Hi, inkscape surprised me a bit just now. I opened a jpg pic with my sketch and spent the next few hours turning it in into a vectorized image with gradients and nice things. Off course i saved it regularly. Now i come back from lunch and was gonna open my image again. Turns out that inkscape had saved it as a jpg image all the time, cause my original sketch was a jpg. So my vectors are gone and all i have is a useless bitmap. Would be even funnier if i didn't actually try to make a living of this. I would suggest the inkscape developers to add a little warning when u save into a lossy format. Well, well, back to work...

Which version of Inkscape?

I found it impossible to repeat what you said you've done with either 0.46 or 0.47.

The nearest I managed was to save the svg file with a jpg extension, though only by manually overriding Inkscape's defaults; there is no option to save as jpg. It didn't open as a Jpeg, though, and after renaming it with a .svg extension it opened in Inkscape with vectors intact. Perhaps you could try the same.

It's more likely, though, that the vector image is saved somewhere you didn't expect. Just look in Inkscape->"Open Recent".

There are also possibilities for auto-save or on-crash saved versions.

Thanks for looking into it. I have no trouble reproducing the behaviour. Open a .jpg photo, draw a line, save and click trough the ok's. Maybe i got a version with special features, it's 0.46. Anyway my second pic quicker and probably better than the first, so i'm ok. Just think inkscape should warn before it makes a bitmap of everything.

I also can't repeat your problem.

Clicking Sav anter opening a jpg results in a blank dialog with the svg extension preselected. If I click OK, nothing gets saved. I have to manually change it to png (jpg is not an option in my version).

-Rob A>

This might be relevant, it's been fixed recently

Opened bitmap images get overwritten with svg on save without warning https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/429529

Then maybe you can reproduce the basic issue. It didn't give a warning when converted to png, right? That is really the problem. It is standard practice to warn before you save to a format that don't fully support your application. For example a word document to text file. If my inkscape also behaved like that, I probably wouldn't have lost my file.

Do inkscape autosave regularly, if I had found an autosave, that would also have saved me from losing my work. I just try to suggest how the application can be improved.

There is no autosave. Are you sure you lost your work? This is inkscape's behavior with bitmaps in my experience:
1. If you open Inkscape then import the bitmap under File>Import, and then go to save your default filename is drawing.svg and "Inkscape svg" in the box in the bottom right of the dialog.

2. If you open the bitmap directly into Inkscape (in Windows by right clicking and selecting "open with" and choosing Inkscape) and make no other changes, then save does nothing and you still have a bitmap file only.

3. If you open the bitmap directly into Inkscape as above, then add some vector element (basically do anything in Inkscape), then save you're default filename is yourfilename.bitmapextension (e.g. llogg.png) with "Inkscape svg" in the box in the bottom right of the dialog. This creates a file with the full name yourfilename.bitmapextension.svg (e.g. llogg.png.svg). So your filename will contain the bitmap extension, and in certain icon views on windows you might think it's a bitmap but it IS an SVG vector file. The only way to get a bitmap after adding vector elements by using the save function would be to select "Guess from extension" in the save dialog (see screen cap). Since Inkscape SVG is the default selection, you must have changed the default settings somehow such that "Guess from extension" is the default. Still, if you didn't change the filename of the bitmap you should get the warning that "yourfilename.bitmapextension already exists. Do you want to replace it?" (Not sure that's verbatim, but close enough.)