How JPG to SVG conversion works
JPG files usually arrive from two places: a camera, or a download of something that really should have been a vector in the first place — a logo from an old email, a scanned drawing, a graphic saved off a website. In both cases the fix is the same: trace the pixels back into paths. This page does that locally in your browser, with a before/after preview so you can judge the result before downloading.
JPG brings one quirk that PNG does not: compression artifacts. Around hard edges, JPEG compression leaves faint blocky halos, and a naive tracer happily turns that noise into hundreds of tiny junk shapes. The default preset here counters this with light smoothing before tracing. If your source is heavily compressed — visible blockiness when you zoom in — raise the smoothing slider one or two steps.
Note that JPG has no transparency, so every converted image includes its background. If you are vectorizing a logo on a white background and want the white gone, choose the “Silhouette (B/W)” preset: it produces a black-and-white trace and drops near-white shapes automatically, leaving a cutting-ready graphic on a transparent background.
For scanned line drawings — sketches, signatures, technical drawings — the Silhouette preset is also usually the right choice. Scan at 300 DPI or more, make sure the paper is evenly lit, and the tracer will reward you with smooth, single-color outlines.