psdiff – .psd previews for git

filp@filp-x ~/dev/myproject
> $ git status

## master
A  mock.psd

filp@filp-x ~/dev/myproject
> $ git commit -m "Add mock.psd"

psdiff: created mock.psd.png # <----------
[master 1156ea5] Add mock.psd
 2 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 1.psd
 create mode 100644 1.psd.png

If you have Photoshop psd files lying around your git repository, you probably already know there’s no easy way to track any changes to them — you have to launch Photoshop and manually inspect them, and if you’re not a designer or don’t have Photoshop installed on your device, you’re fresh out of luck.

Enter psdiff, a git commit hook to automagically render .PSD files to images, allowing you to visually diff changes. The result is an extra .png which is created on the fly and which sits next to the .psd file.

Whilst it’s not a great idea to store your PSDs in Git, psdiff a great example of what one can achieve by using a Git pre-commit hook.

psdiff →

Looking for “real” PSD versioning? Check out the aforementioned LayerVault.

Published by Bramus!

Bramus is a frontend web developer from Belgium, working as a Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. From the moment he discovered view-source at the age of 14 (way back in 1997), he fell in love with the web and has been tinkering with it ever since (more …)

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