Support
Frequently asked questions
Everything about turning bitmaps into SVG with AnyToSVG — what traces well, the handful of options, and where your image does (not) go. Still stuck? Email us.
Input & results
What converts well, and what does not
Tracing is not magic; it works brilliantly on some images and only passably on others.
Which images convert well to SVG?
Anything drawn with flat colours and clear edges: logos, icons, clipart, cartoons, lettering, line drawings, scanned signatures, stamps, silhouettes and QR codes. These come out almost indistinguishable from the original, usually in a few kilobytes. See the logo to SVG guide for how to get the cleanest result.
Can I vectorize a photo?
You can, but expect a poster, not a photograph. A tracer reduces the image to a limited number of fills — smooth areas become linear or radial gradients, everything else becomes one of up to 32 flat colours — so skin tones turn into a few gradients and bands, and fine texture disappears. That look is sometimes exactly what you want — for stencils, screen printing or a stylised illustration — but it is not a way to "upscale" a photo losslessly.
How are gradients handled?
Areas whose colour changes smoothly from pixel to pixel (a sky, a shaded sphere, a two-tone stripe) are detected before the colour quantisation. Each one is fitted with a linear or a radial colour model; when the model matches the pixels closely the whole area is traced as a single shape filled with a real SVG <linearGradient> or <radialGradient> — smaller files and no stepped bands. The swatch row shows such an area as a gradient swatch, and the Detect gradients checkbox turns the feature off if you prefer flat colours only (for cutting machines, for example). Shading that bends around a shape or several overlapping soft shadows will only partly qualify; the rest is posterised as before.
What does "Auto-detect" do?
When an image loads it is analysed: if it is mostly grey, dark-on-light and has two or three tones it is treated as black-and-white; otherwise the number of genuinely distinct colours is counted and used as the colour count (capped at 16), and the black-and-white threshold is computed with Otsu's method. The Auto-detect button re-applies those suggestions after you have changed things.
Why does my result have jagged or bumpy edges?
The source is probably small or heavily JPEG-compressed. Small images (under 600 px) are upscaled before tracing, which helps; for compressed images tick Smooth noise first under Advanced and raise Remove specks. Moving Smoothing towards 1.3 rounds off corners; moving it towards 0 keeps them sharp.
The colours in the SVG are slightly different from the original.
Each colour in the SVG is the average of all the pixels that were grouped under it, so an anti-aliased or slightly noisy region can shift a value by a few points. For exact brand colours, open the SVG in a text editor and change the fill attribute — there is exactly one per colour.
Options
Colours, transparency and size
The few controls there are, and what they actually change.
How do I get a transparent background?
In colour mode tick Transparent background: the colour that touches the image border (marked with a dot in the swatch row) is removed — only the outer region, so enclosed areas of the same colour inside the artwork are kept. In black-and-white mode the background is transparent by definition; only the dark shapes are traced. Any other colour can be dropped by clicking its swatch.
What is the difference between "Stacked" and "Cut out" layers?
Stacked (the default) draws fills from the largest area up and lets every shape reach one pixel underneath its neighbours, so there are no hairline gaps between adjacent shapes and the paths stay as simple as the shapes themselves. Cut out makes every fill exactly its own region with nothing underneath — better if you plan to cut the shapes physically or move them apart in an editor, at the cost of possible thin seams.
How do I make the SVG smaller?
Fewer colours is the biggest lever — every colour is a full path. After that, raise Remove specks to drop tiny islands, use the Smooth preset (a higher curve tolerance means fewer nodes), and tick Smooth noise first for JPEGs. A clean logo typically lands between 2 and 20 KB.
Can I trace just the outline as a stroke (centreline)?
Not yet. AnyToSVG produces filled shapes, so a thin line becomes a long, thin filled polygon. That is fine for display and most cutting machines, but pen plotters that want a single centreline stroke need a different tool.
Which output formats are available?
SVG (the point of the exercise), PNG rendered from the vector at 1×, 2× or 4× the original size, and the raw SVG code on the clipboard for pasting into HTML or a code editor. PDF, EPS and DXF are not offered; every vector editor and most print shops accept SVG and can convert from there.
Privacy & support
Your data, your browser, the price
What leaves your machine, what runs where, and what it costs (nothing).
Is my image uploaded anywhere?
No. Tracing runs inside your browser using WebAssembly; PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP, BMP and SVG files are read locally and never sent to us. The single exception is a format browsers cannot open — TIFF, PSD, HEIC or PDF — which is sent to our server, converted to PNG in memory and discarded in the same instant. The image you last opened is kept in your own browser's storage so it is still there when you come back; use Remove to clear it. See the privacy policy.
Which browsers are supported?
Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on desktop, and the same browsers on tablets and phones. The page needs JavaScript, Web Workers and WebAssembly, which every browser released since 2020 has.
Is there a size or count limit?
Files up to 20 MB are accepted. Images are traced at up to 2048 pixels on the longest side (larger ones are downsampled first, which rarely costs anything — tracing works on shapes, not pixels). There is no limit on how many images you convert.
Is AnyToSVG free? Can I use the output commercially?
Yes and yes. No account, no credits, no watermark, no attribution required. You keep all rights to your images and to the SVGs made from them.
Ready to convert?
Free, in the browser, with a live preview. Drop an image and see the SVG in about a second.