SVG Recolor
What SVG Recolor actually does
Recolouring a vector file usually means finding out what colours it uses, which is not something the file volunteers. Opening it in an editor to sample them is slower than the recolour itself, and typing hex codes from memory produces mappings that silently match nothing. This reads the palette out of the file first and shows it as clickable swatches with the number of times each colour appears, so a mapping is built from what is actually there. Tolerance handles files where the same visual colour was exported at several near-identical values.
How to use it
- Choose one or more SVG files.
- Press read the colours to list every flat colour in the file with its usage count.
- Click a swatch to start a mapping line, then set the new value after the equals sign.
- Raise the tolerance if near-identical shades should be treated as one colour, then run and compare.
Useful for
- Rebranding an icon set from one palette to another.
- Making a light-theme illustration work on a dark background.
- Collapsing several near-identical exported shades into one brand colour.
Limits worth knowing
- Flat colours are matched. Gradients, patterns and colours inside embedded raster images are not remapped.
- A colour written in a form the reader does not recognise will not appear as a swatch and cannot be mapped.
- Tolerance matches by colour distance, so a high value can catch shades that were meant to stay different.
Questions people ask
Why did my mapping change nothing?
Almost always because the source colour is not in the file in that exact form. Read the palette first and click the swatch rather than typing the value.
What does tolerance do?
It widens each match so colours close to the one named are also replaced, which is what you want when an export produced several shades that were meant to be identical.
Can it recolour gradients?
Not the gradient definitions. The colours listed are the flat ones it can match reliably.