Changelog

+ New

• Enhance. A new option beside Upscale that cleans up and sharpens a small image before it is traced. It runs a small model on your Mac, nothing leaves the machine, and it takes a fraction of a second. On flat illustration, logos and AI-generated art it gives cleaner edges and keeps outlines that a plain upscale loses, with 30 to 60% fewer paths at the Detailed preset. It works on images up to 1024 px and only when the image is being doubled (Upscale on Auto for a small image, or 2×). It is off by default because it makes pixel art worse and does nothing useful for photographs

~ Improved

• Soft edges no longer pick up gradients. An anti-aliased or JPEG-softened outline used to read as a tiny ramp, and the tracer would fit a gradient to it: a grey fringe around flat artwork and a much larger file. Gradients are now fitted on the inside of each region only. A cityscape that carried 244 gradients now has 37 and is 30% smaller, and flat logos and mascots lose the fringe entirely
• Straight things stay straight. Buildings, windows, frames and panels used to come back with gently wavy sides and rounded corners unless you went up to Detailed. The tracer now finds the straight stretches of an outline before it smooths anything, draws them as real lines, and puts each corner back where the two sides meet. Curves are left alone: a side has to end in a genuine corner to count, so circles and rounded shapes trace as they did
• Thin lines survive Clean bands. Twigs, whiskers and fine strokes that belonged to a larger region were being worn away a little on every smoothing pass until they broke into dashes. Narrow, long parts of a region are now left alone, while the teeth and notches Clean bands exists to remove still go
• Balanced keeps tones of the same hue apart. Its layer step is now 8 instead of 16, so two close greens or two close skin tones no longer merge into one. Files are about 8% larger on average and the result is closer to the source on ten of the twelve bench images
• Small images trace with more detail. Clean bands was smoothing contours twice as hard on an upscaled image as it needed to, and taking real detail with the pixel stairs
• Detailed is smaller and faster: 17% fewer bytes and about 15% less time across the bench, at lower error

× Fixed

• macOS 27 Golden Gate compatibility. The tracing preset and SVG optimization pickers in the toolbar came up blank on macOS 27: the menus still opened and the right item was checked, but the control itself showed no title. The toolbar in Golden Gate now draws its menus icon-only unless told otherwise, so the pickers now ask for their titles explicitly and read as they did on macOS 26

~ Improved

• The Detailed preset traces at a finer cut. It sat at Detail 255 because that was as far as the tracer went; the engine no longer has that ceiling, and on the bench 350 is where the extra regions stop paying for themselves. A poster goes from 0.041 to 0.034 error, a pen drawing from 0.114 to 0.082, a photograph from 0.066 to 0.043 — the pictures with the most in them gain the most, and simpler artwork traces as it did before. On those dense images the files run three to five times larger and the trace takes two to three times as long, which is the trade this preset exists to make. Balanced is unchanged
• The Detail slider under Watershed clustering runs to 512 instead of stopping at 255. Past the old ceiling the tracer keeps every region the picture's own edges give it, so the top of the slider is as fine as the image goes. On simple artwork the result stops changing well before the end — that is the cut running out of regions to find, not the slider giving up
• The tracing engine is updated to vtracer 1.0.0-alpha.4

× Fixed

• An image made by gpt-image (ChatGPT / the OpenAI image API) showed the OpenAI logo in the Original pane instead of the picture, though the trace itself was right. These PNGs carry a content-credentials manifest with the generator's logo embedded as an SVG, and the preview took the <svg it found there to mean the file was a vector. The preview now only treats a file as SVG when it actually starts as XML

