Convert PNG to SVG
This traces the shapes in a PNG and writes them as SVG paths. That is a real conversion and it is genuinely useful on a logo, an icon, or a scanned signature. It is not a way to turn a photograph into a vector illustration, and no tool anywhere does that — the difference matters enough to lead with.
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Add to Chrome — freeDrop your PNG file here, or click to browse
Up to 50 MB. Deleted automatically after 30 minutes.
What it does
- Real SVG path data, not a PNG wrapped in an SVG tag
- Scales to any size without softening
- Best on flat, high-contrast artwork
- Says plainly where tracing fails
How to use PNG to SVG
- 1
Start with flat, high-contrast art
A black logo on white, an icon, a stamp, an inked drawing. The tracer decides what counts as ink by brightness, so the further your image is from two clear tones, the more it has to guess.
- 2
Convert
The image is reduced to black and white at a midpoint threshold, then the boundaries between the two are followed and written out as Bezier curves. What you get back is a genuine vector file.
- 3
Open it before you use it
Look at the result at a large size. Tracing either worked or it did not, and the answer is obvious in two seconds — clean edges and sensible curves, or a spray of fragments around every soft edge.
How it works
Two steps, and the first one does more damage than people expect.
The image is first reduced to pure black and white at a 50 percent brightness threshold. Every pixel is now either ink or background — there is no gray, no partial transparency, no color. Then potrace follows the boundary between the two regions and fits smooth curves along it, writing the result as SVG paths.
That threshold is where the quality comes from and where it goes wrong. On art that was already two-tone it changes almost nothing. On anything with gradients, soft shadows or mid-tones, it makes an all-or-nothing decision about every pixel, and the shapes that come out are shapes the threshold invented rather than shapes that were in the picture.
What a real vector file is
An SVG stores instructions: draw a curve from here to there with this control point, fill it with this color. Because those are mathematical descriptions, they render perfectly at any size — a 16-pixel favicon and a two-meter banner come from the same file with no loss at either end.
A PNG stores measurements: this pixel is this color. Enlarge it and the renderer has to invent the pixels between the ones you have, which is why it goes soft.
This is why "convert PNG to SVG" is a slightly misleading request. You can put a PNG inside an SVG file — several converters do exactly that and hand it back — and it is still a raster image that still goes soft when enlarged. It just has a different extension. This tool does not do that; the output contains real paths and no embedded bitmap.
Where tracing genuinely helps
Recovering a logo. The most common real use. A company has a PNG of its mark and no longer has the source file, and needs it on a sign or a vehicle. Tracing gets a usable vector in seconds, usually with a little cleanup afterwards.
Signatures and stamps. Scanned ink is close to two-tone already, and the result drops into a document at any size.
Line drawings and technical diagrams. Anything drawn in pen. Clean edges, few regions, exactly what the tracer is built for.
Icons. Especially small ones that need to scale up — the traced version is usually smaller than the PNG as well.
Where it does not
Photographs, screenshots of real interfaces, anything with a gradient, anything with a soft drop shadow, and anything where the subject is separated from its background by color rather than by brightness. In that last case the threshold sees two regions of similar lightness, merges them, and returns a silhouette of something that was never there.
If your source is one of those, the honest answer is that no converter will help and the shape has to be drawn.
Examples
A solid logo mark
The ideal case. Two tones, hard edges, and a shape the tracer can follow unambiguously. The SVG is smaller than the PNG and stays sharp at any size, which is the entire reason to do this.
A photograph of a coffee cup
The conversion succeeded and the result is useless. Everything above the brightness midpoint became white and everything below it black, so the cup is now a blotchy silhouette made of thousands of fragments — larger than the photograph and worse in every respect.
Frequently asked questions
Why can a photo not be converted to a proper vector?
Because the information was never recorded. A photograph is a grid of measured colors with no notion of shapes or edges; a vector is a list of shapes. Going from the second to the first is easy, and going back means inventing the shapes. Tracing guesses at them from brightness, which works when the image really is made of a few flat regions and fails when it is a continuous field of color.
What do the tools that claim to vectorise photos actually do?
Mostly the same thing with more steps: they posterise the image into a handful of color bands and trace each band separately. The output is a stack of flat color blobs that resembles the photo from a distance, in a file far larger than the original, that cannot be meaningfully edited. Some newer services generate a fresh illustration with a model instead, which is a different product, not a conversion.
Can I edit the result in Illustrator or Inkscape?
Yes — the output is ordinary SVG path data that any vector editor opens and edits. On clean source art the paths are few enough to adjust by hand. On messy source you will get thousands of tiny paths, which is technically editable and practically not worth it.
Should I trace, or redraw?
Trace when the artwork is simple and the original vector is genuinely lost — an old logo surviving only as a PNG is the classic case. Redraw when the shape matters and someone will look closely. A traced curve follows the pixel boundary, including its anti-aliasing wobble, so it is never quite as clean as one drawn deliberately.
Further reading
- A PNG Logo Wins Up to 128 Pixels, and the SVG Wins Everywhere AboveA vector file costs the same whatever size it is drawn at, and a raster costs what its grid costs — so there is a size where one overtakes the other. On a logo it arrives sooner than most people assume, and the file-size argument is the least important half of the decision anyway.
- Interlacing a PNG Made It 27% Bigger and Did Not HelpPNG has an interlacing option that shows a rough version of the image while it loads, in the same spirit as progressive JPEG. Unlike progressive JPEG, it is reliably and substantially more expensive — and the preview it produces is worse. Here is what it cost on two very different images.