Edited textures/images are not saved when pressing Ctrl-S: Discussion & How to proceed?

Hi,

I would like to discuss a closed issue #45636 that is only partially fixed:

The issue mentioned that the edited textures/images are not saved when pressing Ctrl-S, and have no confirmation dialog during exiting.

This issue can be split into 2 parts:

  1. Ctrl-S should save everything including the texture.
  2. A confirmation dialog should pop up during exit if there are unsaved textures.

Although the confirmation dialog during exiting is added in v2.80 by @Jeroen-Bakker (i.e., issue (2) has been fixed), pressing Ctrl-S still doesn’t save the edited textures/images, and doesn’t show a confirmation dialog either (i.e., issue (1) remains unfixed).


I followed the reproducing steps and confirmed the issue on Blender v3.4 on Windows.

There are 3 potential behavior for pressing Ctrl-S when some textures are edited:

  1. Always show confirmation dialog even if the textures have been saved before
  2. Only show confirmation dialog for the textures that have not been saved before, and save all other textures (silently)
  3. Do not show confirmation dialog, and don’t save any textures.

Since users assume Ctrl-S saves everything by default, I think the better default behavior should be changed from behavior (3) to behavior (1).

Behavior (2) may not be preferred since it may silently save other textures, which causes silent (breaking) changes for users that are familiar with older versions with behavior (3).


I wonder if there are any designing reasons to keep behavior (3)? Although experienced users may be familiar with such a default behavior, novice users seem to keep suffering from this behavior throughout the years (as seen in the issue comments).

This issue is assigned to @julianeisel, I wonder if there have been any internal discussions about this issue that I can refer to?

My questions:

  • If behavior (3) is indeed non-optimal, should we re-open issue #45636? Or should we open a new issue for this?
  • If behavior (1) is preferred and not assigned to anyone, I would like to try open a PR for this.

Side note: I tried to discuss this on Blender Chat (#user-interface-module) but didn’t recieve feedbacks.

Thank you!

2 Likes

Blender should always pack edited textures. No questions asked.
I have lost too many damn textures over the years!

Speaking of deleting things. Actually, I think blender should not delete anything until the user specifically asks it to. I don’t think that this whole “Fake user” thing is a good idea. If the user wants to purge the file, there should be a specific operator to purge.

2 Likes

While we wait for an official fix, this free add-on does the trick very nicely:

7 Likes