Texture paint doesn't prompt user to save painted textures #45636

If you are painting on a texture in texture paint mode and save the .blend file, Blender doesn't save the texture (even if the texture file is packed). At the very least, there should be a prompt to warn the user that the painted texture has not been saved one way or the other.

With texture paint so neatly integrated to Blender (it's really pretty good!), an average user reasonably expects ctrl + s to save not just the model, but the texture he/she has been working on. Blender should either A) offer an "autosave" feature to keep the packed texture saved or B) feature a prompt that warns the user that the painted texture will be lost unless saved.

Reproducing is simple:

unwrap default cube in whichever way.
Hit texture paint, add diffuse slot and paint a few strokes
Save image (or pack)
Paint a few more strokes
Save .blend (ctrl + S) and quit Blender
Return -> your step 4. strokes are lost.

I'm filing this as a design issue but this is actually a borderline bug. I've lost a couple hours' worth of work because of this behaviour. I realize the current behaviour is "by design" to an extent but IMO making sure the user's work is safe is of utmost importance.

Changed status to: 'Open'

Added subscriber: @PasiHirvonen

#92284 was marked as duplicate of this issue

#91368 was marked as duplicate of this issue

Added subscriber: @Blendify

Leaving as bug, design task are only for devlopers

Added subscriber: @JulianEisel

Changed status from 'Open' to: 'Archived'

This is a known issue and it's broken by design. We all agree that this is not nice and a solution has to be found for it (I expect this will be addressed during the 2.8 project ).
Anyway, this is not a bug and since design/todo tasks are only for module owner teams, I have to close this. Sorry, but this is essential to keep our tracker organized.

If you have any concrete plans on how to resolve this you can write them to a mailing list (bf-funboard, bf-committers or bf-interface).

Added subscriber: @cfcohen

I understand that internal discussions about what's stored where, and what kinds of tickets are assigned to which developers are both valid concerns. As a user who imported an FBX file, and then worked in texture paint mode for several hours only to have "Save As..." silently discard my work, this is undoubtedly a serious bug. Literally, the action of saving my work in fact discarded it! In a more recent build of blender from source, Blender at least waited until I exited after saving to silently discard my work. :-(

Please think about this bug not from the perspective of a knowledgeable user or developer, but instead from the perspective of a novice user. Please consider prioritizing it according to it's impact, which is very significant. To be blunt, nobody who loses work cares that it "works that way by design". If you can't do anything better to fix the bug (which appears to have existed in various forms for several years), add a warning when entering texture paint mode explaining how to save your work properly. At least that way people will know "how it works".

Added subscriber: @0o00o0oo

I agree this is a serious issue. Even if technically not a bug, it seems to be a crucial problem to be resolved ASAP.

Even knowing I need to manually save the textures, I keep losing hours of work simply because I end up forgetting to separately save the texture.. and searching around the Internet proves I'm far from alone.

I don't know if there is a technical difficulty that doesn't allow for an easy remedy, but as far as I can see, Blender is already capable of detecting when texture changes have been made:

Even if the fix is "hacky" until 2.8, is it impossible to have [Alt]+- [x] to automatically trigger when [Ctrl]+- [x] is pressed?

Or if there is some odd reason why one would not want to automatically save textures, wouldn't a checkbox option to enable automatically triggering the [Alt]+- [x] command following [Ctrl]+- [x] resolve that?

Added subscriber: @mooncaine

Of course this should be fixed. No need to repeat well put arguments above. They are all valid. Blender should not delete your work without warning when you engage a save feature.

Added subscriber: @FeepingCreature

Added subscriber: @RomboutVersluijs

To bad this isnt picked up for 1.80

Changed status from 'Archived' to: 'Open'

What is the status of this report relative to version 2.80? The 2.80 branch is less "broken by design" in many ways, for example prompting to save work in general before exiting the application. This ticket seems like a good candidate to improve the usability of Blender for novice users and come more into line with standard software design.

