How do I prevent textures from unloading and turning pink?

Simply put, how do I prevent my textures (mostly image textures) from turning pink and unloading every time I change the directory that the texture is stored?

For example, renaming folders will cause this, or placing your blend in another directory will also cause this, but sometimes you need to rename a folder or place your blend file elsewhere, but if it contains a texture used by Blender, then Blender will lose that texture.

How can I stop this from happening and avoid the “GPUTexture: Blender Texture Not Loaded” message, as it is a pain to reload textures, and creates duplicates.

I know there is “Make All Paths Relative” and “Pack All Into Blend”, but that’s all I can think of.

Make all paths relative just makes the path to the file relative, like textures. Pack all into blend just packs all assets into the file.

How do I restore missing textures without creating duplicate image textures?

File > External Data > Find Missing Files.

Get into the habit of making a texture folder next to the .blend file, with a suitable folder name. Any image to be used gets copied there and used from there. File and Folder get moved together. If there is more data info like a Reference folder then all the folders and .blend file need to be in a Master folder.
Anything more complicated that that - like a team setup, go look at the info on the Blender Foundations movies. Or check the yearly (BCon) Conference video playlists on YT…

This also makes doing backups easier - and therefore more likely to happen… :wink:

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There is also a “Report Missing Files”, but on the surface it seems to function the same as Find Missing Files. What exactly does “Report Missing Files” do, and how does it work?

The same as find - without doing the find part… lol.
Hold you mouse over “Report Missing Files” and see what it says. It is just the list of files missing.
Do you ever right click on things in Blender and choose Online Manual? Its a great way to find out what things do.