Image To Svg Gimp. Gimp itself is a powerful image editing tool. It operates on the entire image.
Use the free select (lasso) tool to select an area. Svg files use a vector format, gimp uses raster format files. Now, go to file menu > export as option and choose svg as the output image format.
If your image has layers of different sizes, making the image smaller could shrink some of them down to nothing, since a layer cannot be less than one pixel.
Several solutions (they assume that you have ticked the import paths` option in the svg open dialog): An svg file is scalable vector graphics file. Once your selection has been converted to a path, you can export it out of gimp and then import it at any time into another composition. It isn't layers in the photoshop/gimp sense but it absolutely can be picked apart.
