Choosing background images: awkward by design?

Why is it that when you click Choose… in Element inspector > Background > Fill Style > Image you get directed not to the resources folder (where all your images might already be) but instead your computer?

Dragging all the images into the Resources panel and then being able to select them one by one would be easier, no?

Media files work in this way, e.g. Audio files. I’m just puzzled why images don’t.

Or am I missing something… which is highly likely…

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You’re not really missing anything; the choose button was added before we had a Resource Library (at least a user-visible one!). I’ve at least wanted files to be draggable from the resource library to the image well for a while; it is one of those minor features that keeps being added to each release goal and then moved out since it isn’t very high priority. The good news is that if you choose in the Finder a file that already exists, it will not add a duplicate to your resources library.

Minor? The hours wasted over the years - click, click, click through the folder hierarchy every time one needs a background image that's already in the Library? aaahhhh!

If this "minor feature" was upgraded to the front burner - there could be a Hype T-shirt in it for You! (Though it may be one from the "rollercoaster of misprints" collection. :roll_eyes: )

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Oof ~ our bad!

(the “minor” is in comparison to something like Symbols)

To be honest, we don’t get much feedback about this quirk, which is why it seemingly gets put on the back burner! Resources can be dragged to the scene area, so I suspected folks were just starting out with the background image that was wanted in the first place instead of changing later. I don’t see too many animations of the Background Image, though perhaps that’s because the UI is hard to use here.

My two cents into 'minor or major quirk' -discussion - I think they are relative terms.

If you are on one-scene / one-off job or playing around with a light-weight prototype, you don't care about minor quirks, you concentrate on features.

Minor quirks start turning into major ones and they start really bugging you when you are in a real-life multi-page multi-layout production. Example: remembering last used preset is implemented (in beta) for vector tools, but not for text boxes, e.g. I have to manually zero paddings on all text boxes (that way they are easy to align to borders of other graphic elements) set automatically by hype to 8 px and to manually remove 'allow text selection' for cursor pointer on multiply pages. Unnecessary unproductive clicks.
Of course we understand that there is always a trade-off between adding major new sales generating features and under-the-hood 'minor' productivity enhancements, especially in a limited developer resources situation.

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@Ed_Sager: if this applies to ALL your text, you could just throw in a

div {
    padding: none !important;
} 

in style tags in HEAD Html.

Or, if this is something you implement for a lot of files, just put it all in a standard css file and throw that in the Resources folder making sure you uncheck Protect from external styles in the Document inspector. No more farting around in the Element or Metrics inspector. Just add classes to elements as needed.

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HI @hyperthetical and thank you for your advice! Sometimes I forget about those powerful workarounds on the coding side when getting carried away with the visual workflow in hype.

I feel your pain, I find myself asking the same - isn’t there a better way? Everything is click, click, click, click and then click. Hype is ‘clicked up’ alright but I love it.
Looking on the bright side, knowing tumult is aware of it change maybe coming one day.

Preach on, exactly on point.

Typically we try to introduce major features in .0 releases and improve workflows (reduce quirks) on .5/.6 releases.

My philosophy has always been that people love a product that they don’t hate, so we do want as many “hate” points to go away as possible :).

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I keep running into this too… also with the new poster feature I want to use a poster screenshot as a texture and can’t as I can’t choose it … please put this in 4.5! Best regards

Hey Jonathan,

I had the same issue as the OP, and thanks to your response, have just begun using this feature. If I have to use an image that's already in my resource folder, I can just locate it and drag it into the thumbnail box. Really intuitive, but impossible to discover!

In my screenshot, the blue circle with a " + " label doesn't appear. For those who are discovering this, the blue circle will appear, making it clear where to drop the image.

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Actually I think this is unintended behavior right now! The image well always accepted files from the Finder, but not files from the Resources Library. When we added external editor support, resource drags get a file path which the well accepts, but it doesn't do quite a proper swap. This probably will lead to duplicate resources. I've filed this - it will definitely motivate the proper feature work.

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