GetSVG

Picture to SVG, in your browser.

Drop a picture and get real vector shapes. Free, and nothing is uploaded.

Drop a PNG, JPG or WebP
or paste from the clipboard
Best from 500 px wide, sharp edges, plain background
Or try:

Turn a picture into an SVG

Drop a picture above and it becomes an SVG: a file made of shapes rather than dots, which stays sharp at any size and can be sent to a printer, a cutting machine or a website. It happens on your own computer, it takes about a second, and there is nothing to sign up for.

Before you do, one honest paragraph, because it will save you more time than any tip.

Which pictures work, and which do not

This works by finding the boundaries between areas of colour and drawing shapes along them. So it works beautifully when your picture has flat colours with clear edges, and poorly when it does not.

  • Works well: a logo, a sign, a symbol, hand lettering, a signature, a pencil or ink drawing, a stencil, an icon, a screenshot of a simple graphic, a scanned sketch.
  • Works with a little tuning: a photo of something drawn on paper, a picture with a slightly uneven background, an image saved as a low-quality JPG.
  • Does not work: photographs of people, places, food or products. A photograph has no flat areas at all, only shading that changes continuously, so there is nothing definite for the shapes to follow. You get a poster-effect version made of hundreds of overlapping blobs. No tool does this well, ours included.

If your picture is in the last group and you still need it as vector artwork, a designer redrawing it by hand is genuinely the answer.

Getting a good result

  1. Start with the biggest copy you have. A picture around 1000 pixels across works well. Below 300 you will see a warning, and the result will show it.
  2. Crop to the part you want. If the picture has a desk, a hand or a browser window around the artwork, trim those away first. It helps the tool work out what is background.
  3. Let it choose the settings. GetSVG looks at your picture and picks them. Nine times out of ten that is the end of it.
  4. If something is wrong, move one slider. Detail, from Simpler to Faithful, fixes most problems on its own. Everything else is optional.

Photos of drawings and sketches

This is the case worth its own paragraph, because it is common and it does work. If you have drawn something on paper and photographed it, choose the Sketch preset, which softens the roughness of the paper and removes the grain. Photograph the page in even light with no shadow falling across it, hold the camera square rather than at an angle, and crop to the drawing before uploading.

If faint pencil lines come out broken, raise Stroke thickness in Fine-tune by a few steps and they will join up.

What you end up with

An SVG file, which opens in Figma, Illustrator, Inkscape, Canva, CorelDRAW and every web browser. Each colour in your picture becomes its own layer, so you can recolour or delete one without touching the rest. You can also export it back out as a PNG at up to four times the size if that is what somebody asked for.

Related: image to SVG, PNG to SVG,JPG to SVG, and what is a vector image if the word "vector" is new to you.

How picture to SVG works in GetSVG

  1. Drop, paste or choose a picture. PNG, JPG or WebP. The file is read by your browser and is not uploaded.
  2. GetSVG picks a preset. It looks at the pixels — how many colours, how soft the edges are, how much plain background — and chooses Clean logo, Hairline, Brush, Sketch, Illustration or Artwork. Every other setting follows from that.
  3. The tracer runs. For each colour a mask is built and Potrace fits smooth Bézier curves to its outline, in a Web Worker so the page stays responsive. Re-tracing after a settings change keeps the previous result on screen until the new one is ready.
  4. Check it is real geometry. Turn on Paths to see outlines and anchor points, or drag the Split handle to compare original and vector.
  5. Download. SVG grouped per colour, PNG at 1×/2×/4×, or copy the SVG code.

What you get

  • Editable paths, not an embedded bitmap. The SVG contains only <path> elements with cubic Bézier curves.
  • One group per colour. Each colour is a <g fill="#…">, so one click selects a whole colour in Illustrator, Figma or Inkscape.
  • A tight view box. Empty space around the artwork is trimmed automatically, with a small safety margin.
  • Transparent background on request. The dominant border colour is detected and removed.
  • Real gradients when you want them. In Full colour mode, Smooth fits a linear gradient across a faded region and writes a genuine <linearGradient>.

Questions

Can I turn a photo from my phone into an SVG?

You can run it through, but be prepared for the result. Photographs have no flat areas of colour for the tracer to follow, so you get a posterised version built from hundreds of shapes. If your photo is of something drawn on paper, crop to the artwork and it works well. If it is a photo of a person, a place or a product, vector is the wrong format.

What kind of pictures work best?

Anything with flat colour and clear edges: a logo, a sign, hand lettering, a signature, a sketch, a stencil, an icon, a screenshot of a simple graphic. The clearer the boundary between one colour and the next, the better the result.

My picture is quite small. Will it still work?

Below about 300 pixels across you will get a warning, because the edges simply are not detailed enough to trace cleanly. Look for a larger version first. If the picture came from a website, try opening the image in its own tab; sites often serve a version twice the size you see.

How do I remove the background from my picture?

Leave Transparent background switched on, which is the default. GetSVG finds the plain colour around the edge of your picture and removes everything connected to it, while keeping enclosed areas such as the hole in a letter O.

Do I need to know anything about design software?

No. Drop the picture in and you get a result immediately, with the settings already chosen for you. Everything else is optional. If the result is not right, the single Detail slider fixes most problems on its own.

What do I do with the file afterwards?

Send it to whoever asked for it, or open it in Figma, Illustrator, Inkscape or Canva. It also works directly on a website. If a printer asked for EPS or AI rather than SVG, open it in the free Inkscape and save as that format.