Added subscriber: @Jeroen-Bakker

Blender 2.80 shows a confirmation dialog where the user can confirm to save the images

Changed status from 'Open' to: 'Resolved'

Added subscriber: @gotaka100

I think it should still save with ctrl+s because i still lost textures when blender crashed, and i didnt get conformation dialog but i did press ctrl+s before that :D and now i know to constantly save textures too :D

I agree, this sounds like a nightmare. I save very frequently via Ctrl+s, and if this is not saving the image, that means all the saving will be moot if the hours-long session decides to crash.

Added subscriber: @Yethiel

This is still pretty relevant and I hope someone will get around to fixing this issue.

Added subscriber: @badihaki

Agreed with all the other well-stated arguments. I just lost over four hours of work. Blender didn't even crash it just never registered my texture and moving to layout mode apparently deleted everything. Came here to see if there is a fix, disappointed to learn Blender hasn't made ctrl+s truly save all your work and has been ignoring this issue for almost five years.

I mean, the texture didn't even save to a backup, so now I'm back to square one. Someone needs to re-open this on the grounds ctrl+s should save everything relevant to the mode you're in, e.g. saving textures if in texture paint mode

Thank you for speaking about it, Badi-Haki. It's a serious bug. ctrl+s should save everything. Even after being aware that this bug still exists, I have lost work. I just can't use the texture paint features for anything serious, because I can't trust it. Lot of hours get wasted when your unsaved work's discarded.

This bug is at least 4 years old now. Please fix it with either a prompt or with proper saving.

I just tried 2.81 by making a texture without saving and making new document. It did ask me to save and also showed the checkmark. I tried it again reopening and doing again some strokes and again it showed the checkbox.

I then checked if it also shows when working with linked textures, again it did show the checkbox "1 modified image".

I guess we need or should pin-point in what case it does not show.

Added subscriber: @(Deleted)

unfortunately CTrl-S and also "Save" menu item still fail to save the content of such internal textures even on v2.90.1 and v2.91 alpha
the message box with the alert appears if you try to open/re-open another file, but the texture is not saved otherwise.

You can reproduce this simply by

create an empty project
save the blend file
create a texture and paint something on it
press Ctrl--S (or menu item "Save")
go to your OS task manager and terminate blender app
restart blender
re-open the blend file

the painting on the texture is gone.
I aggree, this is a serious bug.

Added subscriber: @ghidode

I am able to paint in solid mode but not in material mode and thus the colors are not reflecting in render mode. anybody please help

Added subscriber: @raincole

I'm not sure why this is marked as resolved. Users still lose texture they painted in 2.93. How isn't it a bug?

Added subscribers: @arcturus, @lichtwerk

Unfortunately this doesn't look like it will be resolved in a hurry. Not sure how it's 'not a bug' when the ability to lose work is incredibly high. I didn't even exit the program and the image was reset to the last saved version of the image file at some point (rather than keeping the changes I'd made over the day when I saved the blender file (only)).

Highly recommend anyone who finds this page to leave a note to remind everyone that this still happens. In #91368 I recommended a 'live edit' option in the image menu to save the image when the file is saved - anyone else think this might offer a simple solution?

Added subscriber: @Rawalanche

In #45636#1219731, @arcturus wrote:
Unfortunately this doesn't look like it will be resolved in a hurry. Not sure how it's 'not a bug' when the ability to lose work is incredibly high. I didn't even exit the program and the image was reset to the last saved version of the image file at some point (rather than keeping the changes I'd made over the day when I saved the blender file (only)).

Highly recommend anyone who finds this page to leave a note to remind everyone that this still happens. In #91368 I recommended a 'live edit' option in the image menu to save the image when the file is saved - anyone else think this might offer a simple solution?

Note there are these buttons as well in the Image Editor or {key Alt S}

But of course this does not solve the real pain (multiple edited images, also you might not have an Image Editor open at all).
So not sure if having this tied to the Image Editor is the best solution, maybe it should just be a User Preference with following choices:

Dont check modified images when saving
Check modified images when saving (and ask if these should be saved in a popup dialog)
Check modified images when saving (always save all, no dialog)

I really think this should be reclassified as bug. The talk is about the issue of having to save modified image datablocks manually, as if it was just a workflow issue, but not much has been said about a data loss scenario when Blender crashes. When you think about this in context of Blender crashing and there being a specific type of datablock modifications of which do not get saved by the mechanism designed to prevent data loss on crash (autosave and manual saving), then simply classifying this as a known limitation doesn't cut it.

