Lisa Dziuba

Reduce by Flawless App - Compress huge Sketch files in an instant

Elegant macOS app to compress your heavy Sketch files to a light one. Keep things small even with 1K UI elements in your designs.

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Andrew Alex
Does it reduce quality of images? What technology is behind this tool?
Ahmed Sulaiman
@andrew_alexeyenko We use lossless image compression algorithm under the hood. So no pixels were harmed during optimisation πŸ™‚
Chris Messina
Top Hunter
@geek_1001 can you say more about the optimization techniques you use?
Ahmed Sulaiman
@chrismessina Hello, Chris! Sure, for the image optimisation, we use standard Deflate and LZ77 compression algorithms. This way we can keep original quality more or less untouched. We use this tool for a long time with Flawless App designs, so far we didn't notice any quality loss, but our Sketch files became much tidier.
Chris Messina
Top Hunter
@geek_1001 nice, thanks for that. Do you apply these compression techniques to all file formats? I'm not clear about what formats Sketch uses internally...?
Ahmed Sulaiman
@chrismessina We apply these compressions to images only. Potentially we can compress json structural files as well, but unfortunately, Sketch won't recognize them after. Because Sketch doesn't expect to parse the compressed structural file when it opens a file 😊
Ahmed Sulaiman
Hello, folks! πŸ‘‹ It’s Ahmed here, founder of Flawless App. I’m so glad to share with you our little tool to optimise Sketch files size – Reduce app. πŸŽ‰ Have you ever experienced slow Sketch performance because of huge Sketch file you're using? πŸ€” At Flawless App we have really big Sketch files and this performance problem becomes a real bummer to our productivity. That's why we decided to create a little tool which will optimise our Sketch files. You can not just optimise images, but also automatically remove hidden layers from your Sketch files which is also affecting file size. We'll add more optimisation there soon. I’d really appreciate any thoughts or feedback you have. (No pixels were harmed during Sketch file optimisation)
Jirka TΕ™ečÑk
Very neat product @lisadziuba! Any idea if you would make it available as command line tool as well? I'd love to see it integrated with our Supernova Studio as well! Love the small tools you are guys creating, helps a ton. Keep up good work!
Ahmed Sulaiman
@lisadziuba @jirka_trecak Thanks for your support! πŸ™‚ We are going to add more optimisation options like: "automatically remove unused symbols from Sketch file" and some other as well. If there will be demand for CLI tool – we'll do it.
Jirka TΕ™ečÑk
@lisadziuba @geek_1001 You can definitely count on us at least promoting it, possibly even inside the Supernova / our documentation. Everyone loves faster performance across the board and this will definitely deliver :)
Artur Kiulian
@lisadziuba Nice, I do hate those HUMONGOUS sketch files sitting on my hard drive..
Ahmed Sulaiman
@lisadziuba @arturkiulian Thanks! Oh, we understand you so much... πŸ™‚
Lisa Dziuba
@arturkiulian many thanks for supporting us :)
Dmytro Kovalenko
That's a great problem to solve, guys! We're experiencing the same thing, especially when there are 2 or more designers working on the same file.
Ahmed Sulaiman
@tasteofdalife Thanks! πŸ™‚ That's true, even though Sketch files takes much less space then Photoshop files, it's still affecting Sketch performance itself. We made this little tool for internal use but then decided to publish it as well.
Dmytro Kovalenko
@geek_1001 Btw, small hack that saved me few times is: when you enable 'Show Pixels' mode, the performance gets a little better if the file is way too big.
Lisa Dziuba
Dmytro, many thanks for supporting us!
Nick Neuman
Hey Ahmed and team, nice work, this seems super useful. We are constantly uploading and transferring massive sketch files and it takes way too long. It does worry me a bit that it could accidentally "clean up" (delete) something we will need in the future...how do you guard against that/decide what should be deleted?
Ahmed Sulaiman
@nneuman Hello, Nick! Thank you so much for your feedback! 😊 >how do you guard against that/decide what should be deleted? That's great questions. Thanks! So when you drag and drop Sketch file you can choose optimisation options you need: - Compress all images with lossless compression - Delete all broken images (sometimes there are broken image in Sketch files, they do not show in the interface but take some space as well) - Delete all hidden layers (this option will remove every hidden layer from every page on every artboard) If you don't want some option to be executed, you can just unselect it from the list. Also for exactly this reason, the option "delete hidden layers" is disabled by default, so you won't delete something accidentally. We're also going to add some more options for optimisation like - Remove all unused symbols - Convert repeatable elements across the whole Sketch file into a single symbol and use it instead (which will also save a lot of space) Is it an answer to your question? πŸ™‚ Would love to hear what do you think about this "optimisation options" approach.
Nick Neuman
@geek_1001 That does answer it, thanks! I'm going to try this out. I like the optimisations idea depending on how you guys implement it. Converting the repeatable elements into one symbol could be πŸ’°πŸ’°πŸ’°, but I think I'd want a quick way to review and sign off before they are merged. Seems like it would maybe be tough to write it to distinguish between some of the small differences in certain elements. Staying on the safe side with an 80/20 approach and just converting the definite matches would still be awesome.
Ahmed Sulaiman
@nneuman > I think I'd want a quick way to review and sign off before they are merged. True. That totally makes sense. Thank you again for the feedback! πŸ™‚
Alphonso Morris

Had a Sketch that was 89mbs, downloaded this app and it increased it to 128mbs.

