Image to SVG (bitmap tracing)

Features

• Colour tracing and black-and-white tracing
• Adjustable colour count (2–64): fewer is cleaner, more looks closer
• Three detail levels, moving the fit tolerance and the speck filter together
• Adjustable trace size (long edge 400–2000 px), which sets the file size and the time taken
• A light blur is applied first, to suppress JPEG and scanner noise that would otherwise trace as thousands of specks
• Transparent areas are flattened to white — otherwise each one traces as a black patch
• The output is standards-compliant SVG, editable in Illustrator, Figma or Inkscape
• The result card reports the path count, the most direct measure of how far it deviates from the original
• Everything runs locally in the browser; the image is never uploaded

How to use

1. Drop the image in, or click to choose one
2. Pick colour or black and white
3. Start at 16 colours, then go down if it is too busy or up if it is not close enough
4. Generate and download the SVG

FAQ

Why did my photo come out as a heap of colour blobs?

Because photos are not suited to vectorising. The approach finds colour boundaries and draws them as polygons, but in a photo almost every pixel differs slightly from its neighbour — so the result is either a few hundred blocks (which reads as a collage) or tens of thousands of paths (a file bigger than the original). The test is simple: count the colours. An icon, logo or line drawing has dozens or fewer and traces cleanly; a photo has tens of thousands and gives the result above. Vectorising a photo properly needs an AI-style model, which is a different kind of tool.

What colour count should I use?

Start at 16. Going down (8, 4) makes the picture more poster-like and the file smaller, which suits icons and line art; going up (32, 64) looks closer to the original, but the path count climbs fast and the file with it. Note that this and Detail are different knobs: the colour count decides how many colours are used, while detail decides how precisely the boundaries are traced and how small a speck is discarded.

What does the trace size do?

It sets how far the image is scaled down before tracing (long edge in pixels), which directly determines the time taken and the file size, since the path count scales with pixel count. A 4000 px image traced at 2000 has roughly four times the paths of one traced at 800. The default of 800 is enough for most icons; dense line art (sheet music, maps) can go to 1200 or 2000, at a noticeably larger file. It never enlarges your image: anything smaller than the limit is traced at its own size.

Why does a transparent PNG come out with white edges?

The tool flattens transparent areas to white before tracing. The tracing algorithm only looks at the RGB channels, and a transparent pixel is `rgba(0,0,0,0)` — black but invisible — so without that step every transparent region would be traced as a black patch and the result would be a dark smear on a light background. With the white underlay, transparency becomes white (the background colour), matching how the image looks. If you want a transparent SVG, delete that white layer in a vector editor after exporting.

Is my image uploaded?

No. Decoding, tracing and generation all happen in browser memory; the page makes no requests and works offline.