I am wondering if there is any way to put all of the files referenced in a LayOut document in one place for sharing and or archiving purposes? I need to back up my work on a work drive that may eventually need to be opened by someone else to work on it. How do I ensure that all the referenced files are accounted for?
AutoCAD has something called eTransmit that will gather all of the necessary references and support files for a document and put them in a zip file for you to send to someone else or save to an archive somewhere. I guess that I am looking for the one button approach to make sure that the file can be opened on another computer by another user.
I make it a point to keep all of the reference files for a particular LO project in a single folder from the beginning. The LO file is also kept in this folder. I guess if I needed to share the whole thing as an archive with someone I could easily create a zip file containing the folder and be done with it.
Assuming you haven’t done that and perhaps consider it too difficult to collect all those files in one place, you could make a copy of the LO file, rename it to .zip and extract the references out of that file into a common folder. Then you would need to relink the references in the LO file to these “new” references in the folder. Not one click but workable.
Fair enough. I figured that this was the case. Again, forethought is a good thing to have. Luckily, this project is not too big to move all the project files to the same folder. Might be best practices anyway for future projects.
That darned forethought. 
To be honest, I never really thought of it from the standpoint of being able to share the references with others. It’s always more so that I can find them. When I’m doing something like a furniture plan, the csv from the cutlist naturally goes into the same directory as the .skp file so the .skp file gets saved into a directory named for the client and project. It just seemed natural to put the LO file in the same place.
FWIW, if you unlink the references in the LO file, the external files won’t be used anymore. Keeping a backup copy of the LO file would automatically keep a copy of all the references, then. If the LO project gets updated you’d need to save a new backup copy, of course.
Thanks for bringing this topic up! I’m a year late to the conversation.
We use LO for documenting complex interior installations, that at times include graphic files created by several different artists, as well as breakout Sketchup models for detailing. We also operate locally and on servers, with some baton passing occurring during the design process.
Having a capability to “package” an LO document with all of its linked content would be an unbelievably useful feature (I am more experienced with InDesign’s packaging feature, though it sounds like AutoCAD has a similar function).
I like the workflow solution to keep all of the referenced files in a single location, but wouldn’t you still have the problem of having to relink inside of LO if you moved the LO file and its folder of links from a local desktop to a server? Even if they were all grouped in a single location…I think LO would still try to find the links along the original file path.
I do want to try your workflow though…it would save us some time in our baton passes. Thanks for the thoughts on the matter.
A LayOut document is merely a packed document already, if you change the extension into .zip, one can extract all the reference files.
For relative paths, see this topic:
Yes and if you want to relink files you have to go through one by one, you cant just update the folder path (like you can in indesign).
This causes my staff and I a lot of frustration.
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