Convert a PNG to an SVG for Cricut

Design Space has an Upload button that accepts PNG and JPG files, so it looks like it converts them. It does not. What it does is let you erase parts of the picture and then either print it and cut around the printed edge, or cut a single rough outline of whatever is left. The result is one flat shape traced from pixels, not the clean, resizable, layer-per-color vector that people mean when they ask for an SVG.

The giveaway is scaling. A raster upload gets soft and blocky as you size it up, and a colored design arrives as one piece rather than separate layers you can send to different mats. A real SVG stays crisp at any size, because it stores curves rather than pixels.

What a good conversion has to fix

Tracing pixels naively gives you a staircase: thousands of tiny straight segments following the edge of every pixel, which cuts rough and takes forever. This converter fits smooth curves through those edges while keeping genuine corners sharp, so a mane spike or an ear tip stays a point instead of being rounded away.

It also handles the things that make a file unweedable. Anti-aliasing and JPEG compression leave a fuzzy band of in-between colors along every edge, which naive color splitting turns into phantom layers and confetti. Those bands are absorbed into the real colors instead, and anything smaller than a piece you could physically weed is removed rather than left on the mat.

Getting the best result from your PNG

A PNG with a transparent background converts most cleanly, because the subject is already separated. Failing that, a flat, solid-color background works nearly as well. Use the largest version of the image you have: more pixels means more detail to work from, up to the 25 MB limit. And prefer the original file over a screenshot of it, since screenshots add their own compression noise.

If your design is text, do not trace it at all. Use a real font instead: it will always cut or write more cleanly than a traced picture of letters.