Right. So. Vectorizing a PNG into an SVG is one of those tasks that sounds trivial until you actually need to do it, at which point you discover a graveyard of tools that are either $10/image, want you to subscribe half a leg and a kidney/month, or produce something that looks like Michael J. Fox (apologies for the bad joke, I actualyl admire him) traced your logo during an earthquake.

After running into this roughly once a month I thought surely that's enough to invest some time into researching whether I should build my own image tracer. Which led me to find VTracer, an open source project from visioncortext.

Vectron (that's how I named my brain child) is a frontend for [VTracer](https://github.com/visioncortex/vtracer), an open-source Rust vectorization engine that's genuinely good but has the UX of a command-line tool written by someone who, understandably, cares more about the algorithm than the button placement. I forked it, compiled it to WASM (thanks Claude), and stuck it in a Web Worker so the whole thing runs in your browser. No upload, no server round-trip, and for smaller images it's near instant (I did try it with some rather stupidly large examples which then turned into a ten-plus-second nerve-wrecking waiting times :D).

[](https://cf.preview.redd.it/an-image-to-svg-vectorizer-that-doesnt-suck-as-much-v0-swsy0tuozfmh1.png?width=3010&format=png&auto=webp&s=ed323cef59c9322aee0291879a857a59a5eae334)

A few things worth knowing before you try it:

* **It's not AI.** No neural net pretending to understand your image. It's proper curve-fitting and edge detection, which means it's predictable. The same input results in the same output (this is super important to me), no "vibes-based" tracing that changes if you sneeze near it.
* **It's best at clean line art and logos**, not photographs. Feed it a photo and it will attempt it, valiantly, and the result will remind you why this is a hard problem. But hey, it's sort of working.
* **Selective refinement**. Sometimes you get like a good overall results but often the devil is in the details, like a curve turned into a sharp corner or some lines don't connect. You can refine a certain area by dragging a rectangle over it and adjust your filters to polish the proverbial turd.
* **It's free because I don't want give users the experience that I went through countless times.** It's a side thing. There's no upsell, no tier, and no "unlock batch processing for $9/mo." And I say that now, it's not gonna change.

[https://vectron.vendos.com.au](https://vectron.vendos.com.au/)

Feedback welcome, especially on where it falls over or it's genuinely hard to use.

An Image to SVG vectorizer that doesn't suck (as much)