Pictures in Textures?

Why are the pictures, photos, signs all mixed in with the textures under the Texture Tab in the editing window?
I have about 60 photos of avatars in my Gallery and they all appear in the texture file as well. I have a hard time finding a moss covered rock texture in all that stuff. I am in the process of putting all non texture stuff ( like snapshots etc.) in bundles since they don't appear on the list then but it's a pain. Why can't we chose what we want behind the texture tab, or catagorize the texture tab if that's where the other stuff needs to go?

Does anyone else have a better idea for a work-around if it stays this way?

Your help is always appreciated

Peter

Hi Pete I was trying to tell you, you can either make a brand new folder and name it what you want or put your photos of people in the photo album. All you do is right click the picture you want and choose copy, then paste that picture to your folder you want the picture to appear under. Then go back and delete the picture from the folder you don't want it in. Now every time you upload new pictures they will always appear in the textures folder if you aren't using the resident snapshot camera. Hope this helps you.

No, he means in the Edit menu -- the dropdown list of textures lists ALL our textures, not just those in the edit folder. This is stupid. Please fix this, Lindens!

Additionally, I suggest using a tree-based dropdown menu to let us pick through our folders within the Textures folder. I'm not sure if SL currently can accomodate those kinds of widgets in the UI easily, so better get cracking!

Cate

What Cat said....!!

Since snapshots are in fact textures (you can put it on a box) there is one of two ways to handle this:

1. Texture picker only shows textures which are somewhere in the default 'Textures' folder. This means that if you make a project folder somewhere in your root inventory, the textures in the project folder will not be accessible from the picker, but can still be applied by dragging it out of inventory.

2. Texture picker show ALL textures in inventory, including snapshots and any textures that happen to have been moved into other folders. This is how it works today.


Right now, I'm hearing a lot of support for 1. If there's no dissent, I can make sure this gets put in the pipeline for a future release.

Phoenix, can't we get a option (checkbox thingy) to decide whether we want a particular folder to be included in the drop down list or not.

3. Inventory folders represented in the texture picker. So if I put all my metal textures in a folder named "metal" then there is a folder (or something) named "metal" in the texture picker.

This just seems like common sense to me, and we've been asking for this forever.

Edit: I don't mean to sound snippy, I'm just stating facts.

This might be more time-consuming to implement than it seems. The UI control used for the texture picker looks likes a fairly standard drop-down list, and as far as I know, the standard Windows drop-down list doesn't support sublists. They'd have to change the texture picker to use a cascading menu, which is an entirely different UI element requiring different coding.

Hi,
thanks for your replies, support and help. I like the " Please fix it Lindens" idea the best. ( Thx Catherine ).

I don't understand what Phoenix is saying, though. No matter what folder I put my textures and or photos and other graphics in, they always show up in the texture picker or is there a " Project Folder" option that I'm not aware of? Is there a way to contain the texture or photos so they don't show up in the texture picker? The only way I know of is to put them in a bundle but drawing them from the bundle limits your texturizing to only one side of an object.
I understand what Jake is saying but there must be other ways to restrict the texture picker to only texture, if you know what I mean.

I guess it's a dead issue unless we get more support,
thanks all for taking the time to respond.

Peter

Peter,

As of right now there is not a way to limit which images show up in the drop down picker.

Phoenix suggested a way that might be possible in a future release. Wednesday followed up a post or two later with a better (as in what we'd prefer) way to do this, also in a future release.

#!

What advantage does this provide over the standard inventory? The normal inventory view provides (semi-)flexible hierarchical controls. The texture picker is meant to show 'all my textures.'

With that in mind, I'm wondering if anyone would like to have the texture picker show a reduced set of textures. It could be implemented to show all textures in your textures folder. It could be implemented to show all your textures which are not in your snapshots folder. It's not going to provide hierarchical information any time soon.

Then I vote a single folder until we *can* get a tree. Seeing everything is a pain, especially if you have a large inventory. Can you make it where we can pick the folder each time? SO if now I need metals I can look only in that folder but if I want to see all I can pick my texture folder?

The advantage this provides, is safety. Dragging and dropping a texture is like playing with a grenade, it's real easy to miss what you're going for. Standard problem of drag & drop interface. Choosing from a list? Much "safer".

Personally, there's 2 things I never do when editing in SL because of mishaps:

1) Drag an object i'm editing freehand in the world view, I always use the numeric up/down adjuster or type numbers in.
2) Drag anything I can avoid into an object. I wish I could avoid this when putting contents into an item, but right now it's my "lynch pin" of the system if you will.

It's too easy for your camera view to freak out, or something else to move in the way, etc, while you're doing a drag & drop. Bad juju.

Actually, there is a somewhat safer way to add textures from the inventory than dragging and dropping them onto the object in the 3d view.

It still involves dragging and dropping, but instead of dropping onto the object in the 3d view, you can drop the texture directly into the "texture slot" on the Texture tab of the Edit window.
This leaves less room for error, missing, and camera quirks, and also lets you work with the "single Texture" or "individual object" option.

Similarily, Content (scripts, extra textures, sounds, etc.) can be dropped into the Contents Tab of the Edit window.

One little quirk I have noticed with the Edit window, though... ocasionally, you can try to click on it but the click will "go through" and instead register on the 3d view. To avoid this, just click once in an empty spot on the Edit window before you drag, such as right below the More/Less button.

Hope that helps someone, or at least makes sense.

-Sphereon Nomad
"A sphere is worth a thousand polygons."

This is actually what I was referring to, missing the edit tab slots and such more than the objects themselves.

I've had many a drag & drop go right through the edit pane

The advantage is when you have several scroll pages of textures in the texture picker and are trying to remember if the texture is called metal_rusted or rusted_metal or foo345 and you mis-click on foo344 instead and the picker goes away and you have to open it again and scroll-find it again and then you decide to play minesweeper instead.

Basically, in a UI, making people click on a massive linear list of (miniscule) text names to choose pictures is really mean. I realize that it would be too expensive to create a preview of each texture and lay them out in some other kind of picker, so I think a tree view that reflects the existing folder structure in the inventory is a good comprimise. Then we can organize our textures how we want them, find them quickly and not curse the Linden name every time we try to texture something.

Screen realestate is really REALLY scarce in SL, and so I do no usually have the inventory window and the edit window open at the same time (add the map and an IM window, and basically all you can see is your avatars foot, and this is at highest resolution).

Hm... Sorry, misunderstood you. Was hoping that would help.
I haven't had too much trouble with missing the edit window, but that could be for any number of factors.

I don't own very many textures, so picking from the list isn't a burden yet.

I do agree it would be nice if there was some way to trim down or organize the texture picker list.

- Sphereon Nomad
"A sphere is worth a thousand polygons."

Offering up a simple but temporary solution. I to have the problem of to many textures in the texture picker. So what I have been doing untill this is modified or regurgitated ..he he Regurgitated...anway til its fixed I have made sub folders and dropped all the pertinant textures in the subs. Then when I have an object and I want a specific texture on it I drag and drop. The Texture Commands still work on the object but its still a pain either way Especially if you are making Shirts.

Or Second Option.

Rename all your textures as per how they should be.

I.E. a metal texture...right now it would be like Aluminum. Rename it to Metal-Aluminum and all the rest of the metals put the word in front same spelling and all and it will list in the picker per the Pre name. Still a lot of scrolling but its easier to scroll for a key word than it is to do the hunt for red october.

Sincerely, ShadowWeaver

Thank you for your input everyone. The request has been put on the queue.