Online PSD to Sketch file converter | Hacker News Reader

Online PSD to Sketch file converter

avocode.com

64 pointshelloiamvu22 comments

Hi everyone!

I'm very excited to show you our new tool.

It's a free online PSD to Sketch Converter. If you're manually re-creating designs from Photoshop into Sketch, now you don't have to.

It converts named layers, layer groups, basic layer effects, layer masks, vector shapes, text layers and more.

Let me know your thoughts. I hope you will like it.

I thought your guys video was excellent all around. I think you should have it front and center on the home page and probably even on the '/convert-psd-to-sketch' page. Best of luck!

Nice! Are you using an ExtendScript script to extract all the info? Or is it an in-house C++ extension for Photoshop?

We're actually using our own technology to parse PSD files without using any Photoshop API. We're already working on other design formats as well.

That's impressive! I read a few stories about reverse engineering the PSD format and how much technical debt it carries in it

Good stuff. Would it be possible to have the reverse?

Would be a huge time saver when taking Sketch files to After Effects for animation. AE reads layered PSD's but not sketch files, and there isn't any tool on the market that helps designers export Sketch designs to AE.

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Well... no

Neat! I've been a super happy user of Avocode for years, and I'm stoked to see you lot continue to innovate :)

Works quite well so far. Opened some giant ass old PSD files and was able to start tweaking the design right away.

Super useful, thank you!

I'm guessing that the lack of detail on this is really an explanation for expectations of this. It probably doesn't work well for anything complex but, if it works halfway decently, this could be a boon for those trying to get out from under the dark Adobe umbrella.

I'm sorry, it's my bad that I didn't post any details into comments.

The converter actually works pretty well even with large and complex designs. You should really try it out. There are still some features that we're working on.

> I'm guessing that the lack of detail on this is really an explanation for expectations of this

What details do you expect? It's a PSD to Sketch converter, what else do you expect it to say? He could have filled it with a "gorgeous", "unique", "innovative" marketing keywords but it would still be a PSD To Sketch converter.

> It probably doesn't work well for anything complex but

I just tried converting a really big photoshop file and it worked pretty good, why don't you try it before making comments on it's functionality?

Why don't you calm down a bit before getting all jumpy?

There are lots of details that could be helpful. What kind of limitations are there? What does it convert? Is anything discarded in the conversion process? What does it do with items where there isn't a 1:1 conversion? What does it do to features that aren't available in Sketch? You know... the things that are included in the description that OP provided in response to my comment and that he updated the main thread with... There is a lot of technical info that would be helpful. I didn't have a .PSD file handy to test so I was asking to try and be informative and helpful.

Here's a list of currently supported features: https://avocode.com/convert-psd-to-sketch/features along with additional information about features that are in development. Since it is a "PSD" to Sketch Converter - the best way to try is really just by trying to convert a PSD design and opening in it in Sketch afterward.

Knowing in advance which kind of layers won't be converted successfully sounds reasonable to me.

As the matter of fact, when you enter the website: https://avocode.com/convert-psd-to-sketch/ - there is a call to action to "Read more about supported features". If you click it, you would see a page explaining what will and what won't be converted. Here's the link: https://avocode.com/convert-psd-to-sketch/features

Ugghhh, if you're using this, then you don't really grok Sketch. Sketch has all these wonderful tools for breaking up your design into reuseable components and playing with them like lego pieces. If you're doing a straight conversion from PSD to Sketch, you're missing all the things that make Sketch great.

When you're starting from scratch in Sketch it has a lot of great features that are worth exploring. But what about making the switch to Sketch from PS? Normally, you would have to recreate the whole design. Most people and especially bigger design teams don't have time for that. So this service is meant to save you all that time, convert your current design system and then you can play around with the design some more and add all the wicked funtions in Sketch anyway. And I'm sure others can think of more use cases.

Well that's my point. If you don't have the time to convert your design system, then you might as well stick with PS until you do. You'd just be using Sketch as PS-Lite. It's not a "cheap PS" or a PS-lite, it's a tool for a new system of design.

It would be like using JIRA for Waterfall development. Sure, you can do that, but that's not really the point of JIRA...

Consider the use case where the designer doesn't have PS but receive a bunch of third party .PSD files.

You can incrementally convert your design system. Doing it all at once could be difficult to justify to some pointy-haired bosses.

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