First of all, thank you for update 23 that brings file name prefix matching for variants. It’s quite nice and works well from what I tested.
However, it is still a bit too limited than what I was hoping for. Sometimes I open up an editor without necessarily spinning up Aspect, or rename files directly from the file system, and in that case the prefix matching doesn’t seem to work.
Additionally, importing existing libraries (with variants using suffixes) doesn’t match the pictures using that prefix either.
I remember in this post that you mentioned considering a manual management of variants, but were hesitant about the way to implement it UI/UX-wise.
I just wanted to propose to add this function as a drag-and-drop:
Dragging the variant over the original could link them together, and dragging an image out of the variant window (the small pop-up when clicking on ‘Show related files’) would remove this single variant out of the related files and back as an independent image.
To me this seems like an intuitive way to link/unlink them, without necessarily adding another menu entry on the right click that could make it more cumbersome.