Weird Glowforge App Question

Ok! SO! I made my first test strip for a non-PG material (and I didn’t burn the house down, nor did a fire start, so woo-haa me! Thanks for the advice for opening the door and bringing along a wet towel for backup. Easy peasy!)— now I have one more silly/odd question:

Is there a way to export a file from the glowforge app?

I made some fun choices designing my test strip- half in AI, and then the rest I just manually entered in the glowforge app. Soooooo… I’d like to make a backup now. Just in case I “woops” delete them. Is there an easy way to do this?

I read a ton on the forums today and have been making like mad with my new awesome toy. :slight_smile:

One awesome forum post (Glowforge Interface - Tips & Tricks for Using the App 🤔) doesn’t seem to mention exporting, so I’m worried it might not exist.

We can’t export or download the Catalog items. (Protects copyright for the designers.)

Jules answered about the catalog items but it looks like you are asking about items you designed and modified within the app. There is no way to download those either. However you can make a copy within the app and rename it. Just hover of the design icon. A little down caret will appear from which you can select “make a copy”.

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Whoops, quite correct. I didn’t read that closely enough. Thanks. :roll_eyes:

Ok. I made a copy. I’ll just make a few so I have backups of my backups just in case. I was hoping there was an export option (definitely of something I made, sorry! Should have made that way more clear.)

Next time I just need to design it all in AI instead of half and half- my bad.

Thanks for the answer!!

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I will probably get banned for mentioning this again but when you load a design it gets loaded into you browser, which will cache it on your computer. If you know where to find your browser cache you will find it there, or if you know how to use the debugger built into your browser you will see it there also.

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Dude, stop hacking the mainframe

While that may be true, there’s no guarantee that a design that’s edited in the ui will be saved locally as an svg or other usable format. Have you tried to find the cache file and open it locally? If so, does it actually contain the changes that were made in the ui?

Wild speculation:
I do all my editing in inkscape and have only ever cut good measure from the catalog, so I’ve never thought to try what you’re describing. My gut says that what we receive is some sort of JSON (ish) that allows the ui to draw the colored outlines… that’s one of the major reasons for having it be cloud-based — you don’t rely on the customers to have specialized software or a particularly beefy rig. Users (us) just need a modern browser. The heavy lifting of interpreting PDFs and svgs is all handled upstream in a much more controlled manner.

Whoa, true! Hmm… But it would still not quite do what I want- which is to back up my design “just in case” for someday re-uploading to the UI if I ever delete it by accident. Even if I did go into the cache and find it, I doubt I could re-put it in the app easily.

Going to dig the forums to see if I can make it an app feature request. :slight_smile:

Yes, I posted the GOGM svg in the forum and got banned for a month for doing it, despite it being a free design given away. It was to help somebody engrave it in reverse for use on acrylic.

Disclaimer: I may not have all the details here, but if I do…

Huh. Kind of hamfisted to ban you.

I think that if the recent history of the internet has taught us anything, it should be that it’s a good idea for consumers to be aware of what various websites store and track on their machines. It seems silly to ban you for this — if GF wanted to seriously protect their local files maybe they shouldn’t have opted for obscurity as their primary security vehicle.

That being said, you must have known that GF wasn’t going to be too psyched about you posting the design. I applaud your actions in terms of principle, but I’m not sure I’d have risked Dan’s wrath. I like my Glowforge too much :slight_smile:

I am surprised the GFUI runs so much in browser. They would need to keep it on the server if they wanted to keep anything secure instead of dumping their IP on to user’s machines. Also the raw motion files, so you can see precisely what the machine does physically.

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I’m glad to hear Jules and rpegg were able to clarify what can be done once you’ve altered settings and designs in the Glowfoge app!

If you have any further questions, please create a new post or write in to support@glowforge.com.