Why you can’t just rename it
PNG and SVG describe images in completely different ways. A PNG lists the color of every pixel. An SVG lists shapes — paths, circles, fills. Changing .png to .svg changes nothing inside the file, and a program that opens it will either refuse or show you the same pixels.
Some converters go a step further and wrap the PNG inside an SVG. That is technically an SVG file, but one holding a single embedded picture: it scales no better than the PNG, can’t be recolored, and is no use to a cutter or a print shop that asked for vector. A real conversion traces the image — it finds the regions of color and draws each one as a path.
PNG to SVG in four steps
- Upload the PNG or JPG on the home page: drag it in, browse for it, or paste it. It’s traced straight away.
- Check the colors. Open Settings → Palette to merge stray shades, hide the background, or set exact colors.
- Pick SVG in the Format row, and a preset: General use for most things, Easy editing if you’ll recolor it, Cutting & engraving for a cutter.
- Apply and download. Settings that change the shapes need Apply changes first; then Download.
The full walkthrough explains every option on the way.
PNG: transparency is on your side
PNG is the better starting point. It’s lossless, so edges are exactly as they were saved, and it can carry transparency.
Transparent pixels are left out of the trace: they get no palette color and produce no path. A logo saved as a PNG on a transparent background becomes an SVG on a transparent background, with no extra steps. Semi-transparent pixels — the soft rim around an anti-aliased edge — are treated as either opaque or transparent at the halfway point, so the edge stays crisp instead of growing a ring of faint color.
JPG: plan for the compression
JPG compression throws away detail the eye isn’t supposed to notice — but a tracer notices everything. Around every hard edge, JPEG leaves a faint halo of noise, and across flat areas it can leave blocky shifts in shade. Traced literally, those become slivers and specks.
- Use fewer colors. Merging the noise into the colors on either side of an edge removes most of it.
- Raise the minimum area (Advanced → Small regions) so leftover specks dissolve into their neighbours.
- Remove the background. JPG has no transparency, so a logo “on white” sits on white pixels. Hide that color, or switch on Remove background.
- Look for a PNG first. If one exists anywhere, it will trace cleaner.
What about WEBP?
WEBP is accepted too. Lossless WEBP behaves like PNG; lossy WEBP has compression artifacts much like JPG, so the same advice applies. Transparency in a WEBP is handled exactly as in a PNG.
What you get
The SVG you download is built from real paths, sized to your image. Open it in a browser, Figma, Inkscape, Illustrator, or Affinity Designer and every shape can be selected. A few options shape the file itself:
- Version: SVG 1.1 by default, with 1.0 and Tiny 1.2 for older or embedded software.
- Adobe compatible: writes elliptical arcs as Bézier curves, which Illustrator’s importer handles reliably.
- Fixed size: writes a width and height onto the file, for tools that need to know its physical size.
- Group by: collects shapes into groups — by color, for example, with the Easy editing preset.
The vector format guide compares SVG with EPS, PDF, and DXF.
Checking it’s really vector
Open the SVG in a text editor. You should see <path> elements whose d attributes are long strings of numbers — that’s the geometry. An <image> element holding a data: URL means a wrapped raster, not a trace. Or zoom to 1,000% in your browser: a real vector stays razor sharp. More on spotting the difference in raster vs. vector images.