What in the world made you decide to allow an item to be selected by clicking its outer glow or drop shadow, and then make the only way to turn this off to also turn off the ability to select items by their fill? This is truly rendering the program unusable to me in some cases right now. Please change this so that things cant be selected by their shadow or outer glow effect, this is a terrible feature.

The ones who commented that it works - try to do some big projects with this "option" and guess again 🤦🏻‍♀️

Dror, it works indeed. But it also prevents selecting an object by clicking its fill :)

This works 100% - Preferences > Selection & Anchor Display > Object Selection by Path Only.

Who at Adobe made this kind of decision to select an object by its shadow/glow? Do you have any developers/design leads there who really use your products? When artists use shadows/glows, they can be really far away from the object plus the blur around can be shallow... So now the situation is that the user never knows what is selected. So utterly mindless development decision. I just do not understand whats the reason behind this decision.

Neeraj Nandkeolyar Has found the solution guys.... It's not massively ideal that we can only select edges but it's helped a lot.
"Neeraj Nandkeolyar (Sr. Product Manager, Adobe Illustrator) commented · There is a setting in that may help in case of large glow/shadows. Preferences > Selection & Anchor Display > Object Selection by Path Only.

Enabling this option will disable clicks on appearances (fill/strokes/effects) from selecting the object. Only paths can be used for selection."

please fix this! Horrible to work with

This is unforgivable. I've been reading so many complaints. It took me half an hour to figure out what was "broken" in Illustrator preventing me from selecting objects. I too have some huge drop shadows blocking EVERY **** OBJECT BELOW ONE LAYER! EVERYTHING! I can't select ONE **** THING below a few small objects because of a drop shadow.

This is insane. Does anyone at Adobe actually try and use their own programs??? How could this be going on for an ENTIRE YEAR with no one actually acknowledging it or fixing it????

FIX THIS **** THING ALREADY!!!! I am paying a fracking fortune. It's stuff like this that makes many people look at much cheaper, equally feature rich alternatives like Krita or Affinity.

There is literally no point to making the shadow cast by an object selectable. It's terribly annoying and increases the time and effort to edit compositions by forcing workarounds like locking and unlocking objects.

please give us the option to change this behavior

DEAR ADOBE. HAVE YOU BEEN RECEIVING MY PAYMENTS AND FEEDBACK FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS? GOOD. FIX THE ******* PROBLEM THEN. THANK YOU.

This type of problem exists from the moment Adobe brought shadows etc into illustrator... why it works this way? Who knows...probably it was easier to implement and team is to lazy to fix it.

Please dont write that it is complex...in PS it works fine, its not hard to seperate effects (even fills and strokes) from path INNER area.

Solution by selecting by path only is a joke. Who am I? Surgeon?

From comments below i can see that there was a version when it was working properly. Can anyone provide me info which version it was? Thanks in advance :)

Please allow us to toggle the feature off!

PLEASE, for the love of all that is good, remove this evil or at least give us an option to toggle this feature on or off. It's literally giving me a migraine working on multiple objects with large shadows, forcing me to separate them on multiple layers and locking the ones I don't want to select.

Why, why, why would anyone who has used illustrator ever suggest such an addition? It makes me wonder what the Adobe team is thinking when they rolled this out. Ridiculous. Fixes nothing, adds 10x the frustration.

I'm also having this kind of "feature" in Illustrator CC 2020 (24.0.1) on Windows 10.
I don't know but recently I'm having a headache over Illustrator "features" that doesn't let me do the simple basic task such as selecting objects.
I'm hoping that in the future release they remove these "features".

still no hope I suppose. this is getting annoying...
okay, looks like I'm downgrading version...

Stop selecting objects when I click on an effect.

I have a rectangle with a long, soft drop shadow. I now can no longer select anything that is technically 'under' the drop shadow, because clicking on the drop shadow selects the object casting it. This is really really bad and extremely counterintuitive.

I'm smart enough to know which object is casting the shadow because I put it there. If I wanted to select the object casting the shadow, I would have clicked on it. Now I can't click on the thing I really want to click on — all the shapes' clickable areas are wildly overlapping and I need to re-order my layers just to click.

All this feature does is let me move an object by ~not~ clicking on it.

Awful.

I've just updated Illustrator and this is killing me. What a strange strange feature to introduce. Needs to be removed ASAP.

It's horrible. It's like scroll-jacking, where some JS won't let me scroll the way I want to scroll. This feature won't let me click where I want to click. An effect is just an effect — it shouldn't be a default selectable object, especially given how long and soft our shadows are these days. Need this one resolved ASAP!

Select tool preferences are limited to only two basic options - select by object or select by oath only. I suggest a third.

It would make life so much easier if there was option in preferences that would allow users to choose “select ignores raster effects". This would enable the selection of an object fill without being concerned with overlapping shadows, transparent images, text effects or scans containing clear elements or objects white areas of objects with multiply effect applied.

When working with complex detailed illustrations contains multiple overlapping shapes the ‘select by path option’ tends life harder still – like threading spaghetti with chop sticks.

Other workarounds include forever locking / unlocking objects, isolating objects or creating more layers. However, when you start counting in excess of 40+ layers.. you just end up fighting layers too.

Please Adobe... end this needless suffering of fighting to select object fills bellow shadows and raster effects.

Select tool preferences are limited to only two basic options.

Option 1: Select tool's default option selects object's shadows, text leading and transparent raster images instead of just the object shape. This is hugely aggravating when working on highly detailed illustrations utilising multiple overlapping objects and layers with shadows or raster items.

Options 2: is to "select by path only". When working with highly complex and detailed illustrations, this is actually a far more fiddly and aggravating option. Especially. when trying to click on individual paths where there's many paths overlapping.

It would make life so much easier if there was a third option in preferences allowing "select ignores raster effects". This would allow the user to select an object fill without being concerned with overlapping shadows, transparent images effects (e.g.. multiply) or text leading effects.

Please Adobe... I'm so tired of fighting with shadows an raster effect selections every day.