Duplicating projects

Today: As an agency, we’re frequently starting new projects for new clients. We’ve evolved a set of best practices for Figma file organization, per-client design systems, etc. These best practices have been captured in a Starter Project project in Figma. However, to use this Starter Project each designer must duplicate each file in the Starter Project individually and then move them over into a new project.

Idea: We’d love to see Figma support duplicating projects in addition to the existing file duplication functionality. This would be a small but noticeable improvement in efficiency for spinning up new client projects.

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You have a library in your Start Project?

You can select all files in the project (Cmd/Ctrl + A), right click, click duplicate and then move them to the new project via drag & drop.

@Gleb Unfortunately, this is not going to solve the problem.
If you have files A and B (with components syn together) and duplicate these 2 files.
C and D components won’t be linked anymore…

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Hello Community!

We are a Design Agency based in Sydney with vast experience with design systems, variants, componentization, and file organization.

In this article, we illustrated why we believe the absence of an essential feature is slowing down the large-scale implementation of design best practices and costing a lot of money and working hours for design agencies and organizations.

Please, check out the article link in the comment section.

(It seems like we can’t include links in a post).

It will be fantastic to have feedback from the community on this.

I hope you are all well and safe!

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+1, sick of doing the same work every single time a new project starts, when you try to have a repeatable flow.

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I have a template project (with Figma and Figjam files) and it isn’t easy to create a new project based on this template. I have to duplicate files, sort them and move to a new project.

If I could duplicate a project my workflow would be simplified.

My team also feels the same way about this

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Some of us use projects as a templates do estandardize other projects across the company. Could we have a “duplicate” on a project level?

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Reviving this topic - seems like it is still a missing issue? I am a recent Figma user and have been trying to figure out if I can duplicate projects from the project level instead of each file individually.

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I noticed this topic has been revived in Mar 2022, we are now 1 year+ later, but still I can’t seem to find a copy project option? Anyone?

I agree with your suggestion. Even as a product designer, I often start client projects with interdependent “Figma library project files”. Each time I start a new project, I find myself dedicating several hours to adjusting components or library styles applied to certain components.

This needs to happen, I know is not a popular feature, but same issue here. We, as a team have a project template file and we are struggling with the loss of the styles connection with the components

Same here. We are a design/web agency and this is how we also work web-wise to cut time setting up basic things. Let us copy projects!

Please make this possible!

Same. We are huge telecom company and duplicating or exporting the whole project is very essential for us cause duplicating files leads to loosing links between each other

We really need this feature!

As we have components nested in others and different releases, the library swap does not work if the instances are nested, so the only way to do it would be to copy the whole team, which is not possible yet. Don´t know how to go on further, I´m working at DHL and this feature is so hard needed please make this happen soon!

+1.

We have the following use cases;

  1. Project Start - Duplicate a starter project containing UI Component Libs and files.
  2. Transferring work to a client’s Figma account. We can transfer Projects or Teams, but we would like to maintain or keep a version. So Ideally we duplicate, and then transfer 1 version to the client Org.
  3. Disaster recovery - Duplicate a whole setup for backup. Quite important for a large structure for an entire organisation’s DesignOps.

Just keeping this thread active. Please let us duplicate entire projects as the others have mentioned. Thanks

I just want to +1 this request! We’ve worked to establish project best practices that we can continue to refine over time, but the biggest limitation to doing this well is the lack of ability to duplicate a whole project, maintaining the various variable/component/style relationships within the files in said project. Been wanting this feature for years now.

Hey All, thanks for the feedback!

We’ll pass this onto our team to consider making duplicating projects easier in the future.