Creating scenes not working properly?

Configuration
1

I think I might be thinking about scenes incorrectly. I’ve been using HA since 2018, but I’ve never used scenes. I went to create one in the Settings —> [Automations / Scripts / Scenes / Blueprints] area, but I must be doing something wrong because after I click save, and the save button goes away, the name up in the upper left corner doesn’t change from “New Scene” to the one I’ve specified, and it doesn’t appear in the list after I come back into that view.

The scene I’m trying to create is the simplest one I could think of, just to start. I’ve copied the YAML out so I can easily paste it in again, because this has happened half a dozen times already, where it has just gone away after I’ve saved it. My only goal for this initial scene is to have an automation turn on when the scene is activated. The automation brings up the lights when the movie is paused and dims them when playback starts, but that’s really irrelevant to this scene.

After clicking save, I see the scene I just created in the scenes.yaml file, but it doesn’t show up in the GUI ever, even after a restart and hard-refreshing the browser. I don’t get an entity for this scene at all. Maybe something is broken for me? I’ve just updated to the latest 2025.5.1.

- id: "1746885065496"
  name: Movie Time
  entities:
    automation.kitchen_lights_on_movie_play_pause:
      state: "on"
  icon: mdi:video-vintage
  metadata:
    automation.kitchen_lights_on_movie_play_pause:
      entity_only: true

Like I said, I just feel like I’m thinking about something incorrectly, or just doing something completely wrong. are there any good scene tutorials? Some of the ones I’ve seen have said they’re simpler than scripts, and so far, for me, this is not the case :expressionless:

2

So, I figured I’d comment again here to document where I went wrong. Yes, SURPRISE! This was ultimately my fault :slight_smile:

First, some background

Yeah, this issue goes back a bit.

When YAML automations and scripts first started being discouraged in favour of GUI-based editing, I had a folder hierarchy of a few dozen YAML files that I imported with a packages directive in my configuration.yaml

Importing the new GUI editor files automations.yaml and scripts.yaml didn’t play nice with my existing packages statement. To fix this issue, I added files in the packages directory that imported the GUI -created files in the root config folder.

The problem with my scenes

All that stuff described above was done before scenes were a thing, and I had never created a scenes.yaml import. So while the scenes.yaml file was being written to with the new scenes, it was never being loaded.

Adding a new file scenes_gui.yaml in my packages folder (that was already being included) with this one line fixed my problem;

scene: !include /config/scenes.yaml

Hopefully this can help someone else.

Edit: fixed mistake

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