JPG to SVG converter.
Turn a JPEG photo or scan into real SVG paths. Compression noise is left to the tracer, and photos are traced as smooth splines. Export PDF, EPS, AI or DXF from the same run.
Trace preset:Balanced (Auto)▼
Applies to images you add next — each one traces as it lands.
No smoothing, on purpose.
JPEG artefacts are left alone before tracing: every smoothing pass we measured cost more edge detail than the speckle was worth. The tracer's own 4px speckle filter drops the single-pixel junk at full fidelity instead.
Photos traced as splines.
Photographic input is detected automatically and traced with smooth Bezier output rather than straight segments, so gradients and soft edges do not come out faceted.
Three presets, real trade-offs.
Sharp traces at up to 3840px for maximum detail, Balanced and Compact at 3072px — Compact with lighter colour layering for smaller files. Pick per job — the preset applies as each trace starts, so a change part-way through affects the images still queued.
What happens to your image
The same five steps run for every file you drop, whether it is one logo or twelve photos.
- Step 1
Normalised
The raster is opened with Pillow and converted to RGB. Transparency is composited onto white, and palette or CMYK images are converted to three clean channels.
- Step 2
Downsampled to fit
The image is resampled with LANCZOS only when it is wider than the preset cap — 3840px for Sharp, 3072px for Balanced and Compact — and is never upscaled, so the canvas is never larger than the source.
- Step 3
Mode detected
The engine counts distinct quantised colours on a 256px thumbnail. Forty-eight or fewer means flat artwork, which traces as straight-edged polygons; more than that means photographic, which traces as smooth splines.
- Step 4
Traced
vtracer builds stacked colour layers into filled paths. Per-path translate transforms are folded into absolute coordinates, a viewBox is added, and the path data is pretty-printed so the file is readable in an editor.
- Step 5
Exported on request
The trace is always SVG. PDF, EPS, AI and DXF are produced from that SVG only when you pick them, so a batch is never slowed down building files nobody asked for.
JPG to SVG questions
- Why does my traced JPG look blotchy?
- Usually a low-quality source: heavy JPEG compression creates colour patches that the tracer faithfully turns into shapes. Try the Sharp preset for more detail, or Compact if the file came out with thousands of tiny paths you do not need.
- How many paths will a photo produce?
- It depends on how much distinct colour the image contains, not on its resolution. A 1600×1067 photo traced here produced 28,973 paths and a 16 MB SVG. Use Compact if you need something lighter.
- Will the white background become a shape?
- Yes. A trace converts every region it sees, including background, into filled paths. There is no background removal step — that is a different job from vectorisation.
- How large a JPG can I upload?
- About 45 MB. Anything larger is rejected up front rather than failing partway through a trace.