Files and covers

A work can carry files: a cover, a reference, a picture of the thing. They live on the card’s Files tab.

Attaching a file

Two ways in. Attach a file opens the picker; drop files onto the tab does the same for as many as you drag at once. Either way kilna takes pictures — PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, AVIF.

Set a cover attaches a file and marks it as the work’s cover in one step. Setting a second one changes the cover: the newest is the one that shows, and the one it replaced stays attached rather than disappearing behind your back. Remove it and the older one is the cover again.

Where the cover is drawn rather than photographed, the tab opens with the prompt it is drawn from — see Shorts.

Where the file goes

A file is copied into the workspace, not pointed at where it lay. The copy sits in a media directory beside the workspace database, named by an id of its own.

This is the difference between a cover that keeps working and one that breaks the day you tidy your downloads folder. It also means the pictures travel: a backup takes the files with the database, into a directory named after the backup, and restoring brings both back. A workspace is one folder, and moving it is moving a folder.

The name the file arrived under is kept and shown — it is what you recognise it by, and often what a generator wrote in it. Inside the workspace the file is named by its id, so two files called cover.png cannot collide.

Removing a file takes the copy with it. The original, wherever it came from, is never touched. This is not the trash: what the trash promises is that a deletion can be taken back, and a row restored beside bytes that are gone would be that promise broken.

Where a cover shows

Everywhere a work is drawn small:

• the banner at the top of its card,
• beside its title in the catalogue,
• on its chip in the calendar,
• on the dashboard and in the search palette.

A work with no cover keeps the colour it has always had — a gradient derived from its id, so a row of works reads as one family. The picture is laid over that colour rather than replacing it, so a cover still loading, or one whose file went missing, shows the work’s own colour instead of a white hole.

Files in groups

The tab shows a work’s files grouped by what they are for: the cover first, then the stills its scenes are drawn from, then the clips animated from those, then everything else. A group with nothing in it is not drawn at all.

The grouping earns its place on a storyboard. Scene stills and clips are files on the work like any other, so a board of fifty scenes with four candidates each puts two hundred pictures in this tab — in one flat list the cover would be somewhere in the middle of them. Scene material is normally handled on the board itself (see Scenes); this tab is where you see all of it at once, and what it costs.

A file may belong to more than one work: copying a board points the copy at the same pictures rather than duplicating them. Removing it from one work leaves the other looking at it, and the bytes go only when the last work using them lets go.