Object Mosaic in Inkscape?

Question

I'm currently working on a poster project for my graphic design class. Since I can't use Adobe products outside of school, I'm using GIMP and Inkscape. For the background, I'm trying to convert part of a pixelated image into a path so that it will scale nicely once I import it into GIMP. The image I'm trying to convert is a 16-pixel square texture (shown below, scaled up to 256x256) from Minecraft, while the image I'm trying to import the path to is 5400x7200 pixels.

I know that in Illustrator, there is an "Object Mosaic" function that can convert each pixel of an image into 1x1 squares, effectively creating a colored square for each individual pixel. In Inkscape, I've tried both Trace Pixel Art and Trace Bitmap, but both of them produce undesirable results. Is there another way to convert the image's pixels to paths or am I going to have to do it manually?

Answer 1

This doesn't directly answer your question about converting the pixels to vector shapes, but...

If the only reason you want to convert the pixels to vector shapes is to scale then it's not really necessary (it would be nice, but if your having trouble doing it, it's not essential).

All you need to do is increase the size of the image in integer multiples with no interpolation. In Photoshop you would set the resampling to Nearest Neighbor, I believe you just set Interpolation to None in GIMP.

This is your tile increased in size to 6,400 × 6,400 pixels:

Full size file here

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With regards to the object mosaic in Inkscape—I don't use Inkscape so I don't know for sure but from looking at the docs it doesn't look like Trace Pixel Art or Trace Bitmap are meant for doing what you want, they specifically don't treat pixels as discrete objects.