Yikes. The last activity in this forum was about 4 weeks ago. Still, I haven’t gotten a reply at Blender Artists yet, so what the heck, I’ll post this here:
Good day,
Very often after I close Blender, then restart and load a .blend with some textured meshes, the image maps won’t “refresh” upon loading. I’ll see just a magenta shade over entire things.
In Adobe InDesign or similar, there are “linked” files and “included” files. If something is included, it’s part of the source file and it doesn’t matter where the original image is. If something is “linked”, and if you move the original image file, InDesign gives you a crappy low-res proxy and obviously you can’t go to press with whatever you’re working on.
I figure that Blender is doing something similar.
So, I can go in and “re-open” the image file with no problem. I usually don’t even move them. I just want to figure out what I have to do so that I don’t have to tell Blender each time.
Thanks! 
Hey. Yeah, not many people are using the forums here A bit of a shame. Anyway, onto the issue at hand.
I’m not 100% sure which issue is causing this exactly, but there are 3 ways that I know of at least that fix some issue with files not showing up when you move them somewhere else on the PC. I’m not sure if they will work for your case, but they are worth a shot.
First solution:
Go to File > External Data > Find Missing Files > Pick the folder where the missing files are.
It’s a very backwards way of just reloading all the textures by hand and it doesn’t really fix your main issue. Also doesn’t work very well if the textures are spread across multiple folders and archives. But if all your textures are kept in a single folder, then at least this let’s you load all the missing textures at the same time instead of clicking on all of them one by one which can be nice.
Second solution:
When you load all the texture files, go to File > External Data > Make All Paths Relative.
Strips all the texture paths and let’s the blender just use file names. Typically good if you plan to move all the files and textures to another device. Does stop working if you move the texture files or the blend file separately though. Not 100% reliable.
Third solution:
When all the textures and assets are loaded, go to File > External Data > Pack All Into .blend
I tested it and it seems to work the best out of all 3. Though I don’t have a second PC and couldn’t check if it works when the .blend file is moved to another device, but after trying this, I moved the .blend file, deleted the original texture file and it still showed up and loaded just fine. Of course, with each texture packed, the .blend file size increases and it takes longer to load, but it does work.
I’m not sure if this will fix your problem directly as I haven’t run into this issue much before and when I do, I just reload the textures by hand like you, but these 3 are the ones I know/tried, so hope it’s at least somewhat helpful. If they don’t, let us know, I’m sure someone will know some other solution to this
Thanks! Much appreciated. Just for clarification, I’m not moving the files at all - Blender just “loses” them somehow. I think it might have something to do with me updating to new builds of Blender twice a week, though I don’t know why that would make a difference.
Hey Mark! Have you tried packing your images into the .blend? Go to file –> external data –> pack into .blend and save