Hello everyone!
I'm an architect / interior designer. My last model had almost 900 mb in size (which is more or less common to me), due to the amount of materials and objects inside, with dozens of components and groups. And hundreds of materials, that I have to very diligently and patiently "work throught" so everything "cooks" beautifully in the final rendered image that I usually send to a renderfarm I often use. And A LOT of the components I use come from 3D Warehouse.
The subject of matter here; I waste hours (if not days) doing tireful, tedious, time consuming material organization. Renaming SU materials, exporting it's textures to my personal Library, re-importing them back to Sketchup. Far too much time is wasted in tasks that are not creative but are required to keep my Sketchup Material List organized, understandable (every material follows a template name), and keeping all the materials' image files properly renamed and (if not more importantly) saved to my Library, so that nothing is missed during rendering time.
A practical example of my workflow is:
**1.**I download a "chair model" from 3D Warehouse;
**2.**Go through the "Cleanup" plugin (to get rid of undesirable "stuff" from the model);
**3.**Rename every single material following the template:
(Highlighted in BLUE for materials that can be used throughout the model)
(Highlighted in RED for materials that are "object specific")
%(#0000FF)[Glass_clear
Wood_mahogany
Wood_bright
Wood_dark
Metal_polished steel
Metal_brushed steel]
%(#FF0000)[z_Chair model 123_Wooden chair legs
z_Chair model 123wooden seat
zChair model 123metal bolts
zChair model 123metal support
zChair model 123fabric seating
zChair model 123fabric backrest
zChair model 123random texture1
zChair model 123_random texture2]
**4.**Export to COLLADA (.DAE) to get the texture (.JPG, .PNG, etc) image files, that now are automatically conveniently named accordingly to the names I assigned previously.
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Then I go to the new folder I created (for the chair I downloaded) in "C:\Lybrary\3D Objects\Furniture\Chair\Generic Chair*Chair model 123*\maps" and save all exported pertinent image files there.
-
Open Sketchup / Vray and reimport every single one of them bastards back to their specific material.
After doing this Sketchup (and VRay) now "knows" where every image file is physically stored (rather than on some unknown "temp" folder which can lead to "missing assets"), every material now has matching "internal sketchup material name AND saved file names". Finally, throught this organization, among hundreds of materials, I can spot every single one of them in my Sketchup Material list. Now I know from which object a certain material comes from, and now I can pick those I frequently use whithout needing to sort them out from a "huge mess of weird names that don't relate to anything" which is the case to most of the objects that come from the 3D Warehouse.
Now imagine that, if I have 30 or 40 objects in a SU scene, I go throught this process to every single one of them. That's what I do. And that is a HELL of a thing to go throught.
To finish this. The world would be a very beautiful and candy coated place if I could have a plugin that facilitated all of the previous, so that much of what is done "by hand" could be somehow automated.. Even still, I know some things would still need to be done "by hand", but not all of them.
To all of you who had the patience to read this detailed drama (and plead for help) I leave my sincere thank you. And for those who would kindly give me an advice I wish you all a very happy and satisfying sexual life, and a good amount of beer... or tasty cookies, in case you don't drink.
Waiting for the replies, sorry for anything, and thanks again! 
. I can't believe it. You actually really, REALLY did put time to make this happen