Convert a PNG into real SVG curves

A PNG is a fixed grid of pixels, and you usually go looking for an SVG at the moment that grid runs out: the logo is soft at four times its size, the printer asked for curves, the cutter needs a contour to follow. The shortcut some converters take here is to drop the original PNG inside an SVG wrapper and rename the file — it ends in .svg, opens in a browser, and is just as soft as before.

Rasterless re-draws the picture instead: it splits the PNG into flat colour regions, reads the anti-aliased pixels along each boundary to find where the real edge lies, and fits Bezier curves to it. What comes back is made of path elements and nothing else — no image element, no base64 payload, no link back to what you uploaded. A geometric tracer, not a learned model: colour segmentation, an explicit anti-aliasing model, curve fitting.

Two things need explaining for PNG specifically: the alpha channel, and what the version number on the svg tag really promises.

Drop an image here

or click to choose one

PNG · JPG · WEBP

How it works

Drop one PNG on the converter — one image per conversion, up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels.
Pick a colour count. 26 is the default; flat logos and icons are usually cleaner at 6 to 12, and 2 gives you a single solid shape.
Leave the format on SVG, look at the preview, and raise or lower the colour count if small details have merged or flat areas have split.
Sign in with Google (free) and download the .svg file.

A flat PNG logo and the converted SVG beside it; the SVG edges stay clean when enlarged.

Who this is for

People arriving here need one of three things. A print or apparel shop has asked for vector artwork and will reject a PNG dropped into a layout, because placed pixels still print as pixels. A website needs a logo that stays sharp at every size, at a fraction of the bytes of a high-resolution PNG. Or a cutting machine, a laser or a router needs a closed outline to drive a tool along — a machine cannot follow a picture of an edge, only a curve.

All three fail identically when the SVG is really a wrapper: the RIP finds no paths to separate, the browser downloads the heavy bitmap the site was avoiding, the cutting software reports zero cut paths. So open the file once before you send it anywhere and search it for the word image.

Settings we suggest

Colours. The slider runs 2 to 64 and starts at 26. For a flat PNG logo the honest number is the inks in the design plus one for the background: six colours give six clean shapes, while 26 also reproduces the halo of in-between pixels your PNG exporter left around every edge. Set it to 2 for a single silhouette.

Draw style. Fill shapes is the default and the right choice here: each colour region becomes a filled path. Stroke shapes traces the same regions as outlines, and Stroke edges keeps only the boundaries between them.

Shape stacking. Cut-outs, the default, subtracts a shape from the one beneath, so no two paths overlap and recolouring one area never uncovers another. Stacked layers whole shapes instead.

Group by. Colour gives one group per colour, so selecting every red piece in Inkscape or Illustrator is one click. It changes grouping only, never geometry.

Size in mm. Empty, the SVG carries the pixel dimensions of the traced image — and anything above 1.5 megapixels is downscaled before tracing, so that number shrinks, though the curves do not care. Filled in, width and height are written in millimetres instead, which is what you want for anything physical. Otherwise the file is read at 96 pixels = 25.4 mm.

Questions

Is the SVG really vector, or just my PNG wrapped in an SVG file?

Really vector. The writer emits an svg root element and then path elements only: no image element, no embedded bitmap, no external reference. With Fill shapes it also carries a thin 0.7 px stroke along each shape so neighbouring colour areas meet without a hairline gap; those seams are paths too.

What does SVG 1.1 actually mean on these files?

The root tag is written as version="1.1", the long-standing W3C recommendation that browsers, vector editors and cutting software have read for years. The number matters less than the vocabulary inside it, and ours is deliberately small: a root element with xmlns, width, height and viewBox, optional groups, and path elements with d, fill and stroke. No scripts, no stylesheets, no filters, no gradients, no fonts, no external links — which is why the file tends to open the same way everywhere. The one attribute reaching past 1.1 is vector-effect on the seam strokes; software that does not know it just scales those hairlines with the drawing.

What happens to a transparent PNG background?

It stays empty. Pixels with an alpha value above 10 count as part of the picture; everything else is outside the drawing, so the SVG gets no background rectangle — put it on a dark page and the page shows through. One wrinkle: the preview is rendered onto white at 800 px on the long edge, so a white logo on a transparent background looks blank there even though the downloaded SVG is right. Partly transparent pixels — the fringe of a drop shadow, a feathered edge — are flattened onto white before tracing, so those areas come out lighter than they looked over a dark backdrop.

How long does a PNG take, and what if it stalls?

Logos and flat PNG artwork typically convert in 3-12 seconds in our local measurements; fine-line drawings and noisy photographs take considerably longer. If a conversion has not finished after 60 seconds it stops and suggests fewer colours or a smaller image, and lowering the colour count is usually enough.

Do I need an account, and what happens to my file afterwards?

The converter is free and adds no watermark. Run a conversion and look at the preview straight away; downloading the vector files needs a free Google sign-in. Signed out you get 10 conversions per hour; signed in, 60 per hour and 300 per day. Download links expire after 1 hour, and uploaded images and generated files are cleared by an automatic 1-day deletion rule, never used for anything else.

Updated 2026-09-15