I’m genuinely confused and disappointed by SketchUp’s decision to remove the SketchUp Viewer. It was an incredibly useful feature that allowed clients and collaborators to easily view models — no software expertise required.
I recently shared a model with a client, but without a viewer, he wasn’t able to open or showcase it to his own clients. He now sees the entire project as unusable and is refusing to pay unless this issue is resolved. This puts months of hard work at risk — all because there’s no accessible viewing solution available.
To those suggesting SketchUp for Web — I’ve tried uploading the file multiple times. It either crashes or fails to upload. While I can upload from within SketchUp Pro, that defeats the purpose. My clients should be able to view models freely and independently.
@SketchUpTeam — please consider reinstating the viewer or offering a truly reliable and simple alternative for non-Pro users. We need a solution that works for everyone involved in the design process.
Yes, I’ve tried this and it works for me since I have a SketchUp Pro subscription. However, this method makes my clients dependent on me to access and share the model. The real issue is that neither my client nor his clients have a Pro subscription, so they can’t view or share the model independently.
Also, isn’t there a 1GB storage limit on Trimble Connect? That adds another layer of restriction, especially for larger projects.
It might be possible that I’m not aware of the features and capabilities of Trimble connect but I don’t understand why it was so necessary to remove the simplest feature and make it more complicated.
I recently tried to share a model with a client via Connect because 1. her Apple laptop was old and the Viewer wasn’t working, 2. she couldn’t use the Android app on her Pixel 8a because the Android app is broken for later SketchUp versions and 3. somehow SketchUp for web was not working for her.
It was a nightmare!
On the surface this is truly a very disappointing move by Trimble to discontinue the Viewer – indeed it seems to not be available anymore at the SketchUp website.
True, really doesn’t understand why.
The whole point in using Sketchup and it’s features are the easy accessibility and it’s simple and easy to understand workflow.
And now they are starting to add unnecessary features like rendering and removing one of the best features which is Sketchup viewer.
I don’t think you need a subscription to view the shared link. Try it out send the file to yourself or a friend and open it up on a computer that doesn’t have Sketchup. It should just open in the browser.
I’m sure I heard they are currently developing better collaboration tools. With mark up and live view etc.
It’s not about the subscription but Sketchup removing more reliable and easy to use feature and pushing us to use more complex and utterly unreliable feature. I have an NDA otherwise I would have shared the link here and let you all see how long it take to open this file and crashes most of the time while opening on your browser which was not any an issue in the viewer @SketchUpTeam
This is what I see when I try to upload the model: it takes a long time to upload, and then it doesn’t upload and shows this symbol.
This model is over 300mb and has a lot of polygons and trees, and other vegetation.
That might be the issue — the web app can be quite sensitive to poorly optimised models. A 300MB compressed file could easily unpack to over 500MB of geometry, which can demand a lot of memory just to open, let alone interact with.
If you’re open to sharing the model (via something like WeTransfer), someone here might be able to take a look and suggest ways to streamline it for better performance — and maybe even get it working more reliably via a share link.
On the bright side, this does suggest that the person you were sharing with might not have been able to run the model easily in the desktop viewer either, so it’s not just a web limitation.
You also mentioned using Twinmotion in another thread — worth noting that its cloud feature runs the model from Epic’s servers and streams it as video. That means you’re not relying on the end user having a powerful machine, which makes sharing large models much more forgiving.
I was just using trimble connect to share models last week without an issue. I’ve liked the feature and havent had any issues except the time it takes to open large models. I’ll try it on my machine here in a bit and see if everythings still working.
Everything is working on my Trimble Connect for sharing a model. Here’s an active link. It takes some time to open and depends on the size of your model. On a side note, I’m still on SU2024. I remember trying to upload a massive file a while back and it showed the cloud crossed out until the model had fully uploaded. I couldn’t do anything with Trimble connect until the model was finished uploading. That’s likely your issue.
