Using image resources in a folder or another project's root

Question

Hello,
I must confess that I find it annoying to place my pictures and icon resources in the same package to access them in the JavaFX application. I think this enforcement by JavaFX is an unreasonable one.
Consider that I use the same icon in several places in my application. It is the same resource that I have to put in several different places. Imaging the problems when trying to refactor or upgrading the application.
Is there a mechanism to access icons/picture resources in a folder at the root of the project or access these resources in a separate project. I would prefer the latter because in this way, I create a single project with all these resources and all other projects would access them from this project. I think this would allow updates, refactoring to be done much more easily.
If such a mechanism exists, please point me to it.
Than ks

Answer 1

Thanks for the correction.
Those last 3 examples donot use the classpath at all (although perhaps it does look in there).And so it is not; i.e. the last 3 examples did not use the classpath at all - and it did not look there either.
They will also load those resources from the current directory (or subfolders thereof).And so it is; i.e. when you don't specify a protocol, in the case of a stand alone app it looks up the resources relative to the current working directory. For webstart or applet it may use a codebase and grab the data from an originating server or something like that, but I didn't test that.
My mistake was thinking that if you didn't place the protocol in the image constructor it would default to looking stuff up relative to classpath of the calling class - which it does not do. If you did want to do such a lookup then the examples could instead be written as =>
new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("icons-390.jpg"));
new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("/icons-390.jpg"));
new Image(getClass().getResourceAsStream("../icons-390.jpg"));What I usually do is create a static getResource method on my application which returns a url to the resource, that way all of the resource lookup logic is localized in case I ever want to change how I find resources and where I place them.
static String getResource(String path) {
  return MyApplication.class.getResource(path).toExternalForm();
}