Organizing Component Collections

Organizing component collections

In SketchUp's Components panel, collections help you organize components.

The In Model collection is a special collection that's an important part of the Components panel. It holds all the components saved with your model, whether or not those components currently appear in your model. When you context-click a component in this collection, you see commands not available in other collections, such as Select Instances, Reload, and more. To see your In Model collection, click the In Model icon (). If you've inserted several components that you no longer need to save with your model, click the Details arrow () and select Purge Unused.

SketchUp includes a few prebuilt collections, such as Architecture, Landscape, Construction, and so on.

Tip: By creating your own collections, you can organize components in whatever way makes sense to you. If you use certain components all the time, create a My Favorite Components collection. If you use specific components for a certain client or project, organize them into a collection so they're accessible from a single collection.

The following steps explain how to create a component collection for your selected operating system (Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X):

Windows

  1. Open the Components panel in the Default Tray.
  2. Click the Details arrow () and select Open or Create a Local Collection.
  3. In the Select Folder dialog box that appears, navigate to the folder where you want to save your collection. To create a subfolder for the collection, click the New Folder button and create the folder.
  4. Select the folder where you want to save the components collection and click Select Folder. You see a blank collection on the Components panel's Select tab. If the blank folder doesn't appear, click the In Model drop-down arrow and select the collection that matches your folder from the menu.
  5. Click the Display Secondary Selection Pane icon ().
  6. In the secondary selection pane, navigate to a component that you want to add to your collection and drag it into the blank collection. In the following figure, the Galaxy Class Starship component in the In Model collection (bottom) was added to the newly created Components collection (top).
  7. Continue navigating to components in the secondary selection pane and adding them to your new collection until your collection is complete.
 

MacOS

  1. Open the Components dialog box in the Default Tray to open the Components panel.
  2. Click the Details arrow () and select Create a New Collection.
  3. In the Save dialog box that appears, navigate to the folder where you want to save your collection. To create a subfolder for the collection, click the New Folder button and create the folder.
  4. Select the folder where you want to save the components collection and click Save. You see a blank collection on the Components panel's Select tab.
  5. For each component you want to add to your collection, save it as an .skp file in the folder that you selected in the preceding step. (If the component is in your model, context-click it and select Save As.) The following figure shows the Galaxy Class Starship component saved in a collection called Favorite Components.
 
Tip: After you have a few collections, you can add them to a list of favorite collections that always appears on the In Model drop-down menu. First, display the collection the Components panel: If you used the collection recently, you can select the collection by name from the In Model drop-down menu. If the collection doesn't appear there, click the Details arrow and select the Open or Create Local Collection (Microsoft Windows) or Open a Local Collection (Mac OS X). After your collection appears in the Components panel, click the Details arrow and select Add to Favorites or Remove from Favorites.
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