I am not sure if my problem is the same but it is frustrating and confusing to our designers as well, that they see components in search for libraries the have not enabled in a file. one would expect to see results for only the libraries that have been enabled.
I totally agree. For large orgs with many libraries, this is not only unhelpful, but anti-helpful. Search should search your local file and the enabled libraries only.
Maybe instead of “Showing results from all libraries” it should be a link with text “Show results from all libraries” that only shows results when you click the link.
I just posted a question about this. I totally agree. What’s the point in toggling a library if its components still appear in the search?
Jumping in to reiterate what the others said - this feature is not only not helpful, it’s harmful. I work in a large company with dozens of different design systems scattered across various organizations, and when people are working from my design system I need them to stay there because those are the things that have been built for them. It’s a toolbox, with very specific tools in it - if a designer doesn’t find what they need I can’t have them rummaging around in their neighbor’s toolbox, right?
I totally agree with Iasonas
Too often do I pick the wrong component because it is impossible to know what library the component belongs to by looking at the “search result”. And for people not familiar with our design system it is even more confusing.
Bump #Figma?
Today I did two new things in Figma: I upgraded to a Professional plan and I started using libraries. 15 minutes later I’m reading this thread. That’s unfortunate. 😞
What’s even worse is that the search results show components from read-only libraries that I have no way of removing from Libraries. Am I missing something? Shouldn’t there be a way to do that?
EDIT: Ok, I managed to at least solve part of the problem, thanks to @Gleb: to remove the file from the Libraries modal, open the file, click Share, find your name in the list (using the browser search, because there’s no filter) click the dropdown and choose Leave. That is so counterintuitive…
Oh gosh - this a million times. It’s amazing that a library that isn’t included in my project is featured in asset search.
It’s even more unhelpful that you can’t even see where those results are coming from - so if you search on “button” and there’s fifty components called “button” from design libraries that aren’t included in this project how are you supposed to tell which is the one you need?
We have this exact same issue in our Figma.
My expectation: the search in the Assets-panel only finds the published components, for the libraries that I have enabled for the file in which I’m working on. Currently, I keep seeing published components popping up in the “Search…” results, even though I haven’t enabled the said libraries for the file. Note: these components do not show up under the “Results from all libraries” but in the same list/grid as all of the results.
Oh-kay, apparently this is not a bug, but a “feature”: Why do I get search results from Libraries that I have not included in the project? 😓
If you see this and also think that the way that asset panel search results now show up isn’t helpful, please vote for this feature request: Enable Assets search only for enabled libraries - #6 by Steven3 🙏
Joining the bandwagon and 👍 to what everyone said in the comments. My expectation: the search in the Assets-panel only finds the published components, for the libraries that I have enabled for the file in which I’m working on. Anything else is a distraction.
@ moderators (like @Gleb ): this get help topic thread also relates to this feature request (as it’s poster, Dario commented above) : Components from unpublished library show up in search results
I posted comments there first, before I found this feature request (and found the other similar topics on this same issue).
Related to this, if multiple libraries are attached to a file, the asset search should indicate which library a component lives in. In the attached image I’ve enabled two libraries for this file, and I’m searching for a Button component. But each library has a Button, so how do I know which one belongs to which library? The only way to find out is to drag them into the file and see which system they’re in under Swap Instance.
Possible fixes: separate search results by library, show library on hover.
I moved some messages and closed the related topics so the discussion is focused in this one.
Please tell your devs that this is the desired behavior:
The search in the assets-panel should only find published components for libraries that are enabled in the file that is currently worked in.
Anything else doesn’t make any sense at all. I am working with Figma since the very beginning like 6 hours a day and know every tiny workaround, but there really is NONE for this and it is frustrating because it is probably super easy to fix and yet SO annoying.
PLEASE make sure your devs tackle this asap. This has been a problem for so long now 😦
This is a major annoyance for my organization. Designers often find things via the asset search function, but without the ability to filter things that are unpublished, they often grab outdated / old components that are no longer recommended for use.
You can now search only within a specific library using the Insert Component menu (Shift + I).
But that still doesn’t solve the main issue 😉
Re-hydrating this discussion and feature request. We’re part of a huge organization with an extremely large number of teams (each with multiple library files) and we desperately need the option to turn off the “Showing results from all libraries” feature. The whole point of having toggles for libraries is to make sure outside library assets don’t accidentally end up in our files and this “all libraries feature” completely kills the point.
I’m managing multiple design libraries as we move through new app versions, so I can iterate through each update but still keep old components linked to old design libraries. However, asset search which is the primary method we use to quickly grab the components we need is becoming pretty much useless because it’s showing results from libraries that are toggled off or “archived” internally.
It would be amazing if Figma could provide us options to search only libraries we have enabled, and show us which library our components search results belong to.
Shocked that Figma hasn’t spotted this “All libraries by default” issue themselves - please, please prioritise this!! (seriously) Our UX/Design team wasted hours trying to figure out this misperceived “bug” in our Design System, it directly undermines the architecture of any multiple-design-systems setup. I’m a big Figma fan/advocate, but if another tool arrived that could match Figma and solved for this issue then I’d bounce the org over to that tool. It’s not the expected behaviour (from a user lens) and usually Figma never drop the ball like that.
Adding myself to the discussion that this feature is needed and I hope they don’t hide this feature behind some plans. It’s already frustrating enough you can’t do a library analytics unless you use Organization Plan (the most expensive).
Both features should be given and not blocked by some paywall. Keeping tracking of changes in the library is hard enough.
If developers can keep track of files changed, deleted, and added for free using Git, why shouldn’t designers be able to for free?
Same from our perspective. We are working in an agency model where we’re handling multiple libraries for multiple clients at once. Not being able to filter out the results ofter results in placing components that should simply not go into a specific file.
We have the same problem and just found out that there are a lot of assets from different libraries because our colleagues didn’t know that they were using other assets than the ones from our own library. This is a major problem, especially for bigger teams like ours!!
Same here, it’s super annoying to find out people use the wrong components ! you have to waste time cleaning everything up later