~ Improved

• The Balanced preset is retuned for the best all-round result. It now cuts the image along edges (Watershed at detail 240, Cutout layering) instead of by color, so shading in the same hue as what it falls on, small text and thin line art all survive, and gradients are still fitted. Files are larger on a flat logo and painted texture is simplified into regions, but the two-to-four-megabyte, five-thousand-path results the old setting produced on painted images are gone
• Layer step now means something under Watershed clustering: neighbouring regions closer than that many levels are merged after the cut. A high Detail used to slice every smooth gradient into flat slivers, which was the grain at the top of the slider; with the merge a plain ramp traces to one gradient again, and the Firefox logo goes from 202 pieces to 25 at better fidelity
• Remove background, its Tolerance slider and Remove enclosed areas are available on the free tier
• Upscale has an Auto setting, now the default in every preset but Logo: an image under 640 px on its longer side is traced at double size, where a small icon has too few edge pixels to fit curves through, and anything larger is traced as it is. On the bench 2× lowered the error clearly up to 500 px, made no difference at 800 to 1200, and on a 4000 px image was five times slower for a worse result
• The Detailed preset is retuned to the same engine at its top setting: Watershed at full detail with the tightest layer step. It is the best fidelity on every bench image, and the poster that used to trace to 24,000 paths and 4.7 MB is 779 paths and 631 KB
• The Illustration preset is folded into Balanced. Once Balanced moved to the watershed the only difference between them was one notch of the Detail slider; anything saved as Illustration now traces with Balanced

× Fixed

• The batch progress bar in the toolbar no longer has a button-style border around it on macOS 26
• Remove background does nothing on a JPEG with a thin frame around it, like the one-pixel black line many stock-site exports carry: the frame won the border vote and the white inside it was never touched, whatever the tolerance. The remover now sees that its first pass only lifted a frame and seeds again from the color just inside it

+ New

• A new tracing engine. VectorFox now traces with vtracer 1.0 and its own gradient fitting, built into the app rather than run as a separate program. Every trace used to write a PNG to disk, launch a helper, and read the result back; now the image goes straight from memory into the tracer, and the tracer keeps its work between runs, so changing a curve or color setting re-traces in about a tenth of a second instead of starting over
• The preview inspector is live. Move a slider and the picture follows: a reduced preview while you drag, the full-resolution trace the moment you let go. There is no Apply button any more, and the previous picture stays on screen until the new one has drawn, so nothing flashes or goes blank. Save always writes the full-resolution result
• Output you can edit. Every shape with the same color is now one compound path inside a group for that color, hidden shapes are dropped, and a new Simplify pass redraws each curve with the fewest points that stay within a pixel of the original. An illustration that traced to 719 separate paths in 537 slightly different colors now traces to 37 paths in 37 colors with the AI Art preset, and opens in Illustrator or Affinity as something you can actually select and recolor
• An AI Art preset, for images made by an image generator that were meant to be vectors. Clean edges, one shape per color, up to 32 colors, gradients kept where the image really has them. This is the preset the new version was built around
• A Clean Bands preset. Soft shadows and glows become a few smooth-edged bands instead of a stack of thin slivers with seams between them — the flat poster look, with true circles and rectangles recognised as such
• Simplistic is now Logo: cutout layering, a 12-color palette, circles and rectangles emitted as real shapes, and the image traced at twice its size so small icons get clean curves
• VectorFox tells you before tracing when an image is a poor candidate. Each file gets a Good, Fair or Poor fit label with a plain reason ("This looks like a photograph. Tracing will posterise it into thousands of shapes"), and a batch containing Poor images gets one warning with Convert Anyway and Skip These. Photographs were never something a tracer could do well; now the app says so instead of letting you find out from the result. The warning can be turned off in Settings
• Subject only. Turn it on in the inspector's Image section and the background is lifted away before tracing, using the same subject detection as Photos, so a sticker or character delivered on a busy background traces on its own
• Remove background. Turn it on in the Image section and the color that touches the image edges is cleared before tracing, with a Tolerance slider for backdrops that are not quite one color, so a logo on a flat backdrop comes out as a transparent SVG. The preview draws on a checkerboard, so you can see straight away whether the backdrop came away cleanly Remove enclosed areas, on by default, also clears backdrop-colored gaps the fill can't reach from the edge, like the inside of an O or the hole in an e; switch it off for a design with details in that color
• Trace light areas, for Black & White clustering. Cutout traces the dark parts of the image as the shape, so a white logo on black used to come out as a black plate with letter-shaped holes; the new switch in the Regions section makes the light parts the shape instead. Black & White and Watershed clustering now also honor transparency, so a transparent PNG or a cleared backdrop no longer traces as a black plate. A Threshold slider sets the brightness where the cut between shape and background falls, and Adaptive threshold judges each pixel against its surroundings instead, for uneven lighting or a backdrop that fades across the picture
• Export profiles for makers. Save As and the new File ▸ Export As menu offer Outline (every edge once, no fills, for laser and vinyl cutters), Cut File (flat colors, no gradients, one layer per color, for Cricut and Silhouette) and Layered (one group per color with gradients kept, for editing). Export All applies one profile to a whole batch
• Illustration preset, for shaded artwork. It cuts the image along edges instead of by color, so a soft shadow that shares its hue with what it falls on, or the layers of a tail drawn in one color, come out as their own pieces; Cutout layering keeps every piece visible and the file small. The Firefox logo traces to 33 paths and 54 KB with every detail of the fox intact
• Watershed clustering, a third way of cutting the image into regions, with a single Detail slider that re-cuts in a few milliseconds. Cutout layering is now a true seam-free mosaic where neighbouring shapes share an edge, instead of a stack of overlapping ones
• Upscale and Denoise pre-passes in the inspector's Image section, and a Clean Bands switch that smooths region boundaries before the curves are fitted
• The Info tab reports node count and color count next to path count and size, and a result that came out unexpectedly heavy says so on its row with a pointer to the AI Art or Logo preset

