There should be an option to always disable auto-anything, but especially auto-linking media. I spend a large chunck of my editing time correcting mistakes that Premiere's auto-linking causes. There should be an option to totally disable auto-linking, and have the possibility to manually link to folders the user specifies *and nowhere else*.

I have to move projects and media around, on different machines, hard drives and network drives. I'm not the only one, I'm sure. This is what you have to do, if you edit video, and then hand over projects to others, for e.g. localisation purposes. Premiere utterly messes up these projects, and I have to carefully, manually correct and rebuild the projects, before sending them forward.

The root cause of the problem is at least two-fold: 1) the way the entire Adobe suite of software does media management is broken. The system internally points to file names and paths, rather than any file-specific *unique* ID, like ProTools. 2) Adobe keeps developing software towards the YouTuber hobbyist crowd, making auto-this and that. For example, Premiere's audio "ducking" is not ducking as in side-chain compression, it is auto-generating keyframes (in a bad way).

As a professional user, I find Adobe is not listening to me or any other pro user. I've complained about various critical flaws and bugs (e.g. the eternally broken AE-PPro dynamic linking) for over a decade, and they don't ever listen. The options are to put up with this, or to find an alternative suite of software.

This is related: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/34953352-ascii-project-files

Agreed. Not only that, but one should be able to perform text searches with optional replace of media paths within a project instead of all this magical yet buggy auto-linking. That would be flexible *and* powerful unlike this **** that we have had to endure for so long.

Yes, I'm not really asking for auto-linking to be fixed. I'm asking for MANUAL linking to be IMPLEMENTED.

It's idiotic that this program has no way to simply reconnect all of a project's files to a NEW SOURCE DIRECTORY.

I don't know what kind of amateur-hour or gimped workflow people are using to get around this, but the problem should not have existed in version 1, let alone whatever version this is.

I do agree, however, that, if auto-linking is enabled, that it should only auto-link based on paths one has selected, that is, it should never perform the initial auto-linking which is all guess-based but bring up the media linking dialog and then, when one re-links one media file, the system then auto-links (if the auto-linking is enabled) other missing media files that it can find under the same folder. If it cannot find any more missing media files under the same folder, then the user locates the media, wherever it exist, and the process repeats.

OK, but I don't care for fixing auto-linking, I just want to disable it. I rather trust myself than some algorithm that is bound to fail at some point, or for an untested condition, and then not notice until the damage is done. No auto-linking for me. Power to the people.

My "report" is here: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/34924387-bug-report-link-media-is-broken-links-to-wrong

This is related to the whole defective mess that is media linking.

I have filed a bug on this behavior as well, but we need to decide on common terminology so we can garner votes and Adobe can't pretend that it's a surprise.

The problem is that Premiere lacks any proper way to simply re-link all the media in a project, and (as you've noted) will happily and silently relink to the WRONG MEDIA.

What we need is a way to manually direct Premiere to link to media in a certain location AND NOWHERE ELSE. Without this, I think it's nearly unusable. Trying to work around this defect is doubling my editing time, no exaggeration.

No, wrong. That setting is for the dialog, but that dialog only appears if there is some media that could not be auto-linked. That is, if one was to open a project, Premiere then checks if the media exist at the paths recorded, if not, Premiere tries to auto-link (this is what I don't want), and if it succeeds, it will continue opening the project without letting the user know it has re-linked some media. However, if some media fails to be auto-linked, then it displays the dialog that you refer to. The auto-linking that this dialog does is aided by the user having selected a new path for some of the media, and is not really the same as Premiere auto-linking and making uneducated guesses about where the media actually is.

No, I don't want to open my project in offline mode, I just don't want media to be auto-linked because the auto-linking picks up incorrect media and makes a mess out of my projects.

However, if you say there's an option to disable automatic re-linking then that's exactly what I have been looking for but haven't found.

I think what you really want is the ability to open your project in offline mode, correct? The locate media dialog already has the option to disable "Relink others automatically"