For a project I was working on (SketchUp extension, what else
) I needed to convert some 100+ .skp files from version 2019 back to 2017. The extension contains a library of files and we were willing to support back to SketchUp 2017.
First I created a ruby script that just iterates the files, opens them one by one and saves them in the needed version. But, I wanted to speed things up and use the C sdk, so that I could do the version conversion ‘headless’.
That worked out great for the project and the files were converted in a few seconds. Of course, it took more time to develop the app, but now I have something ready in case we need to support an older version, or, by mistake save out the files in SketchUp 2019 without specifying the correct (older) version. In fact, I thought this might be useful for others that have a bunch of files, don’t know the correct version they are all in, and want to update them to a specific version all at once. For those, I have a sneak peak to show the current progress of such an app:
The tool currently works on both windows and mac, and, since it depends on the sdk instead of the installed sketchup version there is a bonus that the tool can convert newer versions than the version of sketchup installed. I was thinking of making it a separate tool (thus, not a sketchup extension), but, I think it is convienient to have such a tool available in extension warehouse, and acessible from sketchup since the direct relation to sketchup. But, if ever someone needs this kind of functionality even without sketchup installed, feel free to message me.
For now, I was just wondering if there is some interest and maybe someone willing to test?