How it works
From PNG to SVG, in three steps
- 01
Choose a PNG file
Drop a .png 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.
This is a genuinely different kind of conversion from resizing or re-encoding an image: it's tracing. The tool analyzes your PNG's actual pixel content, groups similar colors into regions, and fits vector curves around the boundaries of those regions, building an SVG from scratch, not just wrapping the pixels in a new container.
Because that's real computational work, not a fast reformat, this is the heaviest thing this site does client-side, and it runs entirely in your browser with no exceptions, nothing is sent anywhere to be processed. A quick, low-resolution preview updates as you adjust the settings below so you can see roughly what you'll get before committing to the full-size trace.
When you need this
A logo or icon you only have as a flat raster file
If the original vector source is long gone and all that's left is a PNG export, tracing it back into SVG paths lets you scale it cleanly again instead of being stuck at one fixed resolution.
You need an editable shape, not locked-in pixels
SVG paths can be recolored, resized, and edited node by node in vector software. A PNG can only be cropped, resized, or filtered as a whole image.
Preparing artwork for laser cutting, vinyl, or CNC work
Many fabrication tools expect vector paths, not a pixel grid, as their input. Tracing a simple logo or shape into SVG is often the first real step in that pipeline.
A crisp result at any display size, from here on
Once traced, the shape scales to any size with no blur, the same property every SVG has, which a raster PNG simply can't offer past its original resolution.
Worked example
Say you have logo-mark.png, a simple two-color brand icon exported years ago, and the vector original is nowhere to be found.
Drop the file in above. Choose Color or Black & white for the trace, and a detail level (Low, Medium, or High) that trades a smaller, simpler file against one that keeps more of the original's fine edges. Watch the live preview update as you adjust either setting, it's a fast, low-resolution trace meant to give you a rough sense of the result, not the final output. Once it looks right, click convert and you'll get logo-mark.svg with real, scalable vector paths.
This works best on exactly this kind of input: a flat graphic with a small number of distinct colors. A photograph traces very differently, and this tool tells you so directly if what you dropped in looks photographic, before you commit to the full trace.
Format explainer
PNG is a fixed grid of pixels, useful and universal, but it has no concept of "shape" the way a designer would think about one; every pixel is just an independent color value. SVG describes an image as actual geometry: paths, curves, fill colors, math rather than a grid. Getting from one to the other means algorithmically discovering shapes that were never explicitly there to begin with, which is a fundamentally harder, fuzzier problem than the reverse direction (rendering an SVG to pixels, which this site's SVG to PNG tool does, is comparatively mechanical).
That's why this tool's real controls, color mode and detail level, matter: there's no single "correct" way to trace a raster image, only tradeoffs between file size, faithfulness, and how clean the resulting paths look. A flat logo with three colors traces into a small, clean SVG almost regardless of settings. A busy photograph does not, and pushing detail higher on a photo mostly means a bigger, messier file, not a better one.
Frequently asked questions
Not really, and this tool says so upfront rather than pretending otherwise. Vectorization is built for flat graphics: logos, icons, line art, a handful of distinct colors. A photograph has continuous, gradual color variation everywhere, which either traces into an impractically large SVG or gets simplified down to something that no longer looks like the original photo. If what you dropped in looks photographic, you'll see a warning before you commit to the full trace.
Low produces a smaller, more simplified SVG, more small details get merged together or dropped. High keeps more of the original's distinct colors and fine edges apart, at the cost of a larger file and a slower trace. Medium is a reasonable middle ground for most logos and icons.
Because tracing has real, visible tradeoffs depending on your settings, and there's no single right answer for every image. The preview is a fast, small-scale version of the trace so you can see roughly what color mode and detail level will produce before running the full, slower conversion on the whole image.
This usually means the source image had more continuous color variation than expected, closer to a photo than flat graphics, even if it didn't look that way at a glance. This tool flags that explicitly rather than handing you a multi-megabyte 'vector' file with no explanation: try black-and-white mode, a lower detail level, or a flatter source image instead.
Tracing is genuinely the heaviest computation this site does, and it can take a few real seconds on a large or highly detailed image. It runs in a background thread specifically so your tab stays responsive while that happens, and very large source images are automatically scaled down first to keep worst-case processing time reasonable.
No, not even for the heavy tracing step. Everything, including loading the tracing engine itself, happens locally in your browser. You can confirm that yourself by watching DevTools' Network tab during a conversion.