There’s no way to save a custom project? Is that true?
I upload a custom SVG, spend time setting which colors are engrave, score, and cut… then there’s no way to save this for the next time I open it? SIGH
Please tell me this is under consideration and will be a (soon) future enhancement?
Paul
(2-days using this…)
It’s been requested multiple times.
Yep…In the hopper.
This was one of the first feature requests/feedback they received. Hopefully the hopper is chugging on it. Big multi-step projects it would be a god-send.
Nope, you can’t save yet. Hopefully they’ll add it sooner rather than later; this is an oft-requested feature!
Hang in there savage_25, new software features have rolled out slowly, but regularly. This is a really popular request and it’s on their hopper (to do) list. I confident the save feature will show up one day!
I was thinking – one step that they could do perhaps would be to assign colors to different steps, and display the layers in the same order as they appear in the SVG (which they may already do?). For example, black/grey/white = engrave, red = cut, green = score… easy enough and would save several clicks. 
That’s how it works. The colors used in the SVG place the steps (each color is a separate step or operation in the GFUI) in the order of the hex value of the color. @marmak3261 created a custom palette you can install in Inkscape so they’re in the order they’ll show up in the GFUI.
Objects with strokes but no fills are treated as cuts by the GFUI and objects with fills but no strokes are treated as engraves. It makes it pretty easy to setup in your SVG the operation and order before you send it to the GFUI.
much much needed feature, especially in regards to iteration & fine-tuning settings for more complex projects.
It is. Hopefully they’ve heard the mass request and will add such a thing sooner rather than later. Until such time, you’ll want to keep records of your settings for future use.
That’s interesting that it sorts by color hex value. Do you have a link to @marmak3261 's palette post? I couldn’t find it anywhere.
To be clearer about my idea, I get how it chooses engrave vs cut… however, I’d love to be able to also have certain colors be auto-assigned to “Score”… that way you could have an SVG preset with engrave, score, and cut layers.
Several custom palette templates are available within that thread for different programs.
That’d be pretty cool. It looks like they have some way to do that in catalog designs since some of them have score as well. My guess is that if they ever enable user submissions to the catalog they’ll open up that capability for us too.
I’d also like to go all the way and be able to assign manual settings in the design software somehow.
IMO what they need is a sidecar JSON format for the print settings associated with a source file. You could save them from the GFUI, generate them yourself, re-use, version control, etc.
Very much agree. Glowforge team has done an amazing job at making the general process easier / simpler than traditional laser cutters (Thank you!). But this is currently at the expense of granular control that hardcore users would benefit greatly from. Although challenging it is possible to enable both. JSON that no-one except super-motivated users need to worry about is a great suggestion. I just did a project where I really wished for much finer control over engraving power. The draft engrave setting vaporizes most of a millimeter from some materials and I would be very happy to twiddle some settings in a JSON file to get the desired result. That level of control would motivate power users to tell a lot more friends how empowering GF is 
Has this issue been fixed? I really need a way to save cut settings.
Rather than setting things in the app, can I just embed them into my SVG file? E.g. read the colors and apply a preset mapping for them? That would really be preferable.
All settings and placement are saved automatically, as soon as you make them. (Which means if you delete things and then back out of the file - they will be gone bye-bye. CTRL+Z to undo.) 
Yes. Since the OP, Glowforge has introduced AutoSave which saves changes as you make them. If you set a color to be a particular speed/power, that will be saved for you automatically so the next time you open that project, you’ll be right were you left off.
You cannot.
New user! I took the coaster project and did a trace of an item and put it on the coaster. Is there a way to save the final project so can just load it?
It’s saved as you add and delete things from the project.