TIFF to SVG Converter

How to Convert TIFF to SVG Online

1. Upload Your TIFF File: Drag and drop the .tiff or .tif file, or click "+ Add Files" to browse. Batch uploads are supported — drop in as many files as you need and they queue together.
2. Set Number Precision: Open Advanced Options and adjust the precision slider (1-10). The default is 6, which fits most logos and line art. Lower values (3-4) merge similar colours and smooth curves aggressively for a much smaller file; 7-8 separates more detail at the cost of size.
3. Stay At or Below 8: Positions 9 and 10 abort the job and return no file. One slider value is sent to the tracer as both the path precision and the colour precision, and colour precision is only defined for 1 to 8 significant bits per RGB channel, so the run stops with an out-of-range error instead of tracing more finely. Treat 8 as the real top of the slider.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert". Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no watermark, no account, and no email required.

What Actually Happens: This Is a Trace, Not a Wrapper

This converter vectorizes. The image is handed to a raster-to-vector tracer, which groups pixels into colour regions, fits curves to the boundaries between them, and writes real <path> elements into the output. Nothing is base64-encoded, and nothing is placed inside an SVG <image> element — the file you get back is genuine vector geometry that you can select, recolour, and reshape node by node in Inkscape, Illustrator, or Figma.

That distinction decides whether this conversion is right for your file. A trace approximates the source with paths, so the result is only as good as the fit. On flat artwork — a logo, a signature, a line drawing, a schematic, a high-contrast scanned stamp — the fit is excellent and the SVG is a handful of kilobytes that scales forever. On a photographic scan it is not: continuous tone has no clean boundaries, so the tracer either flattens the picture into a few lumpy colour blobs or emits tens of thousands of micro-paths, producing an enormous SVG that is slow to open and looks worse than the TIFF you started with. Photographic scans belong in TIFF to PNG or TIFF to JPG, not here.

TIFF is not one of the tracer's native input formats — those are PNG, JPG/JPEG, JFIF, BMP, GIF and WebP — so a TIFF has to be rendered to a standard raster before any tracing can happen. Doing that step yourself is worth considering as a quality decision rather than a chore: developing the scan gives you control over crop, contrast, levels, and output size, and those choices affect trace quality far more than any slider on this page does. Render the file with TIFF to PNG, look at the result, push the contrast until the shape you care about separates cleanly from its background, then trace that with PNG to SVG.

• Editable paths for design tools — a traced logo arrives in Figma or Illustrator as selectable shapes, not a flat picture you can only mask and crop.
• Replace TIFF on the web — Chrome, Firefox, and Edge do not render TIFF inline. A traced SVG displays anywhere, at any size, with no plugin or server-side transcode.
• Inline it as markup — SVG is XML, so a traced mark drops straight into JSX, Vue templates, or a plain <svg> tag, and CSS can restyle its fills.
• Cut, engrave, or plot the shape — Glowforge, Cricut Design Space, and LightBurn follow path geometry. A trace produces the closed outlines those machines need; an embedded picture would not.
• Dramatically smaller for line art — for logos, signatures, and high-contrast diagrams, a traced SVG is routinely a small fraction of the source TIFF, because a shape costs a few bytes and a pixel grid does not.

TIFF vs SVG — Format Comparison

Will Your TIFF Trace Well? — Match the Source to the Outcome

Number Precision Quick Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this tool actually trace my TIFF into vector paths?

Yes. The output is real <path> geometry produced by a raster-to-vector tracer — it is not your TIFF wrapped in an SVG <image> element, and there is no base64 payload inside the file. That is why the result scales without blurring and can be edited shape by shape. The honest limit is that a trace is an approximation of your pixels, so it shines on flat artwork and fails on photographs.

Will my SVG be smaller than the TIFF?

For logos, signatures, and line art, dramatically smaller — often a few kilobytes against a multi-megabyte scan, because describing a shape costs far less than storing a pixel grid. For a photographic scan, expect the opposite: every tonal step becomes its own filled path, and the resulting XML can outweigh the source. A traced photo that comes back larger than the TIFF is the signal that this was the wrong tool for that image, not a setting to tune.

Why doesn't my SVG look sharper when I zoom in?

If the geometry is genuinely vector, it will stay sharp — a traced logo enlarged tenfold has no pixels to blur. What people usually notice on a photographic source is different: the shapes are sharp but wrong, because the tracer approximated smooth tone with hard-edged blobs. Sharpness at any zoom is only useful when the traced shapes were right to begin with.

Can I edit the result in Illustrator or Inkscape?

Yes, and this is where tracing pays off. Both open SVG natively and show each traced region as an individual object: recolour a fill, delete a stray path, merge two neighbouring shapes, or drag nodes to clean up a curve. Traced scans usually benefit from a minute of tidying — small speckle paths from scanner noise are the most common thing worth deleting.

What's the maximum useful precision, and why do 9 and 10 fail?

Eight is the maximum, even though the slider travels to 10. The value is sent to the tracer twice — once as the path precision, where 10 would be legal, and once as the colour precision, which is defined only for 1 to 8 significant bits per RGB channel. Asking for nine bits of colour is outside what an 8-bit channel can hold, so the tracer rejects it outright and the job ends with nothing to download. Nothing is lost by staying below it: above about 6 the extra decimals are far smaller than anything a renderer will ever draw.

Does this handle multi-page TIFFs?

Not as a single file — SVG has no multi-page concept, so there is no way to return a multi-page document as one .svg. If a specific page matters, split the TIFF first (ImageMagick's convert input.tif page-%d.tif does it in one line) and upload just that page. If your goal is keeping the pages together at all, TIFF to PDF is the right target — PDF preserves page order in one output.

What about CMYK or 16-bit TIFFs from print workflows?

They are reduced to 8-bit sRGB before tracing, and then reduced much further by the trace itself: the output is a set of flat fills, one per detected colour region, so neither wide-gamut data nor subtle tonal transitions survive in any form. That is fine for a spot-colour logo and useless for a press master. Keep the original TIFF for archival work and use TIFF to PDF with a print-ready profile when colour fidelity is the point.

Why not just use PNG or JPG for the web?

For displaying a picture, TIFF to PNG or TIFF to JPG is almost always the better answer. Choose SVG when you specifically need the artwork as shapes: editable paths in a vector tool, geometry a cutter or engraver can follow, markup you can inline in HTML and restyle with CSS, or an asset that must scale to any size without a resolution decision.

Can I reverse this and go back to TIFF?

Yes — SVG to TIFF rasterizes the SVG at a chosen resolution and writes a TIFF. Note that the round trip does not recover your original scan: what comes back is a rendering of the traced shapes, so it will look like the trace, not like the photograph or scan you first uploaded. Keep the source TIFF if you may need the real pixels again.

The trace came back empty or nearly blank — what happened?

Check Number precision first, since 9 and 10 stop the run outright. If it was already at 6, the usual cause is a low-contrast scan: a faint pencil drawing or a washed-out grey background gives the tracer no colour boundary to find, so it returns one large flat region. Render the file with TIFF to PNG, raise the contrast until the subject clearly separates from the paper, and trace that with PNG to SVG.