How do you organize your materials?

Slowly I’m doing more and more projects in blender and make new materials all the time. After some time I might even reuse some of these materials that I have done already and tweak them or not. So I’m wondering, is there some easy way to organize ALL the materials ever done over all projects? Can you export these and sort them in folders with according names and structure and reimport on a few clicks? Or do you have to keep one huge blend file where they are all collected? How do you manage your library of materials?

As for 2.79, you can use the material library addon that ships with blender.

But you can append/link materials from any other blend file.
And you can have a blend file just for materials. Just be carefull to give a fake user to the material (if there’s no object that uses it), so it stays in the blend file. Otherwise the material will be lost (no users).

This addon may be useful
https://b3d.interplanety.ru/en/bis-online-blender-material-storage/

Nice to know there is a material library addon included with blender. Will have to give that a try.

For now, my current process is, linking/appending from some core material files I have.

For example my own universe design has it’s own file just with spheres and materials on each sphere, so that I can test them and tweak them.

Then other files link to these, unless I need to do further tweaking for singular case then I will append. Linking is nice, but also slightly annoying that within the ship file that I’m working on, if I see something I’d like to fix, I have to open the other file, and any changes, I need to reload the ship mesh to see the changes. Wish a linked object would also work as proxy where I can edit directly a linked material…

Still eager to see what others use.