Recent Panel in the Home dialog – Would be nice if the user was told when a file doesn’t exist

[GarryP]

Noticed in Photo 2.0.4 on Windows 10. (Probably should be the same for all applications.)

While browsing the Recent panel of the Home dialog, it shows an ‘empty’ thumbnail for files that don’t currently exist (in both list and grid view).

When one of these non-existent items is ‘opened’, the dialog disappears but the application doesn’t give any indication that the file didn’t exist, it just returns to what the user was doing before opening the dialog.

I think it might be nice if the application gave some visual indication that the file didn’t exist and didn’t allow the user to ‘open’ the file – maybe display the same “This file doesn’t exist, do you want to remove it’ dialog which we get via the “File → Recent” menu.

The user should also probably not be able to ‘pin’ a non-existent file.

It might also be nice if there was a ‘Clean-up’ button in the panel which would simply remove the non-existent files from the list with one click.

(I did a forum search for recent exist but didn’t find anything related to this.)

[walt.farrell]

It would also be nice if the Show in Explorer button (Windows; presumably there's a similar one on Mac) didn't do anything for a missing file. Instead, it takes me to a generic (default) File Explorer screen, not even related to the folder the file was supposedly located in.

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

It would also be nice if the Show in Explorer button (Windows; presumably there's a similar one on Mac) didn't do anything for a missing file. Instead, it takes me to a generic (default) File Explorer screen, not even related to the folder the file was supposedly located in.

On Mac it looks like this when you click on a document thumbnail in New > Recent. Only the arrow icon to open the folder in Finder is clickable.

On macOS:

• Deleting a document while Publisher is running will still show it in New>Recent but if you click it the path shows that it's in the trash. It's a bit confusing because File > Open Recent doesn't list it.
• Emptying the trash while Publisher is running will show a blank square for for the document without a name or a path in New>Recent. Clicking it doesn't show the path and you can't open the folder in Finder which makes sense. It seems to know when the file location changes but not when it's permanently deleted.
• Emptying the trash while Publisher is not running won't show a blank square when you next start Publisher, it must check for missing files when opening the dialog. This checking is likely the cause of a crash I was experiencing with New>Recent the other day, until I cleared the recent list, but I don't know what I did differently that time versus during this test.

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Only the arrow icon to open the folder in Finder is clickable.

Only the arrow is clickable on Windows, too.

But for a deleted recent file, it does not open the referenced folder in File Explorer. It just opens File Explorer as though you opened it with no location specified.