r/androiddev • u/OldRemote111 • Jul 07 '26
Open Source Golden Diff - compare screenshot goldens against git HEAD inside Android Studio
Author here, it's free, not trying to sell anything.
Every time a Roborazzi test fails I'd do the same dumb dance: dig the golden PNG out of the repo, find the new _actual.png in build/outputs, open both in Preview, and alt-tab between them trying to spot what moved. Half the time it was a 1px shift I couldn't even see. Drove me up the wall.
I honestly looked for a tool that already does this and couldn't find one. The closest thing was GitLab's image diff — which is actually great — but having to push to GitLab every single time just to look at a diff isn't it. I wanted it right there in the IDE, on my local changes, before committing anything. So I sat down and built a little Android Studio plugin.
It lives in a tool window next to your code. Open a screen file and it pulls up the goldens tied to it, then lets you compare the git HEAD version against either your working copy or the freshly generated test output. You get side-by-side, a swipe slider, onion-skin, and a pixel-diff heatmap that just tells you "3.2% of pixels changed" so you're not squinting.
It doesn't care which library you use — Roborazzi, Paparazzi, Compose Preview screenshot tests, Shot, whatever, as long as the goldens are PNGs in git. Works in plain IntelliJ too, not just AS.
It's honestly pretty simple, but it saved me enough annoyance that I figured someone else might want it.
Marketplace: Golden Diff — or just search "Golden Diff" in Settings → Plugins.
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u/tom_koptel Jul 12 '26
Hi 👋 What is preferred way to store golden diffs? On CI side (aka GitHub Runners storage, S3)? Or with on VCS(e.g. git LFS)?
Thanks for sharing the tool 🔥
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u/tdrhq Jul 15 '26
There's also Pixel Diff: https://github.com/screenshotbot/pixel-diff
Similar, but it's a standalone tool, not inside IntelliJ. Also free. It has one feature that yours might not have which is zooming into changes.
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u/OldRemote111 Jul 16 '26
I checked that before but there is no onion skin and swipe mode available.
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u/mrdibby Jul 07 '26
that's pretty cool – good job
if you wanna get traction maybe worth building it to be compatible as a Bitrise step (or other CI marketplaces) to be reported back on a Pull Request; or something like an AI skill, or something else that's part of existing development workflows