I have a bunch of sprites and a UI panel to provide a background color. In the scene view, I can’t select the sprites because the focus always goes to the UI panel. This is true regardless of sorting laye, regardless of Z position, and regardless of order in the hierarchy. How can I give selection priority to the game objects I care about?
UI allways have a bigger priority in the Scene view. Go to Layers and deactivate the UI, if you want to work on the scene objects.
OK, do what I said before to move the UI in the scene (parent it with an object and move it). Now add a second camera and make that the GUI camera (use the culling mask setting on both your cameras - one is game, one is UI).
Now your GUI should be somewhere way off in a corner and you can edit in the scene without clicking it.
I know it’s a fairly old question but this has been bugging me and my colleagues for ages too.
To solve it we have created a plugin which modifies the selection in the scene view. It can ignore ui elements by name (transparent ui elements are click-through by default).
In the image below you can see how to ignore a specific element. I have named it “ui-panel-background” as a reference to @eshan-mathur s original question.
Link to “Smart Ui Selection”: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/smart-ui-selection-unity-editor-124328
@mods: I know it’s an old question and that it might be considered a “plug” but I think it provides a not yet given solution to eshan-mathurs problem and may be beneficial for all readers. If you deem it unworthy as an answer, just remove it, no hard feelings 
After a few years of experimentation, the solution my team settled on was a context popup that displays a list of GameObjects under the mouse in the scene view. This is similar to the way Photoshop, Blender, and other graphic software handle overlapping elements. To implement this yourself, you can use Unity’s API HandleUtility.PickGameObject. But I’m also maintaining a supported version myself: Selection Utility | Utilities Tools | Unity Asset Store
