Convert JPG to SVG
Your files stay on this device. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on a server.
Drop your files here
or pick them from your device
How it works
- Drop a .jpg or .jpeg file onto the bench, or pick one from your device.
- Set the colour count and the smoothing, then press Trace.
- Download the .svg and open it to check how faithfully it came out.
Tracing a JPG has one extra problem that tracing other formats does not, and it explains most disappointing results. JPG compresses by splitting the image into eight-pixel blocks and simplifying each one, which leaves faint ringing beside every sharp edge and a gentle mottling across areas that should be a single flat colour. Your eye tends to ignore all of that. A tracer cannot. It sees each speckle as a genuine change of colour and dutifully draws a shape around it, so a logo that looks clean on screen can trace into a thicket of tiny fragments with ragged, frilly outlines.
The lever that actually helps is the colour count. Set it to the number of colours the artwork genuinely uses, not to whatever looks generous. The difference is stark: a flat two-tone logo traced from a clean PNG comes out as a handful of shapes, while the same logo saved as a low-quality JPG and traced at a high colour count can come out as several hundred, because every ring of compression noise becomes its own colour region. Dropping the count back collapses most of that away. Smoothing is worth trying afterwards, but expect a modest change rather than a rescue.
Better still, avoid the problem. If the artwork exists anywhere as a PNG, a PDF, or the original design file, trace that instead, or skip tracing altogether and export vector directly. A JPG should be the last resort, used when it is genuinely the only copy left.
And as with any tracer, photographs are out of scope. There are no flat colour regions in a photograph, so the tracer approximates the gradients with stacks of blobs: a huge file that looks like a screen print.
Questions people ask
- Why does my traced logo look ragged?
- JPG compression leaves faint noise around edges and across flat areas, and the tracer treats that noise as real detail and outlines it. Lowering the colour count to the number of colours the artwork actually uses removes most of it. Smoothing helps a little on top of that.
- How much smoothing should I use?
- Try it, but do not expect much. In practice it shifts the result only slightly and can go either way. Get the colour count right first — that is what decides whether the trace is clean or a mess.
- Should I trace a JPG at all?
- Only if it is the only copy you have. A PNG of the same artwork traces much more cleanly because it has no compression noise, and the original design file is better still — no tracing needed.
- Can I trace a photograph into SVG?
- Technically yes, practically no. Photographs have no flat colour regions, so the result is a very large file that looks like a poster effect. Resize the photo instead if you need it larger.
- Is the traced text editable?
- No. Letters become outline shapes like everything else in the image, so the font and the wording are fixed. Real editable text has to be typed again in a vector editor.
- Does my file get uploaded?
- No. The tracing happens in your browser on this page. Larger images take a few seconds because your own machine is doing the work.