Logo File Inspector
Drop your logo in and find out what it actually is — real vector artwork, a raster image with a hard size ceiling, or the common trap: an SVG that is only a bitmap in a vector wrapper. It is read on your own machine. The file is never uploaded and no copy is kept.
Or drag the file anywhere onto this page — one file at a time. Any format: it is identified by what is inside it, not by the extension.
Drop a logo file above. It is read on your own machine and identified for what it actually is — true vector artwork, a raster image, or an SVG with a bitmap hidden inside it.
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Logo File Inspector FAQ
Built by SHIFT Design in Buffalo, MN — free to use, no sign-up. When you are ready to make it real, we design and print it.
No. The file is read by your own browser, on your own machine, with the same FileReader any web page uses to preview a photo before you attach it. The analysis happens there and the answer is drawn onto the page. Nothing about the file is transmitted, no copy is stored, and there is nothing to delete afterwards — close the tab and it is gone. One thing to be straight about: this page carries the same anonymous analytics as the rest of the site, so a hit is recorded saying the tool ran and what broad category of file it was. That is a count. It never includes the file, the filename, or anything drawn in it. If you open your browser's network panel and drop a logo, that analytics ping is the only request you will see, and your artwork is not in it.
An SVG that contains a bitmap instead of drawn shapes. The SVG format allows an image to be embedded inside it, so a PNG or JPG can be wrapped in SVG packaging and saved with a .svg extension. It opens, it previews, and it passes the question “do you have a vector?” — but the pixels inside keep exactly the size ceiling they always had, and it goes soft the moment anyone enlarges it. This tool counts the drawing elements, and follows pattern and clip references so a Figma-style frame wrapped around a bitmap is not mistaken for a shape. The logo file formats guide explains the categories.
Because reading inside a PDF requires a full PDF interpreter, and this page deliberately does not carry one — it would be a large library loaded on every visit, and a half-built one produces confident answers that are wrong. An .ai file is a PDF underneath as well, so the same limit applies. The tool identifies the file from its header bytes and says so plainly rather than guessing. Send it to us instead and we will open it properly and tell you what is in it.
Usually, but rarely for free and rarely perfectly. If the file is a JPG, the format itself settles it — JPEG has no transparency channel, so the white is part of the picture. Cutting it out means masking the logo by hand, and the automatic tools tend to leave a gray halo along every edge where the logo was anti-aliased against white. The clean fix is to go back to the vector artwork, where that background never existed in the first place. If there is no vector, see graphic design.
No, and it is not trying to. It reports what is in the file — the format, the drawing elements, the pixel dimensions, the transparency — so you can have a specific conversation with whoever made your logo. Whether a file is right for a particular job depends on the job: the finished size, the material, the process. That is a judgement, and we make it by eye. Every job we take gets a proof you approve before anything prints.
Because the tool reads the bytes rather than the name. Every real format opens with a fixed signature — a PNG begins with a PNG marker, a PDF with %PDF- — and those bytes are what the file actually is. Renaming a file changes the label on the box, not what is in it, which is why a renamed logo opens fine on the desktop and then stalls at a printer. If you get this result, go back and ask for a real export rather than a rename.
Ask whoever designed it for the vector file first — an AI, EPS, SVG or vector PDF. It is one email, and you only have to do it once. If that file has genuinely gone, the logo can be redrawn as clean vector art from the raster you have; it is a one-time design job we quote before any work starts, and afterwards you own a master that works at every size. See graphic design, and logo file formats for what to ask for and what to keep.
Behind the numbers
Every logo file belongs to one of two families, and almost every logo problem comes from not knowing which one you are holding. Vector artwork stores shapes as coordinates and curve math — a circle is a centre point and a radius, not a picture of a circle — so the software redraws it at whatever size you ask for, and the edges stay perfect at any scale. Raster artwork stores a fixed grid of colored squares. Enlarge it and you are not adding detail, only making each square bigger. A logo has to work on a business card and on the side of a trailer, which is why the answer for a logo is always vector. The print glossary has the short version; the logo file formats guide has the long one.
An SVG is not an image file at all — it is a text document, XML, listing drawing instructions, and that is what this page reads. It parses the file the way a browser would and counts the elements that actually draw something: path, rect, circle, polygon and their relatives. Then it counts image elements, because the W3C’s SVG specification also allows a bitmap to be dropped inside an SVG and carried along as base64 text. Drawing elements and no image element means real vector artwork. Nothing but an image element is the trap: a PNG in a vector-shaped envelope. It opens, it previews, it satisfies anyone who only asked whether you had an SVG — and it enlarges exactly as badly as the PNG inside it.
There is a second version of that trap, and it is the one that catches people most often now. A Figma or Sketch export of a placed bitmap puts a single rectangle on the canvas whose fill points at a pattern, and the pattern points at the embedded image. Count naively and that file looks like one shape plus one bitmap — part vector. It is not; the rectangle is a window, not artwork. This page follows the reference before it counts, so a pattern-filled frame is reported as what it is. text elements are flagged separately, because live text is a reference to a font rather than a shape, and on a machine without that font it silently sets in something else.
For a raster file the arithmetic is fixed: pixels divided by the density you print at gives inches. At 300 DPI — the convention for anything read in the hand — a 1200-pixel-wide logo covers four inches and no more. At 150 DPI, where most large-format work sits because a sign is read from several feet away rather than several inches, that same file covers eight. Those are the two numbers reported here, and they are a ceiling rather than a target. The second raster question is transparency. PNG carries a full 8-bit alpha channel, so a pixel can be clear, solid, or anything in between; GIF manages only one bit, on or off, which is why GIF edges go stair-stepped over color; JPEG has no alpha channel whatsoever, so whatever sat behind the logo is welded into the picture. That is where the white box comes from. This page samples the alpha channel around the edge of the file and tells you which of those you have. For one specific finished size, the image resolution checker and the pixels to inches calculator do the arithmetic directly.
PDF, AI and EPS stop at identification, on purpose. Files are recognized here by their opening bytes rather than their extension — a PDF starts with %PDF-, an EPS with %!PS — which is also how a JPG that somebody renamed to .svg gets caught. But going any further into a PDF means running a PDF interpreter, and an .ai file has been a PDF underneath ever since Illustrator 9, so the same applies there. A page that half-reads a PDF gives confident wrong answers, which is worse than no answer at all, so it names the file honestly and stops. Send it over and we will open it properly, tell you what is inside, and say whether it needs work — print-ready files covers what we look at, and graphic design covers it if the answer turns out to be a redraw. Nothing here certifies a file: it reports findings, and every job still gets a human proof before it prints.
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