~ Improved

• The settings a result was traced with travel with it for as long as the app is open. Tweak something in the preview, save, close the window and open it again and the controls are where you left them, not back on the preset's defaults
• Gradients fit more closely and cost less: every gradient test image improved or held (the radial sphere from 0.0134 to 0.0128 RMSE, a linear ramp from 0.0241 to 0.0205) at 10–25% fewer bytes, and identical gradients now share one definition instead of each region carrying its own
• The Trace tab is arranged in the order the engine works: Image, Regions, Color, Curves, Output. The corner, segment and splice sliders that almost never need touching are folded into an Advanced curve fitting disclosure
• The Photo preset is still there, under Show advanced presets in Settings ▸ Presets. It posterises photographs into flat regions and makes large files, which is what tracing a photograph means, and it no longer sits beside Balanced as if it were an equal choice
• Old custom presets keep tracing the same. Anything saved with the previous version's color mode and preset fields is mapped onto the new controls when it loads, and a stored default of Simplistic becomes Logo

× Fixed

• Traced results could open in the preview with pieces displaced and holes torn in them, while re-tracing looked fine. The SVG optimizer that runs on every batch result lost track of position after a run of relative curves and re-based everything that followed on a stale point; the new engine writes almost nothing but relative curves, so whole regions moved. The optimizer's path handling is rewritten and every option now renders identically to the unoptimized file
• The SVG optimization checkboxes in Settings had no effect: the optimizer treated every option as on whether or not it was asked for. They work now, so turning one off actually leaves that part of the file alone
• The preview and the main window disagreed about the preset. Choosing a preset in the preview also changed the app-wide default behind the main window's back, so a result converted with Balanced could open on whatever the preview had last tried. The preview now edits only its own working copy; the toolbar picker is the one place the default is set
• Two inspector sliders could crash the tracer. Segment length below 3.5 or above 10, and speckle above 16, were outside what the tracer accepts, and the old ranges let you set them. The ranges now match the engine

× Fixed

• Moving VectorFox to Applications failed when an App Store copy was already there. It reported that macOS wouldn't allow the replacement and never offered a way through. macOS installs App Store apps in a way that only Finder can change, so VectorFox now asks Finder to do it and you get the usual password prompt — the same one you'd see dragging that copy to the Trash yourself. Your App Store purchase is read and applied before anything is moved, and the old copy goes to the Trash rather than being deleted
• Running from the disk image wasn't always recognised. VectorFox only noticed when the download flag was still set, so in some cases it sat quietly on the disk image reporting itself as properly installed. Nothing you set up there survives ejecting it, so it now says so whenever it's running from an image

