Whenever I transfer my blend files to another pc, there is always an issue with all the textures

Question

Whenever I transfer my blend files to another PC, there is always an issue with all the textures. It appears pink all the time. What is the issue, please, and how to resolve it?

Answer 1

The problem is with your Image textures. The pink color means that Blender can't find the files that contain the images. There are two solutions:

1. Pack the textures into the Blend file and optionally unpack them when you've moved the blend file to the other PC

2. Use Relative Paths and copy the textures to the same place on the new PC relative to the Blend file as you placed them on the original. Note that you must save the original file before you add any image textures for this approach to work.

The downside of the 1st method is that it results in very large blend files. The downside of the 2nd is that you have to keep track of the relative paths.

Relative Paths

Let's say you have your blend files all in your home directory (folder) but in a subdirectory called blender/blends. Then, when you want to use an image in an image texture, you created blender/images and you put the images in that directory. When Blender reads the image and relative paths are enabled, it remembers it more-or-less as "./../images/IMAGENAME" but if relative paths are not enabled, Blender remembers it as "/PATHTO/home/blender/images/IMAGENAME".

When Blender needs to open the image again, it sees the '.' and thinks "start in the same directory the blend file is in. Then it sees the '..' and knows that's the symbol to look one directory higher. since you have hte blend file in 'blender/blends', it looks in 'blender'. Then it sees 'images' and so now looks in blender/images.

So if you copy 'blender' to the new machine, then the blend files and the images will be in the same place relative to each other and blender will know where to find them.