PNG to SVG Converter
Converting a PNG to an SVG is not a format change, it is a redrawing. A PNG is a grid of colored squares; an SVG is a set of outlines. Getting from one to the other means finding the edges in the picture and following them, which works beautifully on logos, icons, and line art and poorly on photographs. This page does that tracing in your browser, shows you the result next to the original, and tells you how many paths and nodes it produced — the number that decides whether what you get back is something you can actually edit.
Drop a logo, icon, or line drawing
PNG, JPG, WEBP, GIF, BMP, AVIF, HEIC, or ICO, up to 4 megapixels. Tracing runs in this browser tab — the image is never uploaded.
Nothing traced yet. Line art — logos, icons, signatures, screenshots of flat graphics — traces into clean paths you can edit. Photographs do not, and this page will tell you when that is what happened.
Keep editing the vector you just made
The SVG downloads as paths, not a picture of paths. Moda is a vector editor — open it, recolor it, set type against it, and export at any size.
Try Moda free →What tracing actually does
The tracer runs in four steps, and every control on this page changes one of them. First it flattens the image to a small set of flat colors — two in black-and-white mode, or however many you ask for. Then it finds the connected regions of each color. Then it walks the boundary of each region, following the staircase between pixels all the way around, including any holes. Finally it throws away the points that were only there because pixels are square: a straight edge collapses to two points, and a curve keeps enough to describe itself. What comes out is a path per region, which is why the shape count and the node count are worth looking at before you download.
Why line art works and photographs do not
Tracing needs edges — places where the color changes abruptly and stays changed. A logo is nothing but edges, so it traces into a handful of clean paths that look better than the original at any size. A photograph has almost none: it is a continuous gradient with noise on top, and a tracer given a photograph does the only thing it can, which is to carve the gradient into hundreds of thousands of little polygons. The result is a file that is larger than the JPG, slower to open, impossible to edit, and worse to look at. This page will tell you when that has happened rather than letting you find out in Illustrator. If you came here with a photo, the honest answer is that you want the background remover or a format converter, not a vectorizer.
What each control changes
Color mode decides how the image is flattened. Black and white gives you one silhouette and a threshold slider that decides what counts as ink — the right mode for a signature, a stamp, or a single-color logo. A limited palette keeps a handful of flat colors, which is what most brand marks actually are. Full color keeps up to sixty-four, useful for illustrations and terrible for photos. Simplify sets how far the outline may move from the pixels, in pixels: raise it and you get fewer nodes and softer detail. Smoothing turns corners into curves without moving the outline off the traced points. Speckle removal drops regions below a pixel count, which is how you get rid of the JPEG artifacts around a logo that was saved badly. Background removal drops whichever color dominates the image border, so a logo on white comes out on transparency instead.
Limits, and why they exist
Input is capped at four megapixels — about 2000x2000 — and at twelve thousand traced regions. Both caps exist because tracing cost climbs with resolution and color count far faster than file size suggests: a twelve-megapixel photo is an ordinary file that would take a tab minutes to trace and produce something nobody wants. Neither limit costs you anything real, because vector output has no resolution: a logo traced at 800 pixels wide prints at any size. If your image is bigger than the cap, resize it first and trace the smaller copy. If it breaks into more regions than the cap allows, that is the tool telling you the input is a photograph.
Frequently asked questions
Is my image uploaded anywhere?
No. The decoding, the tracing, and the SVG all happen in this tab, on your processor, and the page has no upload route to send them to. That is unusual for a vectorizer — tracing is expensive, so most services run it on a server, which means your logo sits on somebody else's disk. The one exception here is shared with every image tool on this site: if you hand it a HEIC photo, the page downloads a WebAssembly decoder to read it, because no browser decodes HEIC natively. Your file still stays put.
Will the SVG look exactly like my PNG?
Close, but not identical, and the difference is the point. Tracing redraws the image with outlines, so anti-aliased edges become crisp, near-identical colors merge, and fine texture disappears. On a logo that is an improvement — you get back the sharp original the PNG was flattened from. On anything with soft shading or a gradient, expect visible banding where the tracer had to pick a color. Compare the two panels before you download; that is what they are there for.
How many nodes is too many?
Under a few hundred is a graphic you can edit by hand — select a point, drag it, done. A few thousand is still a usable vector but not one you will edit node by node. Past twenty thousand you have a photograph in a vector container: it will open, it will render slowly, and no editor will make it pleasant to work with. Raising simplification and speckle removal, or dropping the color count, brings the number down; if none of that helps, the input is the problem rather than the settings.
Can I convert an SVG back to PNG?
Yes, on the SVG converter, which rasterizes an SVG at whatever size you ask for — the direction that always works cleanly, because turning outlines into pixels needs no guessing. It is the right move when a platform refuses SVG uploads, which many still do.
Does the traced SVG keep transparency?
Yes. Pixels that were transparent in the original are never traced, so they stay transparent. Background removal goes further and drops the color that dominates the image border, which is how you turn a logo sitting on a white rectangle into a logo on nothing. If your whole image comes back empty, that is background removal doing its job on an image that is one flat color — untick it.