I think the simple solution would be to just always save internal, packed image datablocks when saving the .blend file, because they technically are part of the .blend file, and leave explicit saving only to external images. If you press Ctrl+S, you expect the entire contents of the file to get saved, not just some of it.

Added subscriber: @kevinkusler

Just lost 3 hours of work due to this. Please ffs fix this, I am so frustrated.

Added subscriber: @cr4zy5pacec0w80y

Hey, blender 3.1 and this is still a problem. Not explained very well, and after this happening 3 times and spending 5+ hours texture painting for it to disappear is somewhat ridiculous to find that the interface is not intuitive at all, and this is still a problem after being harped on for years. Seriously, just add in a line of code to at least save the texture to cache every time ctrl+s is pressed at minimum. An hour of coding (if that) to help hundreds of your users not feel abandoned and completely frustrated from losing hours of work!?! take 10 seconds to put yourself in the users shoes. You just coded for a whole day, found a solution to a bug that's driven you mad. Wrote up a function to fix it. Then you go to ctrl+s to save your work before compiling and you're reset to 8 hours ago. With no way to recover. You'd just want to abandon the project and give up. This is NOT resolved. Your users have spoken, begged, pleaded. Yet a blind eye is turned because it works the wayyou think it should work. Blender is for the community.

Thank you Jack for phrasing that so well. The first post in this thread is from 2015, affecting Blender versions before 1.80, and there have been people watching or posting updates in every year since then. The community has now been requesting this for nearly 8 years.

Added subscriber: @Codebreakerblue

This issue is present in Blender 3.2 as well. Whether it's a bug or a design element, it is extremely non-obvious and very problematic. Even after researching the problem and finding this thread, I still lost several hours of work, silently, with no warning or popup displayed, and without closing Blender. I'm not the most experienced Blender user, nor am I a professional, but I have used Blender for a number of years and would like to think I know most of its quirks and idiosyncrasies. My intuitive expectation for working with images within Blender is that saving a file with packed data blocks should save all of those data blocks, as they are part of the .blend file in every other respect. Additionally, simply changing between workspaces within a single file should not discard changes made in another workspace. I could more easily understand if it was a failure to save an external image, but an image data block that is clearly marked as "packed" should save via the standard methods. I know that I am not alone in this intuition. If this is present by design, in my opinion it is a problematic design decision and should be reconsidered.

Added subscriber: @Giles-Barton-Owen

Added subscriber: @Solstice245

Yep...still losing people hours of their time...

My painted texture up and disappeared in the very same Blender session that I painted it, this is just plainly unacceptable...

It even had the gall to ask me to save the image when I finally went to close the Blender session, AFTER IT ALREADY CLEARED THE PIXEL DATA. Sorry, I'm kinda angry, if you can't tell.

Added subscriber: @Comet.x

Made this account just to say that this better be opened and set to unresolved right now. This is infuriating, at at the BARE FUCKING MINIMUM there should be a separate shortcut to save ALL images at once, no matter the window you are currently in, because going through and checking each and every individual texture is needlessly tedious. Ideally, ctrl s or ctrl shift s should also update all the images with a matching number to the blend file aswell

it can't be that hard. Blender can already detect when an image isn't saved, we already have alt + S, AND we get a warning if blender closes normally that images aren't saved. What the hell is the problem? I and many others have probably lost days worth of work because this for some reason isn't solved yet.

If you send a commit to git, it saves everything in the git file. What moron is deciding it shouldn't be the same in bender? Why can every other program do this fine? fucking roblox gets this right so why the hell can't blender?

Added subscriber: @softyoda

Is there any method as of this day (blender 3.4) to batch save images that have been texture-painted ? I work with photogrammetry that have UDIM consisting of 10 to 30 textures, saving them manually is time-consuming, and the popup to save them when ctrl+s never appeared and the pack all resources doesn't seem to save as there still have the * in the image editor.

@softyoda
You could do it by using s Python script. Shouldn't be that hard to find on Google how to do so

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Texture paint doesn't prompt user to save painted textures #45636