Questions and answers

Not by converting. The whole conversion runs inside your browser using WebAssembly, and the page makes no third-party requests. There is one deliberate exception you control: if a result comes out poorly, you can tick a box to send that picture and the SVG it produced so the fault can be reproduced and fixed. Nothing is sent unless you tick it and press the button.

A real vector. The SVG contains only <path> elements with Bézier curves, grouped one <g> per colour. Turn on the Paths overlay to see the outlines and anchor points, or open the file in any vector editor and move the points.

PNG, JPG/JPEG and WebP go in. SVG comes out, plus PNG at 1×, 2× or 4× and copy-to-clipboard for the SVG code.

Not well. Vectorizing fits smooth shapes to areas of flat colour, so photos turn into a posterised illustration with many shapes. It is built for logos, lettering, signatures, sketches, icons and flat illustrations.

Switch on Transparent background in the Colours section. GetSVG detects the dominant colour around the border of the picture and removes it, so the SVG only contains the artwork.

Usually because the picture has soft shading or JPEG noise. Move the Detail slider towards Simpler, choose fewer colours in Full colour mode, or raise Remove specks in Fine-tune.

Yes. There is no account, no watermark and no file limit imposed by us; the only limit is your device's memory for very large pictures.

Adobe Illustrator, Figma, Inkscape, Affinity Designer, Sketch, CorelDRAW and every browser. Each colour arrives as its own group, so you can select, recolour or delete a whole layer at once.

Clean logo for flat marks with solid shapes, Hairline for thin-line logos and wordmarks, Brush for hand-lettered or brush logos. GetSVG picks one automatically from the picture; change it in the inspector if the result is not right.

Yes. In Black & white mode the ink colour is measured from the picture rather than forced to black, Ink + one colour keeps a single accent, and Full colour reduces the artwork to up to 16 flat colours. You can recolour any colour before exporting.

Download the SVG and drag it in. Each colour is a separate group, so a single click selects the whole colour; ungroup to edit individual shapes and points.

You can, but the result will be only as good as the edges in the file. Below 300 px GetSVG warns you; if a larger version exists anywhere (a website header, a PDF), use that instead.

Yes. When a printer, sign maker or embroiderer asks for vector artwork, they mean a file made of paths rather than pixels, so it can be scaled to any size and cut or separated cleanly. An SVG qualifies. If they specifically request EPS, AI or PDF, see the next answer.

Not directly; GetSVG exports SVG and PNG. Open the SVG in Inkscape, which is free, or in Illustrator and save as EPS, PDF or AI. The geometry is identical, only the container changes. Most print shops accept SVG anyway if you ask.

GetSVG detects it. If the shading is a straight fade it writes a genuine SVG linear gradient into the file, rather than flattening it to a single colour or breaking it into visible bands. Choose Full colour with the Smooth gradient option to get that.

Trace first, then click any colour swatch in the Colours section and enter your exact hex value. Recolouring happens at export time and does not re-trace, so the shapes are untouched. This matters because anti-aliasing shifts measured colours by a few percent.

In order: any PDF the company has published, since those often contain the original vector; the site's press or media kit page; the website header image at twice the displayed size; an email signature. A screenshot is the last resort.

GetSVG claims nothing over your output. But tracing does not transfer copyright: if the logo belongs to someone else, converting it to SVG does not give you the right to use it. Vectorizing your own or your client's logo is exactly what this is for.

Yes. Transparent areas are ignored as background, and the resulting SVG has no background rectangle. Semi-transparent edge pixels are composited onto the detected background colour before tracing so they do not become their own thin shapes.

No. GetSVG traces at two or three times the working size for logos, then fits smooth curves to the edge, so the soft grey fringe of anti-aliasing becomes a clean curve rather than a staircase.

Anything from about 500 px on the longest side upwards. Larger is better up to roughly 2200 px; beyond that the image is scaled down before tracing. Very small PNGs (under 300 px) are upscaled first, but the result will be rougher.

