Vector files for vinyl cutting
A plotter follows outlines. Trace the artwork into a small number of closed, disjoint shapes — one per colour of vinyl — with nothing too thin to weed.
- Preset
- Vinyl
- Palette
- 4 colours
- Output
- SVG
- 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 artBlack & white
- 03Photo64 colours
- 04Embroidery8 colours · Cutout
- 05Vinyl — set for this page4 colours · Cutout
- 06LaserBlack & white · Polygon
- Output · SVG · PDF · EPS · DXF
- Preview free · download with Pro €9.00 / month
- Your file stays in this tab
What the trace looks like
What the software needs
- One layer per colour
- Each colour is a separate sheet of vinyl, cut separately and layered by hand. Cutout mode produces exactly that: disjoint regions with no overlap to register.
- Nothing too thin to weed
- Thin slivers and single-pixel bridges cut fine and lift with the waste. The preset filters small regions and drops short edges before they become cut paths.
- Closed contours with correct holes
- The counter of an O has to be its own contour or the blade never cuts it out. Traced region boundaries are closed by construction.
- No fills, no strokes, no effects
- A plotter ignores everything except the path. Drop shadows and outlines from the source image become extra cut shapes, so remove them before tracing rather than after.
- A size decided before the cut
- Scaling after tracing scales the smallest features too. Set the physical size first and check the thinnest part at that size.
Preset
The vinyl preset traces four colours in cutout mode with a heavy speckle filter and a long minimum edge. Every one of those numbers is about weeding: a sliver two pixels wide is a path the blade will cut and your tweezers will tear.
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 for artwork; EPS and DXF for cutters, engravers and embroidery software. Real files, opened in Illustrator, Inkscape and LibreCAD — not an SVG with a JPEG inside it.
Benchmark
Measured, not marketed. The corpus, the method and every figure the run produced are published in full.
Methodology → /benchmarks- boundary error, p95
- 0.09 px
- region-count error
- 0.000
- node-count ratio
- 1.00×
Questions
- 01Does the SVG import into Cricut Design Space or Silhouette Studio?
- Both read SVG. Silhouette Studio also reads DXF in some editions. Import the SVG, confirm the size in the software, and check the smallest feature at that size before you cut.
- 02Why are there tiny shapes in my cut file?
- They are small regions the tracer found and kept. Raise the speckle filter until they disappear from the path count — deleting them by hand afterwards is slower and easy to get half-right.
- 03Can I cut a photograph?
- You can cut a posterisation of one. Trace with two to four colours and treat it as a stencil; a photograph has no natural boundaries to cut along, so the result is a design decision rather than a reproduction.