Sketch file viewer: open a .sketch without a Mac
Sent a .sketch by a designer and you are on Windows, Linux or a phone? Drop it here. You get the preview picture, the Sketch version that saved it, every page and artboard with a wireframe of its layers, all the text to search and copy, the fonts it needs, its colours with hex values, the images inside it to save, and the symbols and libraries it uses.
The file is read by this tab only. It is not uploaded and not changed.
What it shows
- The preview picture Sketch saves inside every file (previews/preview.png, of the page that was open at the last save), to look at or save as a PNG.
- Which Sketch saved it, and which Sketch can open it. The app version and build from meta.json, the version that first created the document, and the document format number, which decides the oldest Sketch that opens it.
- Every page and artboard, with each artboard’s name and size in points, its layer count, and a wireframe: text boxes with their first line, bitmaps crossed out, symbol instances dashed, shapes outlined, all at their real positions.
- The layer tree, page by page, in Sketch’s own layer-list order: groups, shapes, text, bitmaps, symbols and hidden layers, with how many layers each page holds.
- All the text, layer by layer, including text typed into symbol overrides: search it, copy it all or save it as a .txt. Handy for a copywriter or translator who only needs the words.
- The fonts, by PostScript name, with sizes and how many layers use each, and whether it ships with every Mac (and Windows) or must be installed before the text looks as designed.
- Colours and shared styles: colour variables, document colours, layer styles and text styles, each with its hex value one press away from the clipboard.
- Every embedded image, at its full stored resolution, with the layers that use it and a Save button for each.
- Symbols and libraries: each symbol with its size and number of instances, and the external libraries the file takes symbols, styles or colours from.
What it cannot do
- It does not render the design as Sketch would. The artboards are drawn as wireframes from the layer frames, with no fills, shadows, blurs, masks, rotation or vector paths. For the real look, use the stored preview, or ask the designer for a PDF or PNG export.
- It edits nothing and cannot save a changed .sketch.
- It does not open Figma (.fig) or Adobe XD (.xd) files. They are other formats; Figma can import a .sketch, not the other way round.
- A file from before Sketch 43 (2017) is not read in full. Those were SQLite databases of archived Mac objects. The page says so, lists the tables and shows any picture stored inside; re-saving the file in a newer Sketch makes it readable here.
- Libraries and fonts are named, not included. A library’s own file is not inside the document, only the copies of what was used; a font that is not a system font must be installed unless the file embeds it.
Useful to know about Sketch files
- What is inside a .sketch
- Since Sketch 43 (April 2017) a .sketch is a ZIP archive: document.json (styles, colours, symbols from libraries, the page list), meta.json (the app version and the pages and artboards index), user.json (window and zoom state), one JSON file per page under pages/, the preview under previews/ and every bitmap under images/, named by a hash of its content. Renaming a copy to .zip and unzipping it shows the same parts; this page reads them for you and lays them out.
- A worked example
- The MIT-licensed test file library-symbol.sketch from Sketch’s own sketch-assistants repository reads as: saved by Sketch 67.2 (build 100443), document format 130, so Sketch 66.1 or later opens it; one page holding one layer, an instance of the symbol “Honey” that comes from an external library named “library-symbols”. Without that library, a designer still sees the symbol, because Sketch keeps a copy, but cannot update it from the source.
- Which Sketch opens which file
- meta.json stores a format number that rises with Sketch releases: format 119 was written by Sketch 55.2, 123 by 62 and 63, 130 by 66.1, 67.2 and 68, 134 by 69, 136 by 71 and 144 by Sketch 91. A Sketch older than the one that wrote the format asks to be updated instead of opening the file. The page gives the oldest release it knows for the number it finds.
- Artboards, points and pixels
- Sizes and positions are in points, which are pixels at 1×: an iPhone-sized artboard is 375 × 812 or 390 × 844 points, exported as 750 × 1624 pixels at 2× and 1125 × 2436 at 3×. A symbol master is an artboard that other layers reuse, so it is listed with the artboards and in the symbol table.
- Without a Mac
- Sketch itself runs only on macOS. Its web app shows a document only after it is uploaded to a Sketch workspace, and other tools that import .sketch (Figma, Lunacy) convert it into their own document. This page needs no account, keeps the file on your device and shows what is in it as stored.