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Question

Share library assets without editing rights to the library

  • March 7, 2024
  • 4 replies
  • 1149 views
F

Hello Figma Community,

I’m exploring efficient ways to share our Figma library’s assets with partners, both within and outside our team account, and could use your insights. The goal is to enable collaboration by allowing access to our library’s components, styles, and variables without compromising the integrity of the original library.

  1. Library Protection: How can we ensure the original components and styles of our library remain unaltered while still making them accessible for use in projects by external partners and internal team members?

  2. Collaboration Facilitation: What are the best practices or settings to allow productive collaboration using our library assets without giving edit rights to the library itself?

If anyone has navigated similar challenges or knows of specific documentation/articles that delve into these topics, your guidance would be greatly appreciated. Looking forward to learning from your experiences and recommendations.

Thank you in advance for your help!

This topic has been closed for replies.

4 replies

ksn
Figmate
  • ksn
  • Community Support
  • 2049 replies
  • March 8, 2024

Hey @Felix_vdW – if I understand, overall you’re looking to share your organization’s library with external users, and how you can protect the library assets from being modified by them.

If that’s correct, it’s not possible to share Libraries outside of Organizations and vice versa at this time.

Organizations are considered enclosed workspaces that are different from one another so you would only be able to use the Libraries within your own Organization.

One thing you can do: provide external users with view-only access to your library files. However, these external users will not be able to access your library files in ones that are created in their workspace (only in yours).

In order for them to be able to use the assets in your library file, the file they are editing will need to also be in your Organization. For transparency: if you grant them access to edit in your files in your org, you will be billed for an editor’s seat.

What you can do is export the library, and provide that file to your partners. They can then import it to their own library, but they won’t update if you modify them in your organization (since they’re essentially now a separate library for your partners).

I think that addresses your questions – external partners won’t be able to alter your libraries unless you grant them a full seat within the team that you have the library in. Granting them view access sounds like it’d work in this case.

For collaboration facilitation, that is probably a bit trickier. With the current set up in Figma, you could export > send to partner > they import > they make their changes and export > you import, but I know that’s really messy and probably not what you’re looking for.

Sorry for the long reply (and if I misunderstood), but there also may be other community folks that have some other tips or methods they can provide. I’ll leave the convo open in the meantime 😃

F
  • Felix_vdW
  • Author
  • 1 reply
  • March 11, 2024

Hi @ksn , thank you very much for the quick and detailed response!

Could you clarify if, within a Professional or Organization account, it’s possible to limit the editing capabilities of team members to specific files, while excluding editing rights to the library or library files?

Many thanks,
Felix

ksn
Figmate
  • ksn
  • Community Support
  • 2049 replies
  • March 13, 2024

As long as someone can view a library, then they can use those assets in another file they have edit access to. If they don’t have edit access to the library file itself, they shouldn’t be able to make any unintended changes.

If they’re not able to view the library (ex: it’s in a private/invite-only team or project they don’t belong to) then they that user won’t be able to use those assets / modify them at all.

alt
  • alt
  • New Member
  • 1 reply
  • February 12, 2025

Just found out that once you add someone in your team even with view-only rights, they can still copy the assets from that library… so yes it’s protecting from making unwanted changes but still gives them opportunity to clone your assets and resell after small adjustments for example. This is very bad!

 

Anyone found a way around this?

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