Delphi - Want an automated way of maintaining the link between a “source” image file and images in my project

Question

One thing I find Delphi doesn't manage well is the link between image "source" files and the image components in my project (D2006 here but I'm assuming it applies to all versions).

Say I have various static images in my project - backgrounds, toolbar button glyphs, various bits of eye candy, etc. I have a corresponding collection of PNG/BMP etc. files that I have sourced, scraped or created, and these have been loaded into the image components at design time.

One problem is that there seems to be no automated way of finding out three months later what source image file was used to load an image component. This becomes more of an issue when you need to edit one or more images.

So what I would really like, is some way of including the image source files in a build of a project. I.e. when I did a build, all of the image components would be reloaded from the sources first. At present, when I modify some of my images with PhotoShop or similar, I'm faced with a lengthy and error-prone process to reload the altered images into their respective image containers.

Is creating a resource with all of the images bound into it and adding code to load the image components at startup a viable way to go? Do others have this problem, and how do you manage it?

Answer 1

None of the standard components support what you are asking for. However, Thany's TPngImageList component does support the ability to associate a user-defined string with each image in the list.

Otherwise, to know which file belongs with which image, I would suggest using an .rc file to compile the external image files into the app's resources at compile-time, and then you can load the image resources into your components dynamically at run-time instead of at design-time. That way, you can manage the image files however you want. When you change a file, it will automatically be linked into the app on the next compile.

Answer 2

You might load the same images in runtime, and add these images in version control to ease maintenance. There are also command line tools for Lazarus (I guess you might find similar for Delphi too) which can put files into resources that you app can later use.

Answer 3

I load the images from ico files, populate a imagelist and then use it in my Virtual string tree for various nodes. Easy to change the ico files. /Mikael