We spent months building our own vector tracer. Here's what we learned

We've been working on something at Adaver for the past few months, and I thought I'd share a little about the problem we're trying to solve.

Why is converting a raster image into a good SVG still so difficult?

On the surface, image-to-vector conversion sounds fairly straightforward. But the moment you introduce complex textures, subtle gradients, shadows, or intricate details, things become considerably harder. Preserving the original character of an image while keeping the output genuinely vector-based is a challenge of its own.

We spent months researching this and eventually decided to build our own tracing engine rather than relying on generative AI to recreate images.

It's been an interesting exercise in understanding how much information gets lost during vectorization and how we can preserve more of it.

We've made some progress. Adaver already supports image-to-SVG conversion, smoother gradients, and exports for workflows involving DXF and Cricut. We're also working on making gradients editable while preserving their smoothness.

We're sharing our progress and upcoming features here:

https://adaver.nuvai.dev/coming-soon

Would love to hear from others who work with SVGs or image.