After the cleanup process including reducing the textures to a reasonable size the SketchUp file is now reduced by 46%. That reduction will carry over to LayOut. I did not reduce the huge objects in the model. They could probably undergo some surgery to lighten them. I think there are some textures that could be replaced by simple colors without changing their appearance significantly and that would further reduce your file and make LO’s work easier.
You mentioned adding a faucet. There’s a faucet in the model that is a Dynamic Component. If you don’t need the “dynamic-ness” you could make it not dynamic and purge unused stuff to reduce its size.
So between the overload in your SketchUp model and a relatively slow connection to the save location, I think the time you’re spending waiting for LO to do “tasks” is inevitable. No matter how fast your internet service is, it is still slow compared to working on locally saved files.
I would strongly urge you to be more diligent about keeping your models on a diet and working with locally saved files.
Before you add anything from the 3D Warehouse open it in a separate SketchUp file so you can clean it up and reduce it.
And back to the long references list in the huge LO file; did you start this project by using an earlier LayOut project?
You pretty well listed all my dirty secrets from my bad SkUp habits that I’ve gotten away with up until now. This is how I’ve always done things but it looks like it caught up with me today or I added the straw that broke the camels back. And yes I probably piggy backed the Layout file from a previous file that might have been linked to another SkUp file still. Thank you for looking at all of this and pointing out what I’m doing wrong. Lot’s of old revisions. In any case I have to look in to how to reduce my material size somehow for future use. What Clean Up file do you use to reduce edges, faces, etc…I’m not sure how I feel about merging material. My materials are usually very specific. I’ll have a look and let you know if it works better on my end. Thank you!
You should create an essentially empty LayOut template to use instead of doing the piggy back thing.
I used CleanUp3 as well as Default Tag Geometry, and Material Resizer. First and third from the Extension Warehouse. The second from Sketchucation.
As for merging textures it’s usually a thing that happens for things like materials for appliances where you might have several that each use the same stainless texture. Or different furniture pieces that all have the same wood grain material.
Hi @mazzie504 … working on SketchUp files in the cloud has been a reported issue. FWIW I’m also on a Mac platform and have had no issues working with SketchUp or LO files in Dropbox or iCloud for years. All of my slow performance issues have been related to bloated files (not necessarily large files though) and specific to LO. It’s a bit frustrating that SketchUp can power through a file like a champ only to have it grind to an excruciatingly slowdown in LO. To that end, I’ve had few performance issues in 2026.
Sounds like file size was ultimately the cause and has since been resolved. I just wanted to weigh in on the cloud issue specifically.
There is no question that Layout is slower, reference points are harder to line up, and less intuitive. With its age, it should be moving the other way. This is a slow death, just waiting for the next new thing.
Thank you for piping in. My issue has been resolved, but like you said LO not as fast as it used to be. It can’t be frustrating at times. Even though I fixed my issues when I went back into my SketchUp file some of the materials that were merged altered the look and feel I wanted to accomplish in my renderings. So I had to go back and readjust the materials so they were more specific.
For both SketchUp and LayOut backups are automatically created in the same directory as the working files. I also save backups to Trimble Connect. Each time a SketchUp file is saved to Trimble Connect it’s an incremental save so I can go back to earlier versions if I wish. Currently there isn’t a way to save LayOut files to Trimble Connect within the application like you can with SketchUp but you can upload LayOut files to Trimble Connect.
In addition I have a backup program which runs every night and saves to the tertiary drive in my computer. It is set up to save the last two days and each night it deletes the older one when it writes the new one. This shows the backup folders from last night and the night before.
yes, my interest is in how to accomplish getting backup files off the same machine and out of the same physical location, like into the cloud. I’m not suave enough to set up a NAS just for myself, have relied on OneDrive sync similar to OP because it makes my professional life so easy in many ways, but am perhaps quite late to realizing this might be part of ongoing LO pain. Thx.
I haven’t set up a NAS either. My process for saving files and my choice to not work directly on cloud-saved files comes from seeing the experience of many users here on the forum. I’ve also learned that wht might seem to be a time saver on the front end often winds up costing a lot more time later on. This doesn’t just apply to SketchUp and LayOut of course. Looking ahead is really important in the way I create models and work with them in LayOut.
FWIW, there is another possible backup for your LayOut files. When LO opens it creates a folder in AppData/Local/…/LayOut/working. You can select the contents of the folder, zip them up, and rename them to .layout. If the files are viable the new file you’ve created should open in LayOut. This shows the the folder for the last LO file I opened.
I used cleanup and material de-sizer on my original sketch up file. And I used it on a couple other files and it worked really well. One thing that I noticed when I did the cleanup with the material merger is that when I went back into my file to use with Enscape the material did not look like they did originally. So I had to go back and fix it. I will experiment more often in the future. And I’ll also look into some of the other suggestions of working right from my desktop rather than iCloud. But it’s going to be an adjustment for me.
I’m having significant slowdown with Layout. I’m running 2026 Pro. Any updates I have to select the viewport, right click and select “Update…”, then initiate a render. My models aren’t huge, but Layout no longer just updates when I ask it to. More steps involved, and more time to actually render. I use DropBox for saving files. Maybe it would be better if I save to a local drive, then backup to DropBox or some other entity once a day?
