GetSVG

PNG to SVG, transparent background.

No background rectangle, and the holes inside letters stay clear.

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

An SVG with a genuinely transparent background

Most converters hand back a file with a white rectangle sitting behind your artwork. It looks transparent against a white page and then appears as an obvious box the moment you drop it onto a coloured background, a photograph or a garment mock-up.

GetSVG writes no background at all. The output contains only the paths that make up your design. Open the downloaded file in a text editor and you will find no rectangle to delete.

How the background is found

Removing a background sounds simple until you consider the hole in the middle of a letter O. It is the same white as the page, so a converter that simply deletes every white pixel will also punch out anything white inside your artwork, and one that only deletes the outer edge leaves the counters filled in.

GetSVG uses two passes that together handle both cases:

  1. A flood fill from the border. The tool samples the colour around the edge of your picture, then spreads inwards, taking every pixel that is both close to that colour and connected to the edge. It stops where your artwork starts, because the local difference between neighbouring pixels becomes too large.
  2. A strict pass anywhere. Any pixel very close indeed to the background colour is removed regardless of where it sits. This is what clears the inside of an O, an A or an 8.

The reason for two passes rather than one is gradients. A shape fading towards white is not background, and the connected test protects it, while the strict pass is deliberately tight enough that it only touches pixels that are effectively the background colour already.

What works, and what does not

  • Plain white or plain coloured background: reliable, and the usual case.
  • Already transparent PNG or WebP: reliable. Transparent pixels are treated as background from the start, and any semi-transparent fringe is composited first so it does not become a thin extra shape.
  • A photographed or scanned page: usually works. Paper is rarely perfectly even, which is why the threshold is measured as distance from the detected background rather than plain brightness.
  • A busy, patterned or photographic background: this will not work, and no automatic tool will do it well. Crop to the artwork first, or remove the background in an image editor before tracing.

Checking it worked

The vector panel shows a checkerboard wherever the file is transparent, the same convention Photoshop and Figma use. The checkerboard is part of the preview, not part of the file. For a stricter check, download the SVG and drag it onto a dark page in your browser; anything that should be transparent will show the page colour through.

If a stray patch of background survived, it is usually because that patch differs from the border colour more than it appears. Try nudging Detail towards Faithful, or crop the picture more tightly so the border sampling sees only background.

Related: PNG to SVG, JPG to SVG (which never has transparency to begin with), and how the tracer works.

How transparent background 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

How does GetSVG decide what counts as background?

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.

The counters inside my letters stayed white. Why?

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.

My photo has a busy background. Can it still be removed?

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.

Does a transparent SVG have a white rectangle in it?

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.

Why does the checkerboard appear behind my result?

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.