Ux for handling individual missing texture

[eobet]

I’m not going to create a topic per paper-cut here, so…

PROBLEM

1. Shiny magenta texture appears on an object!
2. Selecting it in either shader editor or image editor yields no clues (nor menu options to see the original path)…
   
   
3. Going to the data API to search for the name yields no results UNLESS you expand the Images section first
   
4. Choosing the “report missing files” option also yields no results UNLESS you are quick enough to click on the orange highlight at the bottom of the screen
   
5. The info log screen doesn’t map shader name/image name to missing texture file and when you copy the line with a path, you get quotation marks and “not found” in your clipboard
   
   

EDIT: Similar problems with missing collections, and as of writing this thread, I genuinely don’t know how to re-link this collection because…

• All of the object tabs for the instanced collection only show properties for the placeholder empty
• The “find missing files” menu option did not re-link the collection
• I can find the collection in the data-api tab, but I don’t know how to re-link it from there

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SOLUTION

So the solution is probably obvious to experienced users, but I’m attempting to show how there’s several steps a new user might take in order to find out why a texture is missing, and only a single one of them works.

There could be a lot more warning notifications, helpful text and (contextual) menu options on the way to help the user as he attempts to navigate the UI in order to find out what the original texture file that went missing was.

[RomboutVersluijs]

There is an addon developed long time ago by Pablo Vazquez, its called Amaranth. Its been updated to 2.8 branch and has many handy operators and functions.

Im currently researching a different issue, but im going to use the base from the operator. Im looking for a faster and easier way to update file paths when working on 2 different OS’s. Currently this is a p@#@, everything needs to be relinked with find missing files. But can cause issues.

PS right-click in the Outline > Blend-file > Relocate
Find Missing Files only works with identical names

When you use report missing files, it shows a list in the Console. Again Amaranth addon goes a step further and show users, material using it, if its linked etc etc