Yes, if the logo is reasonably large and not blurry. Crop away any UI around it first, and prefer a screenshot taken at 2× device pixel ratio.

A PNG stores a grid of coloured squares. Enlarge it and the squares get bigger, because there is no more detail to show. An SVG stores instructions: move here, curve to there, fill with this colour. It stays sharp at any size, and every shape can be selected and recoloured.

No, and no vectorizer can do that. Tracing turns letters into outlines, so the word becomes a set of shapes rather than type you can retype. If you need live text, identify the typeface and set it again in your design tool. The traced outline is still perfect for printing and cutting.

Because the tracer is fitting smooth curves through pixels, and where the original had a soft anti-aliased edge there is no single correct answer. Corners can round very slightly. Move Detail towards Faithful to follow the pixels more closely, or lower Smooth edges to keep corners sharper.

Switch on the Paths overlay before downloading; it draws every outline and anchor point over the result. You can also open the downloaded file in a text editor: a genuine vector contains <path> elements, while a fake one contains an <image> tag with a long block of encoded data.

None imposed by us. The practical limit is your device's memory, since everything happens in your browser. Pictures larger than 2200 pixels on the long side are scaled down before tracing, because past that point extra pixels add time without improving the curves.

JPEG compression adds blocky noise around edges. GetSVG's Remove specks control deletes the tiny stray shapes that noise creates; the Sketch preset and the Simpler end of the Detail slider help further.

Yes. JPG has no transparency, but the Transparent background switch detects the dominant border colour (usually white) and removes it, so the SVG has no background.

Slightly. Chroma subsampling blurs colour boundaries, so in Full colour mode use fewer colours (6-8) for a clean logo, and let the palette merging fold the halos into the neighbouring colour.

Yes. Choose the Sketch preset: it softens scanned edges and removes paper grain. For pencil work, raise Stroke thickness if faint lines break up.

Nothing. They are the same format with two spellings, left over from an era when file extensions were limited to three letters. GetSVG accepts both.

You can, but you will not like it. Vectorizing works by fitting shapes to areas of flat colour, and a photograph has none, so the result is a posterised approximation made of hundreds of shapes. It is honestly not what this tool is for. Use it for logos, lettering, signatures and flat artwork.

That halo is JPEG ringing, and it is one of the things the tracer is built to ignore. The palette is learned only from the flat interior of each colour region, so edge artefacts never become their own colour layer. If a halo still survives, move Detail towards Simpler.

No. That would not restore the detail JPEG compression discarded; it would only make a larger file containing the same artefacts. Trace the JPG directly, or find a higher quality original if one exists.

It can. Crop to the artwork before loading so the background detection sees paper rather than your desk, shoot in even light with no shadow across the page, and hold the camera square to the page. Then use the Sketch preset.

GetSVG measures each colour from the pixels rather than assuming pure black, and JPEG compression shifts those pixels a little. If you know the exact brand colour, click the swatch in the Colours section and type the hex value before downloading.

No. Every current browser decodes WebP natively, so GetSVG reads the file directly, including transparency and animation's first frame.

Mostly. Lossy WebP has less blocking than JPEG but still smooths edges; if you see stray specks, raise Remove specks or use the Sketch preset. Lossless WebP behaves exactly like PNG.

Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari 14+ and their mobile versions. If a very old browser cannot decode the file, GetSVG shows an inline error instead of a blank result.

WebP is an image format Google published in 2010. It stores the same picture in a smaller file than PNG or JPEG, which is why most modern websites serve it. If you saved an image from a site recently and got a file you could not open, it was probably a WebP.

Yes. Both lossy and lossless WebP can carry an alpha channel, and GetSVG treats it exactly like PNG transparency: transparent areas count as background, and the SVG comes out with no background rectangle.

Only the first frame. The browser hands over a single still image when it decodes an animated file, and that is what gets traced. If you need a later frame, extract it first in any image editor.

It depends on the size. Web images are often 200 to 400 px wide, and below 300 px GetSVG warns you that the trace will be rough. Check whether the site offers a larger version: look for a file name ending in @2x, or open the image in a new tab and see whether it loads bigger.

