One of my greatest frustrations with Foundry has always been its asset management system. I’ve got a growing body of music, images, and animations that I want to use across multiple worlds, but I’ve never found a good way to keep these media files organized. Once a file is used in a world, its location in the file system can never be changed without breaking all existing links.
I really like the Forge asset management system, but unfortunately this limitation still seems to exist. Has anyone found a good solution to this problem? Is there a module or tool that will scan a world for broken weblinks and try to update them?
Unfortunately, because the assets are referenced by paths to the assets rather than a sort of ID, the same limitation will exist.
I don’t believe that there are any modules that are geared towards reorganizing Assets Layout directly, though there are a few (Eg. moulinette and alpha suit) that help with indexing and searching. In some cases, proper indexing and library-wide searches (like from the Assets Library page) greatly help to reduce downsides of imperfect organization, and is the preferred approach for many people.
One way to work with this is to duplicate some files, as needed. Make the changes you want to the organization of your Assets Library, keeping the old files where they are for backwards compatibility but over time using the new organization. Once no files in the old organization are in use, you could delete them.
Key to this approach working properly is to work out a future-proof asset system that aligns with the way you’d like to access and add to your assets in the future. Keeping that organizational goal in mind will help you in the long term. For example, something I use down below, many people have different preferences. I try not to think about how I want to store them, but rather about how I want to access them.
Genre (SciFi/Fantasy/Common)
Asset Type (Audio SFX/Audio Music/Token Art/Maps)
Style, eg. Audio Music → Boss Music/Ambient/Combat, or Token Art → Enemy/Ally, etc.
I hope that helps a little Perhaps someone else can chime in if they do know of a module or have written a script to automate reorganizing assets.
Perhaps someone else can chime in if they do know of a module or have written a script to automate reorganizing assets.