PNG to SVG converter

Pixels vs. paths

A PNG is a fixed grid of pixels: enlarge it and the grid shows, so edges go blocky and soft. An SVG instead describes an image as mathematical shapes — paths, curves and fills — which the browser redraws sharply at any size, from a 16-pixel favicon to a billboard. That scalability is why logos, icons and simple illustrations belong in SVG, and it is also why SVGs are tiny for flat artwork and can be styled or animated with CSS. Converting a PNG into an SVG means turning that grid of pixels back into shapes, a process called tracing or vectorization.

How tracing works — and its limits

The tracer first reduces your image to a small palette (the colors control sets how many), groups adjacent pixels of similar color into regions, and redraws the outline of each region as a vector path. This works beautifully on flat-color art — logos, line drawings, icons, silhouettes — where there are a handful of clean color areas to outline. It works badly on photographs: a photo has thousands of subtly different colors and soft gradients, so tracing it either produces a posterized, cartoon-like approximation or an enormous file full of tiny paths. The honest rule is that tracing recovers shapes, not photographic detail. Raise the color count for fidelity, lower it for cleaner, smaller output.

Local conversion and the round trip

The whole trace runs in your browser with nothing uploaded. Because the result is generated rather than hand-drawn, treat it as a starting point you may want to clean up — and run it through the SVG optimizer to strip the redundant precision tracing tends to leave behind. Going the other way, rasterize a vector back to pixels with SVG to PNG, or turn a finished mark into a full icon set with the favicon generator.