Thanks for writing @thepixture and @rrbarry11.
This behavior has been around since we introduced images and has been on our “to design” list.
We designed Subform to refer to images in an external folder (the images/
folder next to your saved document file) rather than storing the image data in the .subform
file itself.
Our reasoning is that it makes it easier to share images between multiple .subform
files, and also allows you to organize and manage images using your regular filesystem tools (Finder, Windows Explorer, command line scripts, etc.).
We were thinking about use cases like yours, @thepixture, actually — say your icon was used in a ton of artboards in your file and you wanted to replace all of them with a new version that has a different color.
Right now you can do that by overwriting the file at images/my_icon.png
with the new image — no need to do anything in Subform itself.
We didn’t want people to overwrite images by accident, though, which is why when you tried to import again nothing happened — Subform noticed that there was already an icon.png
in the images folder, and so it did nothing when you tried to import.
We can definitely do a better job providing feedback in that case — it is on our todo list.
So, tl;dr, if you want to replace an image, do it directly in the images/
folder rather than in Subform, since that will do the replace everywhere.
Hope that makes sense.
We’re definitely open to any suggestions ya’ll have about other ways we could streamline this workflow.