Hi Blenderhead , i’m releasing my first addon, still a beta version, but everything seems to works so far on windows and linux (didn’t get a chance to test it on mac, feel free :))
Basically i wrote this pyton script cause i’m not a big fan of the packing method in blender to be sure to get all sources availbable, even on a different workstation. When i’m working on texturing, i want my textures to be separate files in order to modify them in photoshop or gimp, but i also want to be able to do the same on a different workstation, and when you have a project with a hundred of texture files, it could be a pain to keep track and organise your textures.
I come from the After Effects world, and on this software, there’s a usefull fonction called “collect all files” which basically copy all used footage, photos… of the project, and copy them to a new location, in your porject file folder. My addon do exactly the same in blender, when your project is saved (you have to do this unless you got an error) you go under the file header, under the category collect external files, and select an option (all, images, movie clip, strip, blend libraries). It worked with every kind of external datablocks, relink them and make the path absolute. It also class them in subfolder, and doesn’t create dupes. By example if a same texture is used twice in your blend from two different path, it means blender see 2 differents datablock, with the addon, it check if the files already exists before copying it, and if so, just relink the datablock !
there’s no real documentation, and i plan to add a “collect by extension” fonction and a “collect by name containing …” fonction, but these two are for comfort, the main idea is here and already usable.
Another great use could be for editing, you can collect sequencer strips file from the current scene only, avoiding on a big editing project to get a big amout of files, with some of them not used in the final edit, for example.
The addon also generates a small txt report in the collected files folder, with the name of the copied files
You can track progression of the operations on the python console, the operators freeze blender gui unfortunately (there’s some workaround about this out there, but too complicated for me…)
So here’s the link :
Feel free to post here or on my site through the user preference addon panel in blender any critics, bugs…
And if you look at the code, be comprehensive, i’m not a programmer, so things may be not so well written in here 
Hope this piece of code could be useful to people !
that’s a great idea! I really like the deduplication part. Does it also work with linked objects (are the source .blend also copied)?
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