~ Improved

• VectorFox offers to move itself to your Applications folder, in one click. Opened from a disk image or straight out of Downloads, macOS gives an app a new temporary home every time it launches, so no folder permission you grant is ever remembered — which is why you can end up allowing the same folder over and over. VectorFox now spots this on launch and offers to move itself and reopen from Applications, where permissions stick. You can also just carry on where you are

~ Improved

• The paid features have a name. Settings ▸ License read a bare "Licensed", which never said what the tier was called, so the pricing on the website and the status in the app were using different words for the same thing. It now reads "VectorFox Pro", the trial counts down a "Pro trial", and the buy button and status line name the tier instead of listing the features twice

× Fixed

• Confetti celebrates license activation again. It had been hiding behind a Settings toggle that defaults off; now it always fires, and the toggle governs just the fanfare sound

+ New

• A full interface redesign matching RasterFox 3.0. VectorFox now uses native macOS windows, toolbars and controls throughout, with one vivid magenta accent, and it respects your light or dark appearance
• The preview window finally shows what vectorization buys: the SVG pane re-renders the vector at every zoom level, so zooming in shows crisp curves against the original's honest pixel squares. The old preview flattened the SVG to a bitmap once, so both sides always looked equally soft
• Side by Side compare mode: original and SVG in two panes with locked pan and zoom, plus a minimap in each pane showing where you are. Click or drag the minimap to jump anywhere. Zoom now reaches 64x
• The floating Presets panel is now a proper inspector pane attached to the window edge, with two tabs: Trace, holding every vectorization and optimization control in full-size grouped forms, and Info, showing size, path and color counts, the preset used, and before-and-after numbers following each re-trace
• A Presets pane in Settings for managing custom presets: create, duplicate, rename and delete in one place
• Saved SVGs now include a viewBox, so they scale properly in browsers and design tools. A new Responsive option strips the fixed width and height for fluid embedding
• Keyboard throughout: Cmd-O adds images, Space previews with Quick Look, Return opens the compare window, Cmd-Delete removes, Cmd-R re-vectorizes, Cmd-S saves, Opt-Cmd-I toggles the inspector, Cmd-Return applies, Cmd-Period cancels, Opt-Cmd-C copies the SVG source
• What's New in the app menu: the full changelog in a native window, shown once automatically after each update

~ Improved

• Smooth gradients survive vectorization now. The tracer could only ever fill a shape with one flat color, so anything built from gradients came back either banded into stripes or flattened to a single average color. Regions whose color genuinely ramps are now filled with a real SVG gradient fitted to the original pixels. An abstract gradient wallpaper that used to trace to a 332 KB mess now comes out at 100 KB and looks like the source
• Gradients that radiate out from a point are recognised as such. Anything with spherical shading, a billiard ball, a glossy button, a lit sphere, used to come back as a flat disc with a diagonal tint across it, because the only gradient shape on offer ran along a straight line. The highlight and its falloff are kept now
• Where a smooth ramp gets cut into several bands during tracing, those bands now share one gradient instead of each getting a flat color of its own. The cuts are an artifact of how tracing works rather than anything in your image, and sharing the gradient across them makes the seams stop showing. It helps most on artwork with large soft areas, like the blue field behind the Firefox logo
• The Balanced preset was throwing away color detail before tracing even started, comparing colors at 6 bits per channel instead of 8. That was enough to swallow a gradient whole and paint it one color, and no amount of work further down could get it back. Balanced now traces at full color precision and lays down layers less aggressively, which on gradient artwork is both more accurate and a smaller file
• Gradient Step in the inspector could only be set between 0 and 10, but the tracer takes values up to 255 and its own sensible default is 16. The entire useful range sat past the right edge of the slider. It now covers 1 to 64
• Every preset used to trace with Gradient Step at 0, which quietly switched the tracer into its most wasteful mode. It doubled file sizes without making anything more accurate
• Tracing quality: the Balanced and Simplistic presets were tracing in polygon mode, which reproduces pixel staircases instead of fitting smooth curves. All built-in presets now trace with spline curve fitting, which is what vtracer recommends. Logos come out with clean edges instead of vectorized pixels
• Applying new settings in the inspector shows honest progress with an elapsed counter and a working Cancel button. A stuck tracer now times out instead of hanging a conversion slot forever
• Rows read calmly and honestly: sizes in aligned figures, path counts, and growth stated plainly. A photo that traces larger says "19% larger" in quiet gray, never red, and the totals line says "Total Added" instead of showing a negative saving
• Files past the free tier's batch limit are kept as rows marked "Requires a license" instead of being silently dropped, and convert automatically when a license is activated
• Re-vectorize All now runs through the worker pool instead of one image at a time
• Big batches no longer repaint the whole list on every progress tick
• Twenty SVG optimization controls in Settings were never actually read by the optimizer. They work now
• Sound toggles in Settings took effect only after restarting. They apply immediately now
• Celebrations respect Reduce Motion and share one Celebrations toggle
• VoiceOver can reach every control, focus rings are visible again, and every icon button has a label and tooltip

