Thousands of shapes is a different algorithm, not a setting.
A clean trace of flat art is tens to hundreds of paths. Thousands means posterising.
The converter mapped pixel blocks to shapes instead of finding regions
There are two ways to turn a raster into vector shapes and they produce wildly different files. Region tracing finds boundaries between areas of similar colour and returns one closed path per region — a two-colour logo comes back as a handful of paths. Posterising quantises the image to a palette and emits a shape per contiguous block, which on any photographic or anti-aliased input means thousands of tiny rectangles and slivers. Both technically produce valid SVG. Only one produces a file a human can edit. If your editor grinds when you select all, you were given the second kind, and no amount of path simplification recovers the structure the first kind would have found.
How to confirm it
- Count the paths
- Flat art: tens to ~200 is healthy. Over ~2,000 for a logo is posterising.
- Zoom into one shape
- Rectangular slivers and stair-step blocks are quantisation, not geometry.
- Select one colour region
- A region trace selects the whole area as one path. Posterising selects a fragment.
- Editor performance
- A file that lags on select-all is telling you the count directly.
- Anti-aliasing tell
- Rings of intermediate-colour shapes along every edge means it traced the anti-aliasing.
The fix
Path simplification on a posterised file removes detail without recovering structure — you get fewer bad shapes.
Re-trace from the original image with a region tracer rather than post-processing the broken output.
The preview shows the path count. That number is the difference between an editable file and an unusable one.
Fix it here.
Upload the original image. The preview shows the real path count before you pay.
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FAQ
You can reduce anchor points, and it will not give you the file you want. Simplification works within each existing shape; it cannot merge a thousand fragments back into the region they should have been. You end up with a thousand cruder fragments.
Anti-aliasing creates a band of intermediate colours along every edge to make it look smooth. A posterising converter treats each intermediate shade as its own colour and emits shapes for it, so every edge in the image sprouts a halo of thin slivers.
Yes — detailed illustration, engravings, and anything genuinely intricate legitimately need thousands of paths. The tell is not the number alone but whether the shapes correspond to things you can see. Slivers that follow no visible feature are the problem.
Severely. A cutter follows every path, so thousands of fragments means thousands of tiny cuts, enormous job times, and material that falls apart on the mat. It is the failure that turns a five-minute cut into an hour.