Convert SVG to JPG

An SVG has no resolution. It is a set of instructions — draw a circle here, fill this shape with that colour — and can be rendered at any dimensions with equal sharpness. A JPG is a fixed grid of pixels. Converting between them therefore requires choosing a number, and that choice is permanent.

Most converters take whatever width the SVG happens to declare and render at that, silently. Since many SVGs declare something modest — a 100 or 200 pixel icon size left over from wherever they were made — the result is a small image that looks fine until somebody scales it up, at which point it is visibly soft. This is the single most common complaint about this conversion, and it is a settings problem rather than a quality problem.

Work backwards from where the image ends up. On a web page, render at twice the size it will be displayed — high-density screens have been standard for a decade and a 400-pixel image in a 400-pixel slot looks soft on most phones. For print, the working rule is 300 pixels per inch: a graphic printed four inches across wants around 1200 pixels.

Erring large is cheap and erring small is not. A JPG rendered bigger than necessary costs some file size and can be scaled down without visible loss; one rendered too small cannot be recovered at all, because the detail was never drawn. The scale control sits under the result, so you can convert, look, adjust and convert again without starting over.

JPG has no alpha channel. Not a limited one — none. Every pixel is opaque, so anything transparent in the SVG has to be filled with something, and white is the sensible default.

It is also the default that produces the memorable failure: a white or very pale logo, designed to sit on a dark background, converted to JPG and delivered as a white rectangle containing apparently nothing. If you can see the shape in the preview and not in the result, this is why. Set a contrasting fill colour in the settings, or convert to PNG or WebP, both of which keep the transparency rather than resolving it.

Most SVGs are logos, icons and diagrams — flat areas of colour with hard edges. That is precisely the content JPEG compression is worst at: it was designed for photographs, and it responds to a sharp boundary between two flat colours by smudging it into a faint halo. The file frequently is not even smaller than the PNG equivalent, because PNG is very good at exactly this kind of image.

So the honest advice is to convert to PNG unless something specific demands JPG — and things do: marketplace listings, print submission systems, older content management systems and some office software still refuse anything else. When the SVG holds a photograph or a richly shaded illustration, JPG is genuinely the better answer.

An SVG usually names a typeface rather than embedding it. Whatever renders the file has to have that font available, and resvg — which renders here — has the fonts your system has, not the ones your design tool had.

So a missing font is substituted and a carefully spaced wordmark arrives with the wrong spacing. The fix belongs in the design tool: convert text to outlines before exporting. The letters become shapes, nothing can be substituted, and the file is safe to hand to anybody.

Shapes, strokes, fills and gradients convert faithfully. The uncertain territory is filters — blurs and drop shadows — along with blend modes and masks built out of other masks.

resvg covers what real files use and leaves out what it does not implement, rather than approximating it into something almost right. If an effect carries meaning, look at the JPG instead of assuming. If it is missing, flatten it before exporting.

An SVG can reference an external photograph, font or stylesheet by URL. Nothing here reaches out to the internet, so a referenced file is simply not present — which is the same property that keeps your drawing private.

The symptom is a JPG with a blank rectangle where an image should be. Export again with resources embedded rather than linked, and everything the drawing depends on travels with it.

The size follows the resolution you chose, not the SVG. A 3 KB icon rendered at 4000 pixels is a multi-megabyte JPG, because the file is now a grid of pixels rather than a description.

Quality around 85 is the sensible default for anything photographic. For a flat-colour logo it is the wrong question entirely: no quality setting stops JPEG laying a halo along a hard edge, and the answer there is PNG.

Drop the whole folder. Every SVG is rendered at the same scale and returned as a ZIP, which is what an icon set or an export batch usually wants.

The rendering happens on your machine, so nothing waits in a queue behind anybody else. The two limits are the ones printed above the drop zone — 100 MB per file, 100 files in a batch — and they are the same for every visitor rather than a tier to be paid past. And because it is resvg rather than a browser canvas, the last file is drawn exactly like the first.