How it works
From JPG to SVG, in three steps
- 01
Choose a JPG file
Drop a .jpg logo or icon in; flat graphics with few colors trace best.
- 02
Pick color mode and detail
Color or black & white, plus a detail level. A live preview updates as you adjust either one.
- 03
Download SVG
Your traced .svg downloads straight to your device. It never touched a server.
Unlike this site's other converters, this isn't a reformat or a re-encode: it's tracing. The tool examines your JPG's pixel content, clusters similar colors into regions, and fits vector curves around where those regions meet, constructing an SVG's paths from the ground up rather than repackaging the original pixels.
That's real, nontrivial computation, the heaviest thing on this site, and all of it runs client-side, nothing is ever sent off your device. While you adjust the settings below, a small, fast preview updates so you get a rough sense of the outcome before running the full conversion.
When you need this
A logo you only have as a compressed JPG
If a vector source file was never kept, or it's a scan or a screenshot of a logo, tracing it into SVG paths gets you back to something that scales cleanly instead of staying locked at one resolution.
You need shapes you can actually edit
Vector paths can be individually recolored, reshaped, and resized in design software, node by node if needed. A JPG offers none of that; it's one flat block of pixels.
Prepping simple artwork for cutting or engraving machines
Laser cutters, vinyl cutters, and CNC tools generally expect vector input, not a pixel grid. Tracing a basic logo or icon is usually where that pipeline starts.
Scaling without the blur JPG compression leaves behind
A JPG enlarged past its native resolution gets soft and blocky. A traced SVG scales to any size afterward with clean, sharp edges, since it's genuine vector geometry from that point on.
Worked example
Say you have a scanned or exported wordmark.jpg, a simple text logo in one or two colors, and you need it as editable vector art for a print job.
Drop it in above. Pick Color or Black & white, and a detail level from Low to High, lower produces a tighter, simpler file, higher holds onto more of the original's edges at the cost of size and trace time. The live preview updates as you change either one, a quick low-resolution pass meant to give you a feel for the result, not a preview of the final file itself. When it looks right, click convert and you'll get wordmark.svg as real vector paths.
Results are strongest here on exactly this kind of source: a simple graphic with few distinct colors. A genuine photograph behaves very differently in this tool, and it flags that directly, before the full trace runs, rather than quietly handing back a disappointing result.
Format explainer
A JPG is a fixed pixel grid, and on top of that, a lossy one: encoding it discarded some visual detail permanently, and any JPEG "ringing" artifacts around hard edges get treated as real image content once this tool starts tracing. SVG is the opposite kind of thing entirely, actual geometric paths and fill colors, math instead of a grid, which is exactly what lets it scale to any size with nothing lost.
Turning pixels into geometry that was never explicitly stored is inherently a judgment call, not a mechanical operation, which is why this tool exposes real settings (color mode, detail level) instead of one plain "convert" button. A flat two-color logo traces predictably well almost regardless of those settings. A busy photo does not: pushing detail higher there mostly inflates the file without meaningfully improving how it looks, since there was never a small set of clean shapes to find in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
No, and this tool is upfront about that rather than letting the output speak for itself. Tracing works by finding and outlining regions of similar color, and a photo simply doesn't have those, it's continuous tonal variation almost everywhere. The result is either a bloated SVG trying to capture all that detail, or a heavily simplified one that no longer resembles the photo. A warning appears before the full trace runs if your source looks photographic.
It controls how aggressively small regions and fine edges get merged together versus kept apart. Low favors a smaller, cleaner file over faithfulness to every detail; High favors keeping more of the original's distinct shapes and colors separate, which costs you file size and trace speed. For a simple logo, Medium is usually enough.
Because how a trace turns out depends heavily on your color mode and detail choices, and there's genuinely no universal best setting. The preview runs a fast, small version of the same trace so you can judge the tradeoff visually before spending the time on a full-resolution conversion.
That almost always points to a source image with more real color complexity than expected, whether or not it reads as a 'photo' at a glance, JPEG compression noise can do this too. This tool warns you rather than silently handing over a multi-megabyte file that defeats the point of using SVG at all: black-and-white mode, a lower detail level, or a cleaner source image usually helps.
Tracing is the single most demanding operation on this site, and a large or intricate image can take a real few seconds. It's kept off the main thread so the tab keeps responding while that happens, and image size at full resolution is capped automatically to keep that worst case bounded.
No. Every part of this, including fetching the tracing engine itself, happens locally in your browser, the same as every other tool on this site. Check your browser's DevTools Network tab mid-conversion if you'd like to verify that directly.