With the EAGLE sunset fast approaching, I imagine many users (like me) are looking to move to KiCad, but concerned about leaving behind projects and the (often large) libraries they depend on. KiCad’s built-in converter does an admirable job of making usable symbols and footprints, but it drops the custom attributes and technology variants that make our libraries so useful, and bundles all of the components into a project-local library that is difficult to reuse.
With some help from Claude (I am not a programmer), I was able to pull together some scripts that recover the lost attributes and remap component references to global libraries, saving a potentially huge amount of time and effort. There’s still some post-processing required (mostly related to differences in KiCad ERC, net label placement, and the like), but it feels much more approachable knowing the majority of the information is there.
I hope it helps you as much as it helped me! Grab the scripts from the GitLab link.