Find and Replace (color) doesn't work

[david50B9]

Keep getting "Items not found"

And before you point me to previous "solutions"-  No, my colors are all 100% alpha.  

For every new crap feature Adobe pushes each release, just for the sake of saying something is "new", they break ten things.  This has to stop.  Do you have a QA department?  What the hell is going on over there?  Short on money, can't hire good people?  No, you're laughing all the way to the bank.  Get your act together.  Your products have more bugs than restaurants on Kitchen Nightmares.  You were pathetic 10 years ago.  Now you're just maliciously lazy.  You're lucky you have a monopoly stranglehold on the graphic design market, or your company would've collapsed YEARS ago.  

EDIT:  So I figured out that it doesn't work because the color I'm trying to change is a TAGGED swatch.  The only way to change the color is to edit and change that tagged swatch.  But that is not a good solution at all.

[n. tilcheff]

I agree with your sentiments.

In the past, in older versions of Flash, we had noticed that Groups were excluded from color replacement. Maybe it is something along those lines - groups inside other groups?

If you share a file, I'll have a look.

[Nicktendo28]

I am not having any issues, are sure it is not your computer? I work on a mac. They are very reliable. Maybe do a clean-up and uninstall the reinstall. 

[_keyframer]

I just used Find & Replace (color) today several times without an issue. Did you click on the color swatch in the F&R panel and pick the color you wanna change directly?

[_keyframer]

I had a FBF animation where I needed to manually go through every frame, select and delete a color in various places. I thought I could use F&R panel to select that color and then replace it with no color (deleting it) but it's not an option.

[sergiopop75]

I have been testing in Flash CS6, and when searching and replacing colors, if the objects are not grouped, it allows you to select them, therefore it allows you to delete those objects with the selected color. But in the Animate versions, the object is no longer selected. We can no longer delete by color.

[TheSpaceCat]

Hey David!

I haven't found a solve for this but wanted to corroborate your experience. 

I've had ongoing issues with Find and Replace since 2021. The major problem seems to be when adjusting colors in rigs/designs  where there are many layers of symbols and groups.

Find and replace doesn't seem to recognize colors that are within symbols or groups - the only way to "Find and Replace" is to go through the symbol/group all the way to bottom and then run the tool when the fill is directly editable. Its a pretty freaking inefficent way to work. 

Keeping my eyes out for resolutions but as I've said - this has been an issue since Animate CC 2021 at least. 

Within my work and the teams I'm working with we've adjusted our workflow to be almost entirely layer based in design but that becomes moot when we reach rig/animation phases. 

[n. tilcheff]

Hi @TheSpaceCat 

Since from what you wrote you appear to be a professional user, I decided to write an additional short message.

Groups should be completely avoided in the final rigs, backgrounds or anination. Only use them, if ever, temporarily and ungroup/break apart the moment you are done moving or aligning objects.

It is only Groups that are ignored during various batch operations (not Symbols), because of their very ambiguous nature in the Flash realm.

Instead of Groups use layers, Symbols and Unions.

For more serious color management in character design and animation I'd suggest Symbol Palette Control.