Batch Vectorizing an Icon Pack with Covecto

If you’ve ever maintained an icon pack, you know the pain. Designers deliver PNGs at various sizes, but your app needs SVGs. Maybe you’ve got 200 icons in 48px PNG format and you need them all as optimized SVG files. Manually opening each one in Inkscape or Illustrator and running “Trace Bitmap” is not a sustainable workflow. This is exactly the kind of batch processing task where a CLI vectorization tool shines.

The Problem with Manual Conversion

Icon packs typically arrive as raster files in one or more sizes. The PNGs might be clean pixel art, anti-aliased rounded icons, or even line art with transparency. Each style responds differently to vectorization. A naive trace can turn crisp 1px borders into fuzzy bezier curves, or miss subtle transparency gradients entirely. When you’re dealing with hundreds of icons, consistency across the output set is critical — you don’t want some icons looking sharp and others looking over-smoothed.

Setting Up Covecto for Batch Work

Covecto is designed as a CLI-first tool, which makes it naturally suited for batch processing. Install it from source: