Change compression type to every sprite

I've been trying different methods, as far as I understand when you use the search bar to find Sprites, unity will find only the sprite itself but not the dependency (which I think is what contains Unity's info about that sprite); once the search result is done you can select multiple sprites and with a right click you select the dependancies where you can change the format or compression type, unfortunately when using this method, the objects lose the reference to the sprite and you end up with missing sprite in all your objects. So no luck so far, if anyone has other ideas please share.