Palette Importer
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The palette importer turns a pasted list of colours into swatches: paste a JSON array or a comma-separated string, press import, and the palette appears as a strip.
What is Palette Importer?
Bringing colours into a tool is the step that usually costs the most effort, so the palette importer keeps it deliberately blunt. One field takes a paste, one button loads it, and the result is a row of swatches. Type or paste a JSON array such as ["#3B82F6","#A855F7","#EF4444"] and the parser keeps the string entries; paste a plain list separated by commas, spaces or newlines and it splits on those instead.
- Accepted input: a JSON array of colour strings, or a loose list separated by whitespace, commas or newlines.
- The loader tries JSON first and falls back to splitting, so both a copied export and a hand-typed list work.
- Output: a swatch strip that runs two columns wide on a phone and six across on a desktop.
- Nothing is stored: the imported palette lasts for the session and has to be pasted again to return.
The decision to accept loose input rather than insisting on JSON is what makes the tool practical for a colour list to swatches conversion. Values lifted from a design file, a spreadsheet column or a chat message arrive in whatever punctuation the source used, and the splitter handles all of it rather than rejecting the paste. That flexibility has a cost, though, and it is worth being explicit about: entries are not validated as colours. A stray word or a malformed hex string passes through as a string and renders as a swatch with no colour behind it, so a mostly empty strip usually means the paste contained something that was not a colour.
- No validation: entries that are not colours still count as entries, and nothing reports them.
- No names or roles. Order is the only structure, so a token file has to be mapped afterwards.
- No export, no editing after import, and no sorting — the sorter is a separate tool.
- Long lists render as one long strip with no pagination or wrapping controls.
Use it as the entry point for any palette that exists somewhere else: a client's brand list, a measured sample, a JSON export from another tool, or the values you copied out of a random roll worth keeping. Once the colours are in, the sorters and comparators take over, and the CSS variable tools turn a settled list into named declarations. Before trusting an imported set, run the entries through the format validator if anything looks off — it will tell you which value is not a colour, which is faster than counting swatches. Both routes into the strip cover the two things people actually do — paste hex colors lifted from a design file, or import json palette exports from another tool — and the job is a color list to swatches conversion rather than an edit, so cleaning values up belongs to the tools downstream. Where the list has to become code rather than swatches, the CSS variable tools finish the job. Keeping the source list somewhere safe is the only discipline the page asks for, since nothing here survives the session.
How to use Palette Importer
- Paste the colour list into the field — a JSON array or a plain comma-separated string.
- Press import; the loader tries JSON first and falls back to splitting on punctuation.
- Check the strip: a missing swatch usually means one entry was not a valid colour.
- Sort the imported palette or write it out as tokens with the other palette tools.
When to use Palette Importer vs related tools
Use this whenever a palette already exists outside this site — a brand list, a measured sample or an export from another tool. The palette sorter orders what you import, the palette comparison tool measures it against another set, and the CSS variables generator turns the settled list into named custom properties.
Privacy & Security
This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.