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Vanishing vector Pixelbay stock images


nwhit

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Saw a thread on this in AD, but the person said it was solved, all on it's own (no actual fix).

However, in APub 2.0.4, a few days ago I had added a couple vector images from Pixelbay. My prefs for the document were to have Linked resources. After adding the images, never bothered to look at Resource Manager, just kept working on the doc. Over the last several days, have done several Sleeps with this MBP. This morning I was going to export a pdf but preflight said I had missing resources. Sure enough, as reported in that other thread, the vector images from Pixelbay were shown in Resource Manager as "Linked" but missing. Never seen this happen in all v1 versions of APub, so something new! IIRC, any images brought in through the Stock panel were always brought in as embedded no matter what the doc prefs were. 

I ended up having to relocate the images in Stock/Pixelbay, drag them in, then go into Resource Manager and change them from linked to embedded. 

Gotta be a bug.

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iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020 i7 72GB) • AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB • macOS Ventura
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20 hours ago, nwhit said:

IIRC, any images brought in through the Stock panel were always brought in as embedded no matter what the doc prefs were. 

From my understanding and from doing a quick check in V1 and also V2, the Stock Panel will honour what you have set in Document Setup.  It sounds like you had the Document set to Prefer Linked, so anything added from the stock panel would be linked.  It's possible as it was linked, its used a temp file which at some point MacOS has deleted and caused the missing resource message.  I'll have to see if i can replicate this and find out just what is removing the deleting or moving the link file.

Actually, just looking into this some more and this is actually a bug with Pixabay option on the Stock panel, that is already logged with the Dev team to resolve.  Affinity should be following what you have set in Document Setup for the Image Placement policy and sadly isn't.  I've given the report a nudge and left a link back to this thread so we can update you when its resolved. 

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Yes, I did have my doc pref set to Preferred Linked, but in the case of dragging items in from the Stock pane, that wouldn't actually work properly, would it? Assuming it puts that image into a temp folder/directory, at some point it is going to disappear and show as missing with no chance of recovery, short of searching within the Stock panel again and re-placing it back into the pub.

I would think that for adding Stock pane images they should default to embedded until a person decides to somehow save those images to a local drive, then make them linked. As an example, when I am using my MBP at a remote office location like I am doing for this current problem APub doc, the vector images were brought into the doc and were set as linked (based on my settings for this pub), but APub lost track of where they were, or the OS deleted them, likely based on several Sleep sessions for the MBP. 

Makes more sense that the default action would be to automatically make them embedded no matter what the doc pref is set to. Or pop up a dialog when dragging the image in. offering to save the image to a local location if it is going to be linked.I think most users would never guess that the dragged in images were being stored in a temp file, much less where that temp file even is. I've been using these apps since they first cam eout, and the Stock images feature, but never knew that I could suddenly lose key images until this happened. 

Thanks. 

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iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020 i7 72GB) • AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB • macOS Ventura
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1 hour ago, nwhit said:

Yes, I did have my doc pref set to Preferred Linked, but in the case of dragging items in from the Stock pane, that wouldn't actually work properly, would it?

There is a new function in V2 that allows Linking to images pasted from the web, which maintains the link as a URL. Something like that could work for images from the Stock sites, too.

Help: https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/pages/Introduction/keyFeatures.html?list=newFeatures (Mentioned in New Features, but does not seem to be explained further.) 

Basically, you can use Ctrl+drag/drop to place images into a document from a website, and it saves the URL and uses that as the Link.

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2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

There is a new function in V2 that allows Linking to images pasted from the web, which maintains the link as a URL. Something like that could work for images from the Stock sites, too.

Help: https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/pages/Introduction/keyFeatures.html?list=newFeatures (Mentioned in New Features, but does not seem to be explained further.) 

Basically, you can use Ctrl+drag/drop to place images into a document from a website, and it saves the URL and uses that as the Link.

Yes, I remember testing that new feature. The more I think about this issue, the more I think there needs to be a better solution to adding stock images. Be VERY nice to be able to drag-and-drop the image, but have a pop-up to save the image to the local drive and use as linked. When I lost the couple of hard-to-find vector images in this current doc, it did take me awhile to re-locate them in Pixalbay, then I had to go through the document to find each instance and replace the "missing" versions with the new embedded versions (I manually changed them immediately to embedded after re-adding them). I'm guessing 98% of users might never know their dragged-and-dropped stock images could disappear/go missing on them! 

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MacBook Pro, 13", M1 2020 • 16 GB • macOS Ventura
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Hi @nwhit,

I just wan't to confirm you've seen the edit i made to my post after further investigation.  This is a bug that was already logged with the Dev team with the Vector option of the Stock panel.  Affinity should be embedding or linking when dragging from the stock panel, depending on what you have set in Document Setup, which it currently isn't and wasn't in V1, and still isn't in V2, sadly.

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24 minutes ago, stokerg said:

Hi @nwhit,

I just wan't to confirm you've seen the edit i made to my post after further investigation.  This is a bug that was already logged with the Dev team with the Vector option of the Stock panel.  Affinity should be embedding or linking when dragging from the stock panel, depending on what you have set in Document Setup, which it currently isn't and wasn't in V1, and still isn't in V2, sadly.

Yes, I did see that, although my comment was that no matter how the pref is set in the doc for either embed or linked, I think that anything dragged over from the Stock pane should automatically be set as embedded (thereby overriding the doc's pref setting). That is until this "import/place" action could be improved to include a pop-up dialog when the imported item is intended to be linked where a person can select where to store the linked image from the Stock pane (creating a copy in the desired location). Having critical artwork somehow linked to something being stored in an unknown (to most all users) temp folder/directory doesn't seem like a safe nor usable method. As far as I can see, the only practical and safe use of linked is for an asset you know is actually located in a safe place, not a  temp folder/directory.

Thus, I think I read your post correctly that the current "correct" action is that if you have the doc pref set as linked, if anyone drags artwork in from Stock, it will store that image somewhere in a temp directory with an odd name where it really is not locatable by most all users, and could be easily "lost" or go missing with reboots, etc.. Is that the current (when working) action? If so, then I think that needs to be changed to avoid serious problems of missing critical art elements within a doc. 

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iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020 i7 72GB) • AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB • macOS Ventura
MacBook Pro, 13", M1 2020 • 16 GB • macOS Ventura
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Just my "two penneth", but while there can be advantages to linking, rather than embedding, images from a folder of my own, I can't help feeling that linking to an image on the web is a bit risky! You not only have no control over the image being being moved or removed, but you won't even know that you have "lost" it until you discover that it no longer "works" in your document. If web images aren't automatically embedded, there should at least be an option to save them to a local folder (of your choice) and link them from there.

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Yes, agreed. A different issue to images from the Stock pane, but a similar idea. When the web image linking feature first came out, I tried it but, as you said, made me cringe at the thought that an asset within a document wasn't someplace safe (other than if it were on one of my own websites, but even then...).

I just believe that to make using images from the Stock pane safe and user-friendly, they really should either be automatically embedded, or the user should be given the immediate choice of downloading it to a safe place where it can be linked, if desired to have it linked. Mysteriously and "secretly" downloading it to some temp directory doesn't seem wise or prudent at all. 

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iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020 i7 72GB) • AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB • macOS Ventura
MacBook Pro, 13", M1 2020 • 16 GB • macOS Ventura
iPad Air 2022

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