PNG to SVG converter.
Trace a PNG — logo, icon, screenshot or transparent cut-out — into real SVG paths, then export the same trace to PDF, EPS, AI or DXF. Runs locally, no upload, no account.
Applies to images you add next — each one traces as it lands.
Transparency, handled honestly.
SVG has no background to show through, so an alpha channel has to be resolved before tracing. Transparent pixels are composited onto white — never black — so a cut-out logo keeps its intended colours instead of picking up a dark fringe.
Flat art traces as polygons.
Logos, icons and UI screenshots use a handful of colours, so the engine detects them automatically and traces straight-edged polygons. That is what keeps a traced logo's edges crisp instead of wobbly.
Palette PNGs too.
Indexed-colour PNGs — including ones with a transparency entry in their palette — are converted to RGB before tracing, so an 8-bit export from an older tool still comes out clean.
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.
PNG to SVG questions
- Will my transparent background stay transparent?
- No. A trace produces filled shapes, not an alpha channel, so transparency is flattened onto white before tracing begins. If you need the cut-out preserved, keep the original PNG and use the SVG alongside it.
- Why did my logo trace into polygons and my photo into curves?
- The engine counts distinct quantised colours on a downscaled copy of your image. Forty-eight or fewer and it treats the file as flat artwork and traces polygons; more than that and it treats it as photographic and traces splines. Most PNG logos fall on the polygon side, which is what you want for crisp edges.
- Can I trace a screenshot?
- Yes — screenshots are flat-colour artwork, so they are detected as polygon mode and trace quickly and cleanly. They are one of the best inputs for this tool.
- Can I convert several PNGs at once?
- Yes. Drop up to 12 images in one run — see the batch converter for how the run is parallelised. Tracing the batch is free; downloading the set as a single ZIP is part of Pro.
- What is free and what is Pro?
- Tracing and previewing are free and need no account. Pro Unlimited is the download: SVG, PDF, EPS, AI and DXF, one file or a whole batch as a ZIP. It is $9.99 a month, billed monthly with cancel-anytime access, and cancelling keeps access until the end of the period you have paid for.