Trace PNG and JPG into SVG in the browser, with color and detail controls, a side-by-side preview and no upload.
A PNG or JPG stores a grid of pixels. An SVG stores shapes, described by points and curves, which is why it can be enlarged without losing sharpness. This tool takes you from one to the other, a process called tracing or vectorizing. First the image colors are reduced to a short palette (the Colors control). Then each color becomes a layer, the outline of every region is followed pixel by pixel and fitted with straight lines and quadratic curves (the Detail control decides how far that fit may drift from the pixels). The result is an SVG with one path per color, validated before you download it. The engine is imagetracerjs, which is public domain, and everything runs in your browser in a separate process so the page does not freeze. It is worth being direct about the limit: tracing is good on logos, icons, stamps and flat art, and only fair on photos, which become a poster with a few colors.
Tracing starts with color. The tool builds a palette of up to 32 colors from the pixels, preferring rare but distinct colors (the small red in a logo) over variations of the dominant color, and it discards tones that are only a blend of two larger colors, the so-called antialiasing of edges. Then every pixel takes the nearest palette color.
Each color becomes a layer. The algorithm walks the edge of every region point by point and tries to cover the run of points with a straight line. If the error exceeds the tolerance it tries a quadratic curve, and if that still fails it splits the run and repeats. The tolerance is what the Detail control sets: at detail 5 it is 1 px, at 10 it drops to about 0.13 px, and at 1 it rises to about 5 px.
Logos, icons, flat-color illustrations, stamps, scanned signatures and line drawings work well. In those cases the SVG is usually much smaller than the PNG and scales to any size, from a 16 px icon to a billboard.
Photos, long gradients and soft shadows are the weak spot. Every color transition needs another layer, and at 24 or 32 colors the result looks like a poster, not a photo. If your goal is to enlarge a photo without losing quality, tracing is not the way.
Start from the largest version of the logo you have, preferably a PNG. A small, heavily compressed JPG carries compression blotches around the letters, and the tool tries to turn those into shapes. Smoothing 1 or 2 helps, but it does not replace a clean source.
If the outline of a pencil drawing comes out broken, raise Detail and choose the Line art preset, which separates only ink and paper. If tiny specks are left, lower Detail: it also filters small blobs.
Paste the code into your HTML and the tool shows up on your page, without J-Kit's navigation and ads. It still runs in the browser of whoever visits your site.
<iframe
src="https://jkit.tools/embed/en-US/image-to-svg-converter"
width="100%"
height="600"
style="border:0"
loading="lazy"
title="Image to SVG Converter"
></iframe>
<p style="font-size:12px;margin:6px 0 0">Tool by <a href="https://jkit.tools/en/tools/image-to-svg-converter">J-Kit</a></p>Using it in a paper, class or post? Copy the link or a ready-made reference. The access date is today's.
<a href="https://jkit.tools/en/tools/image-to-svg-converter">Image to SVG Converter</a>
These references help contextualize formulas, standards, APIs and limitations used on this page. They do not replace professional validation when a result has legal, financial, medical or operational impact.
Upload the image, pick the type (Logo works for most cases) and download the SVG. The conversion is a trace: the tool reduces the colors, follows the outline of every region and writes shapes instead of pixels. It is not just wrapping the PNG inside an SVG file, which would still be a picture made of pixels.
Tracing works best on logos, icons and flat art. Photos turn into a posterized version, like a poster print.