JPG to SVG converter.
Turn a JPEG photo or scan into real SVG paths. Compression noise is filtered out before tracing, and photos are traced as smooth splines. Export PDF, EPS, AI or DXF from the same run.
Applies to images you add next — each one traces as it lands.
Compression noise removed first.
JPEG artefacts are exactly the kind of speckle a tracer turns into junk paths, so every image passes through a 3×3 median filter before tracing. It kills blocking and sensor mottling while leaving real edges alone.
Photos traced as splines.
Photographic input is detected automatically and traced with smooth Bezier output rather than straight segments, so gradients and soft edges do not come out faceted.
Three presets, real trade-offs.
Sharp resamples to 1300px for maximum detail, Balanced to 1100px, Compact to 900px and rounds coordinates harder for smaller files. Pick per job — the preset applies to images you add next.
What happens to your image
The same five steps run for every file you drop, whether it is one logo or twelve photos.
- Step 1
Normalised
The raster is opened with Pillow and converted to RGB. Transparency is composited onto white, and palette or CMYK images are converted to three clean channels.
- Step 2
Resampled and denoised
The image is resampled with LANCZOS to the preset width — 1300px for Sharp, 1100px for Balanced, 900px for Compact — and passed through a 3×3 median filter that removes compression speckle without softening edges.
- Step 3
Mode detected
The engine counts distinct quantised colours on a 256px thumbnail. Forty-eight or fewer means flat artwork, which traces as straight-edged polygons; more than that means photographic, which traces as smooth splines.
- Step 4
Traced
vtracer builds stacked colour layers into filled paths. Per-path translate transforms are folded into absolute coordinates, a viewBox is added, and the path data is pretty-printed so the file is readable in an editor.
- Step 5
Exported on request
The trace is always SVG. PDF, EPS, AI and DXF are produced from that SVG only when you pick them, so a batch is never slowed down building files nobody asked for.
JPG to SVG questions
- Why does my traced JPG look blotchy?
- Usually a low-quality source: heavy JPEG compression creates colour patches that the tracer faithfully turns into shapes. Try the Sharp preset for more detail, or Compact if the file came out with thousands of tiny paths you do not need.
- How many paths will a photo produce?
- It depends on how much distinct colour the image contains, not on its resolution. A 1100×2075 photo traced here produced 15,109 paths and an 18 MB SVG. Use Compact if you need something lighter.
- Will the white background become a shape?
- Yes. A trace converts every region it sees, including background, into filled paths. There is no background removal step — that is a different job from vectorisation.
- How large a JPG can I upload?
- About 45 MB. Anything larger is rejected up front rather than failing partway through a trace.