Hey all,
I just lost a few hours of image and texture painting work because Blender threw away all the edits without warning upon quitting - was wondering, is there any way to auto-save modified images when you save the .blend file?
At the moment I’m managing them as external PNG files.
Thanks for any pointers -
-Luke
I use blender on a PC and a MAC and it warns you on a MAC when you made changes and try to quit. Perhaps the solution is to buy a MAC?
That’s a bit drastic - in my case it’d involve a career change unfortunately :). Any other ideas?
I’ll experiment with packed textures instead, maybe I can just convert to external PNG temporarily when I need to pop into an external editor.
If I don’t hear back I’ll maybe suggest it as a feature - an “Auto-save image edits along with blend file” checkbox, maybe an option in the image editor menus.
@LukeR there isn’t any functionality in Blender to ask you to save your texture files(as far as i know). but to just get a reminder to save your work before quitting, go to User Preferences >> Interface and check “Prompt Quit” checkbox. Save it as default. now when ever you make changes, blender will politely ask you to if you really want to quit.
Now, there is no need to change career 
go to User Preferences >> Interface and check “Prompt Quit” checkbox
Thanks - I actually like Blender’s auto-save system, where it doesn’t prompt you but silently saves a copy of whatever’s open when you quit - but textures seem to get lost in that process unfortunately. I guess it’s just how the current version works. I’ll see if I can submit a feature request.
As you make changes to your images, you don’t use the UV IMage editor open at the same time? I keep it open and invariably save it as the same image or as an increment of the original image so I can see the changes and revert as necessary. It’s the same with Photoshop or Illustrator - don’t hit save on the image you are working on and the system drops out or crashes and you are stuck repainting. I’m sure someone could code a python script to start at the beginning of the session to constantly overwrite at set intervals. Unfortunately I don’t code.
Yeah, I’ve been using the UV editor and texture paint in 3d view side by side - saving can be a little tedious, as the command differs with packed images vs. external image files. A little easier with images files as there’s an Alt-S shortcut, but hard for me to remember which image is which sometimes.
Would be nice to be able to drop into texture paint for a number of models with different textures, make some little dabs and touchups to each one, and then just save the .blend file once.
I posted a feature suggestion to the blender.org site, so we’ll see.
Quick note: I do use that “save all edited” button in the toolbox for texture paint, that’s almost as good.
Please let us know how it goes. I have the problem of working on a project until I’m so tired that I’m brain dead. By that time, I’m not thinking to save my texture paint separately with the actual file. I desperately need an auto-save.
Slight work around here available: Turn on your file to ‘Automatically Pack Into Blend’, and in the Image Editor for each image when you start, choose ‘Pack’ under ‘Image’. Save your file, and go ahead and paint. Save the file and open a new file and the Save dialog will ask if you want to save the the changed image file even though it is only packed to file - choose save there, and the changed images will pack into the blend.
Works pretty well here, I’ll have to use this myself for large memory work.
Ok, this is an old thread mentioning a problem in old versions of Blender. Currently in Blender 2.8+ if you modified an image and you did not save it accordingly, when trying to close Blender it will warn you that there are unsaved modified images and this gives you the possibility to save changes with a check box and a “Save” button. Doing what @Craig_Jones has mentioned is also recommended.
But the cool thing for me is that the images are packed into the blend and I never saved them to disk separately yet, nor are they reduced to the constraints of the image format yet as Blender still has more info there to work with before image save 