Convert PNG to SVG
Your files stay on this device. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on a server.
Drop your files here
or pick them from your device
How it works
- Drop a .png file onto the bench, or pick one from your device.
- Set how many colours to keep and how much to smooth, then press Trace.
- Download the .svg. Open it in a browser or a vector editor to check the result.
This is a tracer, not a converter, and the distinction decides whether you will be happy with the result. A PNG is a grid of coloured squares. An SVG is a list of shapes described by maths. There is no way to translate one into the other exactly, so the tracer does something approximate: it reduces the image to a limited set of flat colours, finds the boundaries between those colour regions, and fits smooth curves along them. What comes out is a drawing that resembles your image, built entirely from filled outlines.
That approach is excellent for the things PNG is normally used for. A flat logo, an icon, a black-and-white diagram, a signature, a simple map — these are already made of clear regions of solid colour, so the traced edges land almost exactly where the original edges were, and the result scales to any size without ever going blurry. That is the real prize: a logo that stays crisp on a business card and on a billboard.
It is a poor fit for photographs. A photo has thousands of subtly different shades and no clean boundaries anywhere, so the tracer invents hundreds of overlapping blobs trying to approximate a gradient. The file balloons and it looks like a poster-effect filter rather than the photo.
Two controls shape the outcome, and they are not equally important. Colours sets how many flat shades the image is reduced to, and it dominates everything: a two-tone logo traced at two colours comes out as a couple of clean shapes, while the same logo at sixteen colours can produce hundreds. Smoothing blurs the image before tracing; it nudges the result, but it will not rescue a bad colour setting, and a heavy blur can add shapes rather than remove them.
Questions people ask
- Will my logo come out looking exactly right?
- Close, usually, if it is flat colour with clean edges — set the colour count to match how many colours it actually uses. It will not be identical to a logo drawn as vector from the start, and curves may wobble slightly where the PNG was low resolution.
- Can I trace a photograph?
- You can, but the result looks like a poster print and the file is enormous. Photographs have no clean colour boundaries for the tracer to follow. If a photo needs to scale up, resize it instead.
- Why is my SVG file so large?
- Every colour region becomes a path, and a busy or noisy image produces thousands of them. The colour count is the lever that matters — lowering it to the number of colours the artwork actually uses can cut the file by an order of magnitude. A cleaner source image helps too.
- Is the text in my image still editable text?
- No. Letters are traced as outlines like everything else, so you cannot retype them or change the font. To get real text, rebuild it in a vector editor using the traced shapes as a guide.
- How many colours should I pick?
- For a two-tone logo, try 2 to 4. For a flat illustration, 8 to 16. Going higher rarely improves the look and quickly makes the file heavier and slower to open.
- Is my image uploaded to be traced?
- No. The tracing runs in your browser on this page. It can take a few seconds on a large image because the work is genuinely being done on your own machine.