If your Mac still nags that ImageVectorizer.app will not work on this Mac, you already know the plot. Intel binary. Great tracer. Dead product.
Vectra is the local replacement: raster in, clean vectors out, nothing uploaded to a GPU farm.
What it does
PNG, JPEG, TIFF, WebP in. SVG, PDF, EPS out. Custom Swift engine. Runs on Apple silicon.
Product page: vectra.alta-forma.com
You drop a logo. You get paths. You take those paths to a sign shop, a laser, a website favicon, a print run. The original ImageVectorizer job, without the Intel funeral.
Why not “just use Illustrator Image Trace”
You can. You can also wait on a cloud tab that wants an account and a GPU queue. Vectra is for people who want a dedicated tracer that lives next to DownSide in the dock and does not need a Creative Cloud seat for one job.
We still open Illustrator when the file demands it. Most of the time the file does not demand it. A shop mark, a scanned signature, a PNG a client swears is “the logo” — that is Vectra.
The Intel problem, again
MacDown.app and ImageVectorizer.app were both good tools that never got a native rewrite. Apple silicon does not care that you liked them. The reminder is not a suggestion. It is a countdown.
We built DownSide for markdown. We built Vectra for vectors. Same reason: this studio has to ship files, and we were done running dead Intel apps.
Why it is on this site
AltaForma sells websites. Logos still arrive as PNG. Someone has to turn that into SVG before it goes on a page or a truck door. Vectra is how we do that locally.
If you found this page because of an OS warning: good. That warning is the marketing department we did not hire.