× Fixed

• Curves drifted away from the shape they were tracing, worst along a long gentle arc where the traced edge could sit five or six pixels outside the original. Two faults in the curve fitter caused it. Where a run of the outline was too curved for a single curve to describe, the fitter split it and then threw away everything past the first piece, so most of that run was drawn by a curve that had never been fitted to it. And the fitter only ever checked its work at the points it was given, so a sparsely sampled run could be matched by a curve that passed exactly through every one of them while swinging wildly in the gaps between. Both are fixed: every piece of a split fit is kept, and the fitter now adds its own checkpoints along the way so it can see where it is going
• Traced shapes came out about two pixels larger than the artwork they came from. Anything with a soft edge is drawn with partly transparent pixels around it, and the tracer was counting every one of those as solid, so each shape quietly grew by the width of its own fade. Edges now land where you actually see them. The difference is largest on logos and icons with transparent backgrounds
• Applying a preset left the preview soft until you dragged or zoomed the window, at which point it snapped sharp. The preview only redrew itself when the view moved, so a new trace arriving while the view sat still was shown at placeholder quality
• Cancelling or removing a converting image actually terminates the tracer process instead of leaving it running
• The SVG optimizer no longer blocks the app while it runs
• Escape properly closes the preview window and cancels sheets
• Cross-promotion suggestions appear at sensible moments and can be dismissed permanently

~ Improved

• Migrating a Mac App Store purchase now tells you it happened. The unlock used to be completely silent, and the one thing it needs from you, an email address for a permanent license key, was easy to miss in settings
• The disk image explains itself now, including a note for App Store buyers to open VectorFox from the disk image before installing it

× Fixed

• Restoring an App Store purchase when the App Store copy is already gone now spells out the order to follow, including moving VectorFox aside before reinstalling from the App Store so the two don't overwrite each other

~ Improved

• Checks for updates shortly after launch. Previously the first automatic check could be a day away, so a new install would sit on an old version
• A new app icon, matching the one on skulkworks.dev

+ New

• First direct release, distributed outside the Mac App Store with automatic Sparkle updates and a Homebrew cask
• Automatic migration for Mac App Store customers: VectorFox detects your previous purchase, unlocks instantly and offline, and can email you a permanent license key for your other Macs
• 14-day full-feature trial. After it ends, VectorFox stays free forever and keeps converting unlimited images with the Balanced preset. A one-time license unlocks every preset, unlimited batches, the SVG optimizer settings, adjustable concurrency, custom save locations and filename templates, custom presets, and the alternative app icons
• A License tab in Settings for activating, deactivating and recovering your key, plus one-click activation from the purchase email
• An About tab in Settings, replacing the old system about panel, with the version, your licensing state, and a manual update check

~ Improved

• No longer sandboxed, so converted SVG can be written alongside the original without granting folder access first