I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.
This is an auto-generated message that is in place on the “footprints” section of the KiCad.info forum. If I remove it and ask for a footprint to be designed anyway, I understand that I will be subject to forum members telling me to go design my own footprint or referring me to a 3rd party footprint site.
Hello I am new here and I have a custom pretty library filled with .kicad_mod files and a symbol library that I need to use. I was able to import the symbol library easily under the symbol section but I am running into issues in importing the pretty library under footprints. I keep getting an error stating that there is no .json file in the library. Does anyone know how to resolve this?
You don’t “import” a footprint library, you just register it. Just make sure the directory containing the .kicad_mod files is in your desired location, then go to Preferences > Manage Footprint Libraries and use the + button to add the library.
I did this a few times and never had a problem with it.
You would still have to put links to both the footprint and the symbol libraries in their tables, but for the rest those libraries ignore each other.
Edit:
I would not recommend this for management of personal global libraries, but putting all project specific footprint and symbol libraries in a single directory helps keeping your project easier to overview. In a single project there are usually also few enough library parts for not getting lost by just throwing them together.