Trace a PNG or JPG image into a black-and-white SVG entirely in your browser — adjust the color threshold to control what counts as foreground, simplify or smooth the traced outlines, and download a scalable .svg file. Basic bitmap tracing, not AI vectorization.
Drag and drop a PNG or JPG image here, or click below to browse.
The process happens in three stages. First, your uploaded image is drawn onto an in-memory canvas (scaled down if needed) and read back as raw pixel data. Second, every pixel's brightness is compared against your chosen threshold and snapped to pure black or pure white, producing a clean two-tone bitmap. Third, a tracing algorithm scans that bitmap for the boundaries between black and white regions and converts each boundary into a sequence of vector path commands — straight line segments and quadratic curves — which are assembled into the final SVG's <path> elements.
Logos, icons, and line art are usually designed with clear, intentional shapes and strong contrast — exactly the kind of source material where a single brightness threshold cleanly separates 'this is part of the shape' from 'this is background.' Once that separation is made, tracing the resulting boundary produces an accurate, clean vector outline. This is the same fundamental approach used by decades-old raster-to-vector tools (Potrace, first released in 2001, popularized this exact technique and remains the tracing engine behind many popular vectorization tools today).
A traced path can theoretically follow every single pixel-level zigzag in a boundary with perfect fidelity, but that produces an enormous number of tiny path segments — visually noisy, slow to render, and unnecessarily large as a file. The Simplify control trades a small amount of geometric accuracy for a dramatically cleaner, smaller path by merging nearly-straight or nearly-curved segments together based on an error tolerance. Most well-defined shapes (logos, icons) tolerate a moderate amount of simplification with no visible difference, while very fine detail (small text, intricate line work) is more sensitive to it.
Real-world shapes fall into two broad categories: geometric shapes with genuine sharp corners (a traced rectangle, a stop sign, typography) and organic shapes with naturally flowing curves (a traced leaf, a hand-drawn doodle, a silhouette). The tracing algorithm has to guess which category a given corner belongs to, and the Smooth Corners toggle biases that guess — enabled, ambiguous corners are allowed to round off into the surrounding curve for a softer look; disabled, the algorithm actively preserves and sharpens angles close to 90 degrees, better suited for geometric source material.
Reading your image, converting it to black and white, and tracing it into vector paths are all performed by JavaScript running directly in your browser, with no server-side processing step at any point. This means there's no upload wait, no file size limit imposed by a server, and the tool continues working with no internet connection once the page has loaded.
PNG to SVG pairs naturally with these image tools for format conversion and preparation.