This section of the docs does not have any details. Could someone please explain what the process is for adding and maintaining remote resources.
I’m finding the whole resource section of Elements to be a little flaky, often resulting in crashes.
Are their any plans for adding sorting options to the resources side bar as it currently just seems to add files in a random order. Requiring me to hand rearrange them so that files with the same names, but different extensions, are grouped together.
Finally, I’d like to understand why dropping WEBP files into image wells can create problems.
I often run into problems where the resources do not display thumbnails. When this happens dragging a resource into a well will cause a crash.
I realize there are a lot of other things being worked on, still I would find it useful to get a better handle on resources as this is one of the most critical aspects of a tool like Elements. For me I DO NOT what all of my resources in Elements, I want to manage them externally so I can update them independent of Elements, when needed.
I did go back and watch the Dev Diary video on remote resources, and it reminded me of how this was intended to be used.
Currently, it is not working for me. If I load some remote resources and then drag them into an image well. The image shows up in the image well but not in the editor. Nothing I do seems to make the image visible in the editor. I tried this in Safari as well and the image is not loaded. Looking at the code the reason seems to be because someone is inserting “@1280” at the end of the URL, and of course this means the resource will not be found because there is nothing with that name on the server.
The other problem with the current approach is that it is incredibly painful for those of us that have a lot of remote resources. Adding each resource one at a time is getting old very fast. There must be some means of adding multiple remote resources at the same time. Right?
It is not hard getting Elements to crash when playing with resources, but it is not always predictable.
I’m assuming the addition of the “@1280” if elements creating the different sized images for each of the breakpoints. But my understanding from the video was that if you used a remote resource you DO NOT get this functionality.
Is that correct?
If it is then I’m assuming there is a bug that is causing this not to work.
So I just went and tried this again today, and now it works, yikes! Must have been some bad energy around yesterday that made it not work. I tried it multiple times in two different projects and it didn’t work, but today it does.
Maybe something to do with the RC for Sequoia as that came out today and maybe fixed something.
Further update: turns out it only appears to be working in image wells in the card component. If I use an image component it does not work. Yikes.
I have decided to suspend testing the private BETA until resources gets some attention. Five crashes in ten muntes is just a little to much. Anything to do with resources causes a crash and invariably means the loss of changes.
This to me is one of the fundamental foundations for an app like Elements. This should have been rock solid before beginning testing. Otherwise, it becomes a total distraction, which is what it has done for me now.
As soon as I hear that resources have had some love I’ll gladly resume testing, but for now I’ll wait.
@dan - I am also seeing fairly frequent crashes when dealing with resources. I have ~2600 different images in resources. You should have several crash reports from me.
I have not found any steps that can accurately reproduce the problem, but I do consistently see when it is going to happen.
Most commonly it seems to occur when Elements is trying to draw the thumbnails for the resources. Whenever, I open a resource folder and there are no thumbnails visible I know the app has frozen and needs to be force quit. This happens very frequently and it does not seem to matter if they are LOCAL or REMOTE resources. Sometimes this is triggered when adding a new resource, especially if it is an SVG file. But I’m not convinced that this is necessarily the fault of the type of resource being added.
So the most consistent means of crashing resources for me seems to be when opening a folder or moving from one to another. As mentioned it seems to be tied to the rendering of the thumbnails. If no thumbnails are rendered then the app is already hung, even though it does not look like it. Trying to do anything after that causes nothing to happen and I have to force quit.
Sorry I cannot provide a specific means of reproducing these hangs. Yes, it is very frustrating, more so because it is unpredictable.
Morning @sbchasin - Can we get a copy of your project with ~2600 images? We’d love to test it and make sure we fix all the bugs in the resources area for you guys!
Can you upload it to Elements Cloud and post the link, either here or via email? (dan at Realmac Software dot com).
