cream triangle and orange triangle — shown as the original raster picture and as the traced SVG — vector result
A four-colour badge — dark teal frame, teal field, cream triangle and orange triangle — shown as the original raster picture and as the traced SVG

Who this is for

This page is for when the destination is fixed but the source is whatever you happen to have. A vinyl cutter wants clean closed paths; a print shop wants artwork that stays sharp at A2; a website wants a mark of a few kilobytes that holds up on a retina screen. In each case the answer is an SVG built from real path data, not the original bitmap wrapped inside an SVG tag.

Vectorising is a re-drawing, not a recovery. A 200 px wide, soft original gives a faithful vector copy of something soft: crisp edges, same mushy shapes. Start from the largest copy you can find, and prefer one that never went through a messaging app.

The engine is a geometric tracer — colour segmentation, an explicit anti-aliasing model, curve fitting. No learned model is involved, which is why every control is one you can reason about: how many colours, fills or strokes, how the shapes stack.

Settings we suggest

Name the picture first, then set the colour count. If you cannot tell, leave the default of 26 and judge the preview at full size.

Flat logo or wordmark. Count the flats the design already has, including a solid background, and use that number — usually 4–10. Too many colours invents slivers along edges where the original had anti-aliasing; too few merges two brand colours into one.

Sticker or badge. These look flat but usually carry two tones of one hue, a shadow and an outline; 12–20 keeps the shading readable. The sample here is that case: its teal frame and teal field are two colours the eye reads as one.

Photograph or painted artwork. No correct number exists, only a poster effect you choose: 24–40 for a printable poster, 48–64 to keep more of the tonal roll-off at the cost of a heavier, slower file.

Line drawing or silhouette. 2 colours produces one clean shape against nothing at all, which is what a cutter or an engraver expects; grey strokes rather than black ones need 3–4 so the lighter marks survive.

The rest of the panel barely moves between kinds. Keep Draw style on Fill shapes unless you want contours only, and Shape stacking on Cut-outs so every colour region is a closed shape with its holes cut out. Group by colour collects each colour into one SVG group.

Transparency is honoured: fully transparent pixels stay empty in the vector, semi-transparent ones are composited onto white. Set a size in mm if the SVG must land at an exact physical size; otherwise it carries pixel dimensions, where 96 pixels = 25.4 mm.

Questions

How do I tell whether my file is a PNG, a JPEG or a WEBP?

Properties on Windows, Command-I on a Mac, the details sheet on a phone. Or just try it — the converter reads the bytes at the start of the file rather than the extension, so a JPEG that somebody renamed to .png still goes through.

My picture is a HEIC from an iPhone, or a GIF. Can I still get an SVG?

Yes, after one extra step: re-save it as PNG. Exporting the photo, or emailing it to yourself, usually produces a PNG or JPEG on its own; in a desktop editor, use Export As. The same goes for an old TIFF or BMP scan.

Does it matter which of the three formats I start from?

Less than people expect, since the tracer works from decoded pixels. A PNG, or a losslessly saved WEBP, is cleanest. A JPEG — and a lossy WEBP — spreads faint halos around hard edges that can turn into thin extra shapes, so step the colour count down a notch. PNG and WEBP also carry transparency; JPEG does not.

What are the size limits, and how long does a conversion take?

Up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels, one image per conversion; anything above 1.5 megapixels is downscaled before tracing. Logos and stickers typically convert in 3–12 seconds in our local measurements, fine-line or noisy pictures take longer, and a run still going at 60 seconds stops and suggests fewer colours or a smaller image.

Is it free, and what happens to my picture afterwards?

Free, and nothing is watermarked. The preview is open to everyone; a free Google sign-in unlocks the vector download. You get 10 conversions per hour before signing in, 60 per hour and 300 per day after. Download links expire after 1 hour, and your files are removed by an automatic 1-day deletion rule.

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