: Batch trace JPG to SVG I have thousands of JPG graphics and want to trace them automatically to vector SVG files with a batch function in Adobe Illustrator CS4/CS5. All graphics looks something

@Harper654

Check this vid:

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@Courtney577

Potrace is free and you can do batch processing from the command line.

The first thing you need to do is converting all images to bmp format. There are several ways to do this but I use mogrify. Run


mogrify -format bmp *.jpg


Convert all images to SVG format:


potrace --svg *.bmp


The downside is that the quality of the conversion will not be as good with potrace as with Illustrator but I am rather sure that potrace is the best available option if you need a free program to generate SVG files from images with.

Mogrify is a part of the ImageMagick toolkit that can do much more than just converting images to a different file format.

Both image ImageMagick and potrace have released Windows versions of their programs but it is much easier to do this kind of processing on Linux. I might be worth it install a Linux distribution if you need to do this several times.

One key parameter that you need to change (if your images are as small as the example you provided) is the size of the image. This can also be done with mogrify. Here is one example (with monochrome settings) of what a traced image looks like.



This example was generated with the following commands:


mogrify -resize 1000% -format bmp bAm4J.jpg

potrace -k 0.9 --svg bAm4J.bmp

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