Pros:

Cool idea

Cons:

Didnt compress my file, weirdly increased it.

Ahmed Sulaiman
Oh, that's probably a bug! Thank you so much for reporting. And I'm so sorry for that! If it's possible, could you please share your Sketch file, so we can try to reproduce it?
Ahmed Sulaiman
Hello, @youngfonz I'm glad to tell you that we finally fixed this issue! πŸ™‚ Please update your application to the latest version 1.3. File compression should work properly. In case you will have some more issues, feel free to ping us. Thanks!
Alex Kukharenko
Just tried. Decreased the size 3 time more! It worths to be added to a workflow. Thanks for a great job guys!
Ahmed Sulaiman
@alexdeardream Thank you so much, Alex, for your support! πŸŽ‰
Lisa Dziuba
@alexdeardream @geek_1001 wow! we are happy, that Reduce helped you already!
Graeme
great tool, really very simple to use πŸ‘πŸ½
Lisa Dziuba
@graeme_fulton Graeme, happy that you liked it :)
Ahmed Sulaiman
@graeme_fulton Thanks, Graeme, for all your support! πŸ™‚ I hope this little tool brings a lot of value into your workflow.
Aleksandra
Congrats on the launch @lisadzuiba @geek_1001 ! Great to see how your product is evolving, and now new products coming :) Keep building πŸ’ͺ πŸ’ͺ πŸ’ͺ
Ahmed Sulaiman
@lisadzuiba @aleks_muse Thank you so much, Aleksandra! We've made this tool for Flawless App internal use. But we decided to make it public. We have a really huge design files and it's affecting Sketch performance so we wanted to fix it.
Ruslan
You kill it guys. Super useful tool with just one feature. I totally love it! Keep growing!
Ahmed Sulaiman
@ruslannaz Thank you so much, Ruslan! πŸ™‚ We're on the way to the Mars! πŸš€
Lisa Dziuba
@ruslannaz thanks :) It's our small present for the community :)
Alphonso Morris
Hey, guys the app increased my file size from 89mb to 128mbs lol. Weird right. I kept a screenshot to show. Great idea though. Big Sketch files are definitely a problem.
Ahmed Sulaiman
@youngfonz Thank you so much for the feedback! I'm so sorry for this inconvenient situation. It seems like a phantom bug. If it's possible could you please share your Sketch file, so we could try to reproduce an issue and fix it. Also, Reduce App has an auto-update system, so we'll push a fix as soon as possible.
Ahmed Sulaiman
Hello @youngfonz We've fixed this issue finally. Please update your app to latest version 1.3. You can do it from the main screen by clicking on the 3 dots in the top right corner. The compression should work properly now. I'm sorry for this inconvenient issue!
Kailash Arya
Good any chance for doing for PS in future?
Ahmed Sulaiman
@arya_kailash Hello, Arya! Thanks for the questions? We focus on Sketch at the moment. Because we use Sketch at Flawless App and we made this tool for our own internal needs first. The time will tell, if there will be a huge demand for PS version, we'll work on it as well. πŸ™‚
Sambruce Joseph
Awesome app πŸ‘ŒπŸ½ Question: How is this different from the built-in "Size Reducer" in Sketch?
Ahmed Sulaiman
@sambrucejoseph Hello, Sambruce! Thanks for your questions! Besides regular image compression, we also have an option to automatically remove all hidden layers from the whole Sketch file. And over time we'd like to add a couple of more optimisation options like: - Remove all unused symbols - Convert repeatable elements across the whole Sketch file into a single symbol (this will save a lot of space actually because instead of multiple copies you'd have only one instance)
Andrey Nikishaev
Cool app, guys! Now i can save money on external drives))
Ahmed Sulaiman
@creotiv Thanks, Andrey! I'm glad you liked it)
Irshad PC
Super 😎
Ahmed Sulaiman
@irshadpc111 Thanks for your support! 😊
Alexander Diatlov
Great app! Simple and useful
Ahmed Sulaiman
@adiatlov Thanks, Alex, for your support! 😊
Arif Akhmedzade
Like it! Thanks for this tool!
Ahmed Sulaiman
@arif_aze Thanks, Arif! I hope it will be useful for you πŸ™‚
Dmitry Kaigorodov
Cool stuff guys. Can't wait for your next product!
Ahmed Sulaiman
@kuolldev Thank you so much, Dmitry, for all your support! πŸ™‚
Nazar Begen
wow, cool idea! Thanks guys!
Ahmed Sulaiman
@nazarpanchyshyn Thanks, Nazar! I hope it will be useful for your team as well πŸ™‚