They store completely different things. WebP compresses pixels very efficiently; an SVG stores the coordinates of every curve. For a simple logo the SVG is usually smaller. For a detailed illustration with many shapes it can be larger, and that is the honest trade for being able to scale it to any size.

Yes. The tool runs in mobile Chrome and Safari, and the settings panel becomes a sheet at the bottom of the screen. Very large images may be slow, because the tracing uses your phone's processor rather than a server.

After the page has loaded, yes. Open the developer tools, switch the network to offline, and tracing and downloading keep working. That is the simplest proof that your file is not being uploaded.

It samples the colour around the border of your picture, then floods inwards from the edge, taking every pixel that is both close to that colour and connected to the edge. That is why a white page around a logo disappears but a white highlight in the middle of the logo does not.

They should not, and normally they do not. As well as the flood fill, any pixel very close to the background colour is removed wherever it sits, which clears the holes in letters like O and A. If a counter survived, its shade is probably further from the background than it looks; try nudging Detail towards Faithful and re-checking.

Not reliably. The detection assumes one plain colour behind the artwork. If the background is a gradient, a pattern or a photograph, crop it away first in any image editor, or accept that it will be traced as shapes.

No. The output contains only the paths that make up your artwork. Open it in a text editor and you will find no background rectangle at all, which is why it drops cleanly onto a coloured page.

That is the preview showing you where the file is transparent, the same convention Photoshop and Figma use. The checkerboard is not part of the SVG.

Design Space will import a PNG, but it has to guess where the cut line goes, and it guesses from pixels. An SVG already contains the outline as a mathematical path, so the machine cuts exactly that line. You also get to scale the design to any size without the edge going soft.

Yes. GetSVG writes one group per colour, and Design Space reads each group as its own layer. A two-colour design arrives as two layers you can assign to two mats, or weld together if you want one cut.

Anything under about 1 mm tends to tear on vinyl. Trace it, then check the Paths overlay: if a stroke is only a few anchor points wide it will be fragile. Raise Stroke thickness in Fine-tune to fatten it, or scale the whole design up before cutting.

No. Leave Transparent background switched on and GetSVG removes the plain colour around your artwork, so Design Space does not add a rectangle cut around everything.

GetSVG adds no licence of its own to your output; the file is yours. But tracing someone else's artwork does not give you the right to sell it. Check the licence of the original image.

LightBurn, Glowforge, xTool Creative Space and LaserGRBL all import SVG directly. Drop the downloaded file in and the paths arrive as cut or engrave geometry.

GetSVG exports SVG and PNG only. To get DXF, open the SVG in Inkscape, which is free, and use Save As with the DXF format. The geometry is unchanged by that step.

GetSVG produces filled shapes, not open strokes, so each path is a closed outline. Laser software usually reads that as a fill operation, which suits engraving. For cutting, set the layer to line mode and the machine follows the same outline.

Use the Hairline preset. It traces at three times the working size and biases the threshold so faint strokes still count as ink. If lines are still breaking, raise Stroke thickness a few steps.

Yes. Every separate shape adds a travel move. If the stats pill shows hundreds of shapes for a simple design, move Detail towards Simpler or raise Remove specks before you download.

Free at the download step. There is no account, no watermark, no credit system and no daily limit. The project is funded by donations, so the only thing you will ever be asked for is optional.

On photographs and painterly artwork. Their tracer is a machine-learning model trained for exactly that, and it handles complex images far better than a classical algorithm can. If you are vectorizing a photo, use them.

Logos, lettering, signatures, sketches and flat illustrations, which is what most people are actually converting. You also get the file free, your image is never uploaded, and you can inspect the anchor points before committing.

Switch on the Paths overlay. It draws every outline and every anchor point over the result, so you can see the geometry before you download. Several converters return an SVG that simply wraps your original bitmap; that trick cannot survive this view.

Yes. The output is your file and we claim nothing over it.