Comment 3 for bug 1519332

"Ideally it would work a bit like custom backgrounds" makes me cringe a bit, because over the course of several reviews and iterations the custom background feature became absurdly over-designed. The design is now much simpler: an automatic list of the ten most recent backgrounds, where manual deletion is hardly used and therefore well-hidden. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Appearance>

Even then, showing the most recent selections is arguably not a picker call-site's job: it should be the picker itself that makes more-recently-chosen items easier to choose, for each app, than less-recently-chosen items. File pickers already do this in Ubuntu for PC, Windows, and OS X ("Recently Used", "Recent", and "All My Files" respectively). The reason I still include recent items in the Background design is that (a) it makes undoing much faster and more visceral than a picker could, and (b) it's more obvious that it will remember the previous zoom and crop for the image (sadly still unimplemented).

With ringtones you'll similarly want to be able to remember the previous loop selection for the track (also not yet implemented), so that would be a reason to remember previous choices outside the picker. And it would be easy enough to include previous selections above/below "Custom Ringtone…". But how many of them? Five? Ten? Twenty? Having had the same ringtone for 2.5 years, I have little idea how often other people change theirs.