How HEIC to SVG conversion works
HEIC is the format iPhones have used since iOS 11, and it is famously awkward: half the tools on a Windows PC cannot even open it. If your end goal is a vector — say you photographed a whiteboard sketch, a hand-drawn logo or a kid’s drawing you want to plot or cut — the usual workflow is HEIC → convert to JPG somewhere → find a vectorizer → convert again. This page collapses that into one step: drop the HEIC, get an SVG.
The HEIC decoding happens in your browser with a WebAssembly build of the same library the pros use, so the photo is never uploaded — worth knowing, since phone photos carry location metadata you probably do not want on a random conversion server. After decoding, the image is traced into vector paths like any other input.
Photographed sketches deserve one practical tip: light the paper evenly and fill the frame. Shadows across the page are the number-one cause of messy traces, because the tracer cannot know that the grey gradient is your desk lamp and not your artwork. For pencil or ink drawings, switch to the “Silhouette (B/W)” preset — it flattens the photo to black lines on transparent background, which is what plotters and cutting machines want.
For regular photos the “Photo” preset produces stylized, posterized vector art — a popular look for pet portraits and gifts. The preview shows the result instantly; adjust the color slider until it feels right.