I tested it with a bitmap image that ChatGPT 4o created for me based on the following prompt:
> Owl line art, stylized, scientific, illustration
I tested converting it to SVG using first “black and white” mode, which was unsatisfactory because it is literally only completely black and completely white shapes, which loses detail compared to the original image that had multiple shades of grey. The file size was around 291 KB which seems to be not too bad.
I then tried converting the original image with color mode instead, and the result looked good to me. The file size was pretty big, at 3.3 MB. Presumably because it has to use a lot more individual shapes to capture all of the shades in the original image.
I conjecture that if I fiddle a bit more with the prompt for generating the bitmap in ChatGPT, adding things like “unshaded”, “crisp lines”, etc, you might get a bitmap image that will be better as base for a black and white only SVG conversion that captures the original image well while keeping file size around the hundreds of KB.
I am on mobile so I have not tried editing the SVG in Inkscape. I assume that with the details in the image I generated, it consists of many small parts and is probably not well suited for manual editing.
I also know that Adobe Illustrator has a “Live Trace” feature since many years that might also work for this kind of “conversion” to vector graphics. It’s been a few years since last time I tried that feature though.
I looked at a bunch of Vectorising tools, and in the end used https://vectormagic.com/
It works really well, although I had to do all the conversions manually. They do have a bulk tool, but wanted to try this out first.
It does also produce .eps as well as .svg
