Vector Iris

Pixels in. Clean paths out.

Vector Iris is a free panel for Illustrator and plugin for Figma that turns images and ideas into editable vectors with Quiver's Arrow models. Select an image, click Vectorize, and the result lands beside it at the same size.

Download for Illustrator Download for Figma
  • Free and open source
  • Windows and macOS
  • Illustrator 2021 and later
  • Figma, in preview
  • Your own Quiver API key
CtrlY
Image Trace, 16 colors
514 paths 4,672 anchors
Vector Iris, Trace on Telos, Low
17 paths 121 anchors
The same image, both results counted in Illustrator. Switch to Outline to see every path and anchor. Eye illustration by Laura Paunero.

Three ways to get vectors

Trace

Follows the pixels closely, gradients included. Best for logos, scans, flat illustration and prints.

Original mandala print with a speckled paper texture
OriginalVector IrisMandala by mwm_graphics
Original Inertial Frame album cover: gray cones and planes on black
OriginalVector IrisInertial Frame cover, Arpanet
Photo of a butterfly specimen, wings spread, olive and cream with dark patches and white spots
OriginalVector Iris, in Figma
Botanical painting of fern fronds rising from a tangled rhizome
OriginalVector Iris, in Figma

Redraw

Rebuilds an image from shapes and lines of its own, guided by your prompt. Best for photos, where a faithful trace would be a mess of tones.

An old black and white photograph of a stone church on a street corner, with bare trees
Original photoVector IrisLaurel Street Methodist Church, Richmond, Virginia, 1899. Photo via Wikipedia
A photo of the Palace of Fine Arts rotunda and colonnade behind its lagoon
Original photoVector IrisPalace of Fine Arts, San Francisco. Prompt: “an architectural graphic rendering, maintain proportions”

Generate

Describe it and get new artwork, placed in the middle of your view. Select something first to use it as a style reference.

Prompt

An outline of a dodecahedron, thin dotted lines for the hidden faces

28s $0.061
Your wordsVector Iris
Prompt

An icon representing a solar punk city

65s $0.132
Your wordsVector Iris

It never leaves IllustratorFigma

No upload site, no download folder, no re-placing files. Vector Iris is a panel next to your Layers and Swatches.

No upload site, no download folder, no re-importing. Vector Iris is a plugin that works right on your canvas.

  1. Select an imageSelect a layer

    Placed or embedded, cropped with a clipping mask or not. Only the visible area is sent, so you only pay for what you see.

    An image, a frame, a group, anything visible. Masks and clipping are respected, so only what you see is sent.

  2. Pick a mode and effort

    Trace, Redraw or Generate. Start with Low effort on Arrow 2 Telos; on flat art it gave the best results in our tests.

  3. Vectorize

    In ten seconds to a few minutes the result lands beside the source at the same size, as an editable group. The SVG is saved to disk too.

    In ten seconds to a few minutes the result lands beside the source at the same size, as an editable vector frame. The SVG is a click away in the history.

The Vector Iris panel in Illustrator: Trace, Redraw and Generate tabs, the selected image, effort and model controls, a Vectorize button and a history of runs with their time and cost.
The Vector Iris plugin in Figma: Trace, Redraw and Generate tabs, the selected butterfly image, effort and model controls, and a Vectorize button.

You pay Quiver, by the result

Vector Iris is free. The drawing is done by Quiver's API on your own account, prepaid from $10, and the panel shows what every run cost. From our tests on Arrow 2:

Typical cost per result
JobTimeCostScale
Simple icon or logo, low effort10 to 35 sabout 3¢
Flat graphic or pattern, low effort30 to 75 s9 to 22¢
Photo, high effort3 to 4 min40 to 55¢

Bars drawn to scale, 0 to 55¢. Arrow 2 Telos costs about 50% more per token.

More effort is not more detail

Effort is how long Arrow reasons before it draws. On the same image, Medium billed more than twice the tokens of Low: most of the extra was reasoning you never see, and the rest cut the image into more pieces. On flat art that means more seams, so start on Low.

Low
1,425 tokens, 18 shapes, 3.1¢
Medium
3,269 tokens, 28 shapes, 6.8¢

SVG that comes back Reasoning, estimated from the gap

Some images fight back

Bands that weave over and under each other are hard for any vectorizer: every crossing has to be cut. Three runs at different settings each got parts right, and all three still need cleanup by hand. The cheaper Telos run on Low beat the pricier Medium one. Better to know that before you spend.

Original album cover: a circle of colored bands woven over and under each other
Original
Run 1
Run 2
Run 3

Unchained / Moonstruck cover, The Lucid Dream

Traced, then brought to life

The eye at the top of this page was vectorized with Vector Iris, then rebuilt as a live graphic in Weft, our node-based design tool. Clean paths are easy to take further. Move your pointer and it looks back.

Install

Illustrator on Windows

  1. Download the ZIP and unzip it.
  2. Double-click install.cmd.
  3. Restart Illustrator.

Illustrator on macOS

  1. Download the ZIP and unzip it.
  2. In Terminal, type bash and a space, drag in install.sh, press Return.
  3. Quit Illustrator with CmdQ and reopen it.

Then

  1. Open Window › Extensions › Vector Iris.
  2. Create a Quiver API key and add credit.
  3. Paste the key. The panel checks it with Quiver before saving.

Get the files Preview

  1. Download the ZIP and unzip it.
  2. Keep the folder where it is; Figma loads the plugin from it.

Import into Figma

  1. Open the Figma desktop app.
  2. Choose Plugins › Development › Import plugin from manifest and pick figma/manifest.json.

Then

  1. Run Plugins › Development › Vector Iris.
  2. Create a Quiver API key and add credit.
  3. Paste the key. The plugin checks it with Quiver before saving.

Privacy. Your key stays on your computer and is sent only to Quiver. The images and prompts you use go to Quiver's API for processing. Nothing goes to us, and there are no analytics.

Rights. Quiver's terms assign you the rights to what you generate, and limit their free tier to non-commercial use. You need the rights to the images you vectorize.

Why a script? Illustrator only loads panels from outside Adobe's marketplace with its debug setting on. The installer turns it on; the uninstaller can turn it off.

Coming to the Community. We're submitting Vector Iris as an official Figma plugin. Once it's approved, installing is one click from inside Figma.

Download for Illustrator Download for Figma Read the full guide Read the Figma guide