Bumping this up, it’s a good question. Why is it that I can designate some users as a ‘viewer’ and ‘viewer restricted’ while some users I can only designate them as ‘viewer restricted’ when downgrading them from an editor account? Why can I just give them regular ‘viewer’ access? Very confusing and the documentation isn’t very clear or easy to find.

Same here, after convinced my company to switch to Figma, some people switched from viewer to editor (because they didn’t know it better in the beginning, some of them were set as admins due to their role in the company). We cancelled all their editor roles for now. But due to this, they all are viewer-restricted now.

I can’t revert their roles back to viewer-role.

Any update, Figma-team?

This still creates friction in my company. Why viewer-restricted cannot share files? Why block admins to designate viewer roles? and why viewers can upgrade themselves without admin approval?

Hey All,

Restricted viewers are able to own and edit their own files, but being the owner of a shared file would effectively turn them into an editor in the organization.

If the admin prefers for a user be able to share their own files, they’d need to be upgraded to editor, and restrictions like “view only” could be applied at the team level if there are still team files that this person shouldn’t edit.

As requested, we’ve updated our help center article to reflect that viewer-restricted cannot share files from their drafts: