PNG to SVG converter

How to convert PNG to SVG (in full colour)

Drop an image — or paste a screenshot with ⌘V / Ctrl+V — adjust the mode, fit and colour count until the preview looks right, and download the SVG — free, online, no signup. This is a vectorizer, not a wrapper: the PNG is not embedded inside an SVG tag, it is traced into real paths. Under the hood the image is decoded in your browser, downscaled to at most 800 px on the long edge, and posterised to at most the number of colours you choose — the palette is the image's own most common colours, with antialias blends and near-duplicate shades folded into the colours they came from, so a three-colour logo comes back with three fills, not thirty. Each colour region is then traced: straight runs become lines, curved runs become quadratic splines, and speck regions below the preset's minimum area are merged into their surroundings before the tracer ever sees them. The result is one SVG where every colour region is an editable path, organised into named object groups, which you can download, copy, open in the editor, or compare side by side with the original. Nothing is uploaded — the tracer is loaded on demand and runs in a Web Worker on your machine, so even a detailed pass never freezes the page.

The three fits move the same three knobs. Posterised smooths the input and tolerates loose fitting, which suits logos photographed off a wall. Detailed follows edges tightly and keeps small features, at the price of many more nodes — worth it for intricate sources, but on clean flat art it mostly adds weight, so start with Balanced. The Paths counter under the controls shows the cost of each choice.

Colour, greyscale, or black and white with a threshold

Colour is colour-first tracing: the palette is sampled from the image itself, so a six-colour logo comes back as six recolourable layers, not a black silhouette. Greyscale keeps only luminance and quantises it to the number of grey levels you set — the right choice for pencil sketches, engravings and anything destined for a single-ink print. Black & white makes one cut: every pixel darker than the threshold becomes black, everything else white. Slide the threshold up to catch faint lines, down to drop shadows and JPEG noise. That is the mode for cutting machines (Cricut, Silhouette), laser engravers, stencils, embroidery digitising and line art — one colour, closed shapes, and with Remove background on, nothing but the shapes. Invert flips light and dark in any mode, so a white-on-black screenshot traces as dark shapes on nothing.

Transparent backgrounds and background removal

Transparent PNGs stay transparent: fully transparent regions are recognised up front, reserved their own palette slot, and then dropped from the output entirely rather than written as invisible paths — which is why the traced file is often smaller than a naive trace of the same image. For a logo sitting on a flat white (or any flat) background, tick Remove background: the dominant colour along the image border is detected, pixels within a small tolerance of it are made transparent before tracing, and the swatch next to the checkbox shows what was removed. The result is an SVG that shows whatever sits behind it — a page, a T-shirt mock-up, a dark UI — with no white box. Soft edges snap to solid or transparent at the halfway point, so the traced outline is a clean shape rather than a lace of semi-opaque slivers — but partial opacity that covers real area is kept: a shape drawn at, say, 70% opacity comes out as paths with that opacity, not flattened to solid.

Layers: one group per object, and parts inside it

With Group into layers on (the default), the SVG is not a flat pile of paths. The background becomes one rectangle; every separately drawn thing — a figure, the sun, a cloud, each tuft of grass — becomes its own <g>, largest first, named Object 1, 2, 3…, and the paths inside it are ordered top to bottom so hair comes before shoes. Tiny stragglers (a sun's rays, dust) share a Small parts group instead of each getting a layer. White areas that are enclosed by a drawing — the inside of a face on a colouring page — belong to that drawing, not to the background, so they stay selectable and fillable.

Drawings that touch — three people holding hands on a ground line — come out as one object. Split touching objects subdivides such an object into Parts: raise it past the line thickness and thin connectors (a held hand, the ground line) are cut while the enclosed cells that share an outline (hair and face, top and skirt) stay together, so each figure becomes a part with its own group. A large empty area trapped between two figures is treated as background for that decision, so it cannot glue them back together — but it is still traced and kept, assigned to the nearer part. Open the result in the editor and the layers panel shows the tree; double-click a group to name it Mom, Dad, Sun. The tool does not know what a face is — it knows what is connected to what — so the naming is yours, and it takes seconds.

When tracing pays off

When the vector original is gone and all that survives is a PNG — a logo inherited from an old agency, an icon lifted from a slide deck, a diagram that exists only as a screenshot. Tracing gives you paths you can recolour with the Color Replacer, scale for print, and edit shape by shape. It is a reconstruction, not a conversion: the goal is a clean redraw you own, not pixel fidelity. JPEGs work as well as PNGs — the vectorizer accepts JPG, WebP, GIF and BMP — but their compression noise argues for the Posterised fit or a slightly higher threshold. If what you actually need is the reverse — a PNG copy of an SVG you already have — that is the SVG to PNG converter.

Common problems

• The output is huge. Photographs and gradients posterise into hundreds of jagged colour fields — often heavier than the JPEG they came from. Tracing pays off for flat artwork; for photos, stay raster (or accept the poster look deliberately with 4–6 colours). Watch the Paths counter: fewer, larger paths is the goal.
• Halo colours around edges. Antialiasing blends foreground into background, and a naive tracer invents a colour for the blend and traces it as a lace of slivers. The palette here is built from the colours the image is actually made of — a colour that only ever appears as a thin band between two others is folded into them, and each edge pixel goes to whichever side it is nearer. What can still slip through is JPEG chroma noise: reduce the colour count, use the Posterised fit, or switch to Black & white where a threshold decides.
• The white box came along. The background was opaque white in the PNG, so it is a colour like any other. Tick Remove background — or, in Black & white mode, it is the difference between a stencil and a white rectangle with a hole in it.
• Wobbly lines that should be straight. The source was blurry or JPEG-compressed. Trace from the sharpest copy you have, and prefer the Posterised fit, which smooths before it traces.
• Text traced into blobs. Letterforms become outlines of whatever the pixels said, not editable text. If you know the font, set the words again with Text to Path and drop the traced text layer.