Convert BMP to SVG
BMP is uncompressed, so there are no compression artefacts to trace around — what the scanner or the CAD export wrote is exactly what the tracer reads.
- Input
- BMP
- Output
- SVG
- Engine
- WASM, in your tab
- Price
- Free preview
Drop an image here, or paste
Your image is never uploaded. It is traced in this tab.Open the full converter
Preset
- 01Logo16 colours
- 02Line art — set for this pageBlack & white
- 03Photo64 colours
- 04Embroidery8 colours · Cutout
- 05Vinyl4 colours · Cutout
- 06LaserBlack & white · Polygon
- Output · SVG · PDF · EPS [soon] · DXF [soon]
- Preview free · download with Pro €9.00 / month
- Your file stays in this tab
Why vectortrace
- Ticket 1 / 3
In-browser and private
The engine is WebAssembly running in a worker on your own machine. Your image is never uploaded — so there is nothing to leak, nothing to delete, and nothing to take on trust.
- Ticket 2 / 3
Editable paths, not a wrapper
The engine groups the image into colour regions, takes the boundary between them and fits curves to it. What comes out is real geometry — one fill per region, every node yours to move — produced in the tab and never on a server.
- Ticket 3 / 3
Formats print and production use
SVG and PDF today; EPS and DXF for cutters, engravers and embroidery software as the exporters land. Real files, opened in Illustrator, Inkscape and LibreCAD — not an SVG with a JPEG inside it.
Format facts
| Format facts | BMP · in | SVG · out |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Raster. Usually uncompressed, so the files are large. | Vector. Paths described in XML. |
| Scaling | Blurs or pixelates past its native size. | Sharp at any size. |
| Colour | 1, 4, 8, 24 or 32 bits per pixel. Alpha only at 32-bit. | One solid fill per path, in a palette you can edit by hand. |
| Editable in | Photoshop, GIMP, Paint. | Illustrator, Inkscape, Figma, Affinity Designer, a text editor. |
| Typical use | Windows tooling, scanner output, older CAD and CNC exports. | Web, icons, print artwork, the input to a cutter workflow. |
Worth knowing
BMP files come out of scanners, Windows tooling and older CAD and CNC software, and they are usually the cleanest input a tracer can get: no block artefacts, no ringing, no palette dithering unless the file is 8-bit indexed.
A 1-bit BMP is already black and white, which is what the line-art preset expects — it is the default on this page for that reason. Speckle filtering still matters for a scan, because scanner noise is a scatter of single dark pixels and every one of them would otherwise become a path.
BMP has no alpha except in the rarely used 32-bit form, so expect a background region and delete it after export.
How it works
Drop the BMP
Drop the .bmp file. 1-bit, 8-bit and 24-bit BMPs are all decoded by the browser.
Stay on line art for a scan
Line art traces one ink colour against paper. Raise the speckle filter until scanner noise stops producing paths.
Export the SVG
The outlines open in Inkscape or Illustrator, and in LibreCAD once the DXF exporter lands.
Benchmark
Measured, not marketed. The corpus, the method and every figure the run produced are published in full.
Methodology → /benchmarks- boundary error, p95
- 0.39 px
- region-count error
- 0.113
- node-count ratio
- 6.35×
Questions
- 01Why is BMP a good format to vectorise?
- Because it is uncompressed. JPEG and lossy WebP both invent detail near edges that a tracer then faithfully reproduces; a BMP has none of that, so the only noise is whatever the scanner or the source software actually produced.
- 02My scan traces as thousands of specks. What do I change?
- Raise the speckle filter until the isolated dark pixels stop becoming regions, and keep line art selected so the trace is binary rather than trying to model paper tone as colours.
- 03Can I edit the SVG afterwards?
- Yes. The output is ordinary SVG — one path per colour region, with a plain fill — so Illustrator, Inkscape, Figma, Affinity Designer and a text editor all open it and all let you move a node.
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