About Photo2Vector

What Photo2Vector Does

Photo2Vector turns an ordinary photograph into a clean, cuttable vector file. You upload an image, and about six seconds later you get an SVG that a laser engraver, CNC router, vinyl cutter, or screen printing setup can actually use.

The problem it solves is specific. Engraving a photo directly usually produces a muddy grey mess, because a laser is a one-bit device: it either fires or it does not. What you need is line art or a clean silhouette with real, closed paths. Producing that by hand in Illustrator or Inkscape takes anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour per image, and it takes practice. This tool does the same job automatically.

Why It Exists

Photo2Vector started as an internal utility. We were engraving portraits on wood and kept running into the same wall: the photo prep took longer than the engraving itself, and the results were inconsistent because every operator cleaned up the image slightly differently.

The existing options did not fit. Desktop vector editors are powerful but demand skill and time. Commercial vectorizers are built for logos and flat artwork, and they charge per image or per month. Automatic tracing in Inkscape works on high-contrast graphics but falls apart on a photograph of a face.

So we built a pipeline that handles the specific case of photographs, and then put it online for free. It has been publicly available since early 2026 and now processes several hundred conversions a day for hobbyists and small shops.

How the Conversion Works

Everything runs server-side in a fixed sequence. There is no generative AI inventing detail that was not in your photo, and no image is sent to a third-party service.

1. Background removal. A segmentation model isolates the subject from the background so the edges are not contaminated by whatever was behind it.
2. Line art extraction. A neural model trained on drawings finds the lines a human illustrator would draw — not just brightness edges, which is what a plain threshold filter gives you.
3. Cleanup. Speckle removal, gap closing and skeletonisation turn the raw output into strokes with consistent width.
4. Vector tracing. The cleaned bitmap becomes real SVG paths, with curve fitting so the result scales without stair-stepping.

You can then adjust the result in the browser editor — paint over artefacts, erase what you do not want, move the threshold — before exporting. For fibre laser owners there is also a 1-bit BMP export that EZCAD imports without complaint.

The full workflow, including which settings matter for which machine, is covered in the user guide.

Who It Is For

The tool is built for makers rather than designers. If you already have a vector workflow and know your way around the pen tool, you will get better results by hand. If you have a laser and a photo and a deadline, this exists for you.

• Laser engravers preparing portraits and photo gifts for wood, acrylic, leather or slate — see laser engraving, LightBurn, Glowforge, xTool and EZCAD.
• Cricut and vinyl cutter owners who need genuine cut paths rather than a printable image — see Cricut & vinyl.
• CNC and plasma operators who need contours a CAM package can follow — see CNC cutting.
• Tattoo artists building stencils for transfer paper — see tattoo stencils.
• Screen printers reducing a photo to one or two burnable screens — see screen printing.

Our Position on Your Files and Your Privacy

We think a free tool should still behave decently, so these are commitments rather than defaults we might quietly change:

• Uploads are deleted automatically after 24 hours. This is enforced by a scheduled cleanup job, not by a promise to remember.
• Your images are never used to train models and are never shared with third parties.
• You keep all rights to both the image you upload and the vector we produce from it.
• No cross-site tracking and no advertising cookies. There is no Google Analytics on this site.
• No account required — we cannot leak an email address we never asked for.

The details are in the privacy policy, and the legal frame in the terms of service.

How It Stays Free

A conversion costs us real CPU time on a real server. Right now that cost is small enough that the tool is simply free: no watermark, no conversion limit, no account, no trial that expires.

If that changes, it will change honestly. Paid features may be added later, but the core conversion is meant to stay available at no cost, and we will not retroactively watermark work you have already made.

Contact

Bug reports, conversions that came out wrong, and feature requests are all genuinely welcome — a broken output with the original photo attached is the single most useful thing you can send us. Reach us at [email protected] or through the contact page.