Red Xs in Layout

I am soooo tired of seeing red Xs in Layout. It ruins hours and hours of work.

If this doesn’t get addressed soon our company will stop using Sketchup altogether. It started happening two years ago or so. We have top of the line equipment. Layout really needs to stop breaking links and wasting every one’s work. If there is solution, please let me know. But otherwise, our files keep getting corrupted and we have lost so much time already. What a shame. Layout is otherwise such a great program.

The common reason for reference links to get broken is because the user is copying and pasting from the source into LayOut. The act of copying creates a temporary file which by its very nature is destined to be deleted. When the reference file is deleted one should expect the link to be broken. There are two solutions to the problem. Either save the reference file as a permanent file and insert it into the LayOut document instead of copying and pasting or unlink the reference so LayOut will only look at the embedded version. My preference is to save the reference in the working directory for the project and then inserting it using File>Insert which is the way LayOut was designed to work.

Thank you very much Dave. Your thoughts are appreciated. However, there is nothing temporary about copying and pasting in other programs or the computing world in general. Not sure why it should be any different with Layout. In my view, there is zero excuse for the program breaking links on its own with no action from the program user. Using links is all fine but it takes about ten times more time. The program designers ought to review their code and allow Layout to build a reliable file library.

Other programs don’t reference the original file like LayOut does. If LayOut didn’t reference the original file, it wouldn’t allow automatic updates from the original file when the original gets updated. If, for example you copy and paste images into Microsoft Word and then modify the image, you have to manually replace the image to update the document. LayOut gives you that option by unlinking/embedding the files if you want to prevent it from referring to the original reference. LayOut also gives you the easy option to exchange one reference file for another which is very handy and can be a big time saver.

It sounds like you would prefer to give up the choice.

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Hi Vin,

Have you seen this post:

The tl;dr is don’t leave your LayOut files open over night, or your OS/disk cleanup utility will mess up your file. We are working on a longer term solution for this problem that will allow you to leave your files open without having to worry about this happening any more.

Sorry for the problems this has caused you!
Adam

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Really appreciate the added response Adam.

There is half a dozen of us design professionals using this program while the rest of the firm uses Revit. I feel I should have specified earlier in the string that we operate in the Win 10 Pro - 64K, all with high performing workstations. We have all the same problem and it costs us 10-30 hours of lost work every month until we find a solution. And the problem only started a year ago. Never had happened before. Thanks again.