Added textures won't stay in Materials Window

When I import a texture, like wood flooring, for example into the Materials folder while in SU, they gone the next time I open a file. I have to keep importing them each time. Is there something I’m doing wrong? I usually drag and drop a texture from my desktop.

I also seemed to have lost the small material “sample” window that shows you what you’re clicking on. Boo Hoo.

I’m using Sketchup 2015 on OS 10.10.3 (Yosemite) with 32 gigs of ram…on an iMac.

Thanks in advance.
dreamspace

A materials “folder” is a directory of .skm files on disk (or storage.)

Each model has a unique materials “collection”, which will be empty if the template used to create the model has no components that have materials.

However the SketchUp UI blurs the distinction between “collection” and “folder”, by allowing you to designate local folders as “local materials collections” which will thereafter appear in the Materials Manager collection picklist (along with those that are distributed with SketchUp.)

You can create an organized hierarchy of folders and sub-folders for your custom materials collections. (It does not need to be a “flat” single folder deep list.)

So I’d recommend you put your skm and texture files where you can find them even later when you update SketchUp to later versions. The skm files are actually zip archives with internal XML property sheets and the texture file(s).

Suggested locations for version independent support files:
~/Documents/SketchUp/Materials
~/Documents/SketchUp/Textures
~/Documents/SketchUp/Watermarks
~/Documents/SketchUp/Styles

I personally like the documents path because computer to computer “migration” tools will always select the user’s documents path to add to the migration archive.

Some people (on the Mac,) might use:
~/Library/Application Support/SketchUp
for these user folders, as the version dependent folders are located below this in sub-folders.

But to each their own. Where ever you will best remember, is best. This is because you’ll need to tell SketchUp in each new version where these folders are.

This is what the Materials utility menu looks like on PC:


:bulb:

Notice in the screenshot above, the list type choices that appear on the utility menu. I have mine set to “List View” because I don’t want the extra work or time for SketchUp to display thumbnails.

I assume you are dragging into the ‘Colors’ browser with ‘Colors in Model’ selected…

This will only save the new color in that model…
If you create a Materials folder at ~/Library/Application Support/SketchUp 2015/SketchUp/Materials/My Textures for example…

dragging texture/material images into there will persist…

It is quite different than on a Windows PC, and IMHO, Materials are best kept where SU will always look for them, i.e. the User Library path…
john

Did you only import the texture or do you use it in your model. Maybe you don’t use it and do a model purge before saving the file?