When managing a complex symbol library, I find that I need to spend a lot of time deselecting all the symbols that I don’t want to be published as part of publishing updates to my libraries. These might be smaller sub-elements that have no inherent value by themselves and don’t need to be part of a library but are used in other components (e.g a tab item within a tab bar).

Even if previously I’ve deselected a particular symbol from being published, every time I try to publish again it’s been re-selected. Figma also assumes that these are symbols I want to be published by indicating that the library has changes to be published.

I think it would be helpful to allow control of the publish / unpublish functionality from the symbol itself, rather than having this awkward dialog box which asks you to select or deselect everything at once. When you finally would hit publish, it would just show the same dialog we have right now but with the appropriate items checked/unchecked as-per whatever had already been configured.

See the below attached image for an example of how it could work.

Maybe I’m the only one who controls symbols in this way, but I’d be interested to hear if people have a similar issue or if there are any other fixes for this.