If you set an image reference in UI Builder, then move those images somewhere else in the project, UI Toolkit will not be able to find them and will remove the path from the file which permanently corrupts it, so it cannot even be restored if you just move the files back to the correct folder. This is terrible design. Store these images by GUID, and cache the direct reference. At the very least avoid corrupting the UXML data just because it would generate a warning every tick. Capture that properly.