Pros & Cons Asset Management, Project Packaging vs Asset Embedding

General Discussion
1

Thank you Norman for making it much easier to manage assets by either embedding assets in a project or generating a package which organizes assets into subordinate folders together with their project file. Great that you’ve allowed these features to be applied to existing projects. This certainly makes the management of assets within the application, across drives and between computers easier & clearer.

The new feature of non-embedded assets having unambiguous link icons with right click menus to refresh, ‘show in finder’, embed & remove the asset is also helpful. The option to toggle the background colour of each asset is a nice touch.

Regarding size I note in the case of my project sunkenvillages.ca (with 384 assets: jpegs at various web optimized sizes & mp3 files) relatively little difference in the total/practical size of the project file & its assets: before conversion (411.6 MB); project file with a package (347.3 MB); and project file with embedded assets (307.8 MB).

My questions is: what are the pros & cons of embedding versus generating a package? The only thing I can see is packages allowing better management of an asset outside of Blocs. Size would appear not to be a practical issue. Does the app run faster/slower with one or the other? Are there other differences, advantages/disadvantages?

2

The only draw back to using embedded assets is the fact, if the original asset files are changed, those changes are not reflected inside Blocs.

This drawback will be short lived as currently when an asset is embedded in Blocs it also stores the original path and last modify date of the asset. So in future I’ll be hooking up some functionality to scan these assets in the background and if one of the embedded assets can still be found and has a different modify date Blocs will offer the option to update the embedded asset.

3 Likes
3

Thanks. I think I’ll use the packaged option until you add that functionality for embedded assets. Look forward to that functionality.

I noticed with one test after packaging the project that the pathway appeared to still be to the original asset and not to the files in newly created subordinate folder. Is that correct? Honestly, I didn’t double check this so I might have it wrong.

4

The paths are updated when the file is loaded on another mac or when the original images change.

5

Thanks. very good to know.