Free Online Image OptimizerTurning a vector drawing into a PNG
An SVG is not a picture so much as a recipe for one: a list of shapes, coordinates and colours that something has to draw before anybody can look at it. That is why it scales to a billboard without going soft, and also why so much software simply refuses it. This walks through producing a PNG from one, and the two decisions worth making on the way.
A drawing has no pixels until somebody asks for some
Open SVG to PNG. Every other conversion here is done by our image service on the way back to you; this one is not, and cannot be, because that service passes vector files through untouched rather than rendering them. Your browser already contains a first-rate renderer, so the drawing is turned into pixels on your own machine and only the finished PNG is sent anywhere.
The file is read through an image element, which matters for a reason that has nothing to do with speed. An SVG is XML and may carry scripts inside it; loaded that way, none of them run and nothing external is fetched. That restriction is the security model rather than a limitation of the tool.
Hand over the drawing and read the size it chose
Drag the file in, or click to browse. Conversion begins immediately, because there is nothing to ask first, and what lands on the stage is already a PNG.
The number to look at is the one in the corner: the pixel dimensions. They come from the drawing itself, doubled, so a logo declaring 320 by 120 arrives as 640 by 240 and holds up on a high-resolution screen. Where a file states its size in physical units instead — an inch, a centimetre, a point, which is what every serious drawing program writes by default — those are converted properly rather than having the unit shrugged off. A schematic marked 11.69 inches wide is 1,122 pixels across, not eleven.
If the drawing declares no size at all, or gives one as a percentage, the viewBox decides the shape instead. A percentage is a share of a window the file has no access to, so it is not a size and is treated as though it were absent.
Deciding what sits behind the artwork
Most drawings paint no background whatsoever, so the PNG that comes out has a transparent one. For a logo that is exactly right and the reason to use this format at all. For a diagram with black labelling it can be a trap: dropped onto anything dark, the lettering vanishes and the file looks broken when it is perfect.
The swatches under the picture settle it. Transparent is the default and stays the default, because it is what the file asked for and quietly painting something behind every conversion would ruin the logo case to rescue the diagram one. Pick white and the labels come back. The colour is painted underneath the artwork rather than over it, so nothing is hidden, and choosing one re-renders the drawing rather than merely restyling what you are looking at.
Lettering is the one thing that can come out differently
Text inside an SVG is text, not shapes, and it gets drawn with whatever typeface your own computer can supply. If the drawing asks for a face you do not have, your machine substitutes something and the wording shifts a little. Nothing warns you, so the page does: a notice appears above the picture whenever the file contains text at all.
This is also where the browser quietly beats the specialist tools. A well-known converter compiles a rendering library to run in the page but hands it no fonts, so every word disappears from its output. Measured on a drawing carrying four lines in four faces, that route returned the shapes and not one legible character; this one returned all four lines.
Worth knowing
Keep the original wherever you can
A PNG is a fixed grid of pixels and the drawing it came from is not. Enlarging the export later will look soft; going back to the SVG and exporting again at the larger size will not. Convert for the place that refuses vectors, and keep the source file for everything else.
What leaves your machine
The drawing does not. Rendering happens in your browser and only the resulting image is uploaded, to be compressed and handed back. That also means the SVG is never stored on our side at all. The privacy notice is the binding version.