Creating SKM file with mac

Hi, I am trying to make my workflow easier and decided to create .skm files for all my materials.
However I am not able to figure out how to export and .skm out of Sketchup. I created a texture, go into the material and if I right click it there is not “save as” option. I looked a bunch of YouTube Videos and that only seems to work with Windows. Anyone knows what I need to do?
Thanks,
Inga
MacOS Monterey
SU 2021pro

Set the Materials window to show In Model. Then below click on the List dropdown and choose Duplicate. That will generate a folder with the currently In Model materials as .skm files.

Alternatively you can select a single In Model material so it shows in the larger square to the left of the palette at the bottom of the Colors panel, change to the desired collection and drag the material up into the collection.

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Who thought it would be that simple!
Thanks

Sorry. I forgot I should make things harder. :crazy_face:

Hope it got you on the right track.

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So now with SketchUp Pro 2023, and Mac Ventura, what used to work as @DaveR describes above (to export SKM files that I can manage on my own with the Finder) no longer seems to work. It’s hard to believe, but managing materials with the Mac version seems to have gotten worse! The broken and/or outright lack of functionality to manage materials (widely documented and bemoaned) in the Mac version seems recently to have become completely unusable. Regardless of where I put my materials folder (either hidden in the SketchUp folders in the library) or elsewhere on my drive, the best I can do is get SU to make me an empty folder (when I duplicate a list of materials). I cannot copy SKM files between lists (folders), nor have existing materials from my model get written to SKM files, even though the UI suggests something is actually happening. What’s worse, SketchUp has developed a habit of crashing when I change lists in the Materials tab of the Colors window. It’s seriously limiting my workflow. If anyone can provide some insights, or anyone at Trimble can provide any hope that these serious limitations will be addressed soon, I’d be happy to hear about it. I’m tired of being treated like a second-class customer because I choose to use the Mac version of SketchUp.

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I did look at this last night, but it was almost midnight for me, so I didn’t report my findings…

Slightly more awake now, I find that in 2021 and 2022, the Duplicate action gives me a new set of materials, but that new set is empty. With 2023 I get the expected duplicates of all of the materials that were In Model.

In all three cases the corresponding folder in Finder was empty. I tried now in 2017, and it was the same as 2021 and 2022.

Then I realized that my tests were only using the scale figure materials, which are flat colors. So I added a textured material to the scene, and duplicated again. Then in 2021 and 2017 the SKM files were made ok, including the flat colored ones that had failed to appear before. Also, the duplicate set in the Colors palette was no longer empty.

If I do that same test in 2023, I see the duplicate set of materials in the Colors palette, but the Finder folder is still empty. That makes it seem like someone fixed the issue of the materials not being duplicated if they are all flat colors, but then introduced a new problem where the SKM files are not created.

I am now looking through what ‘fixes’ there were in 2023 that could explain what I’m seeing.

Thanks @Colin for testing and confirming that managing materials with the Mac Colors palette is (even more) broken in 2023. I was able to use 2022 to copy a single new material to my collection of materials that I use across projects, and get back to work. I am left wondering if a real fix will ever come so that Mac users can have and manage their own collections of materials reliably? Having this basic functionality (which used to mostly work) is a higher priority for me than adding any fancy new features.

We have a fix for the problem coming in an update. For now, I gave this work around in another topic:

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