Hi Jan!
You saved my day!! Thank you so much for this info! I use this option in most of my scenes so I was some kind of lost, when I was confronted with this issue!
Update 1: Unfortunately it does not work properly! The path is saved somehow longer than before (the global path does not disappear as before), but when I close the project and reload it, the path is again absolute. This also happens with texture paths when I move objects with global texture path to another scene. The global path is not copied with the object into the new scene, but again has an absolute path and therefore broken texture links.
So frustrating!!
Update 2: I attached a short screencap with the issue appearing in my workflow (usiong native C4D bitmaps).
Update 3: This issue does NOT appear with Corona bitmaps. It shows up when I use native C4D bitmaps! So there seems to be a conflict with Corona (and Vray) referring to native C4D bitmaps in the Project Asset Inspector.