Quote - I thought this would be obvious, but it seems it isn't.

I wanted to experiment with adjusting certain textures, so I drilled down into the Textures directory to whatever jpeg the material or pose file pointed to and edited that in Photoshop. When I reapplied the texture it was the same as before the edits. I thought it might be a caching issue, but I flushed everything and even rebooted. Still no change.

OK. So I renamed the Textrures directory to XTextures thinking that would do something dramatic, but it still came up with the original texture. I was amazed. I tried opening other objects and applying textures and sometimes I would get the window asking me to find the particular jpeg, but sometimes it seemed to be able to locate it even in the renamed directory.

I am stumped.

I use poser 8 with the file search set to "None" in the general preferences. This is what poser seems to do:

If a prop contains an absolute pathname, like 'file "C:posertexturesimage.png"', it uses this. This is usually the case when i create an image-map myself and save it.

Another common case applies when the file contains a texture reference with a library-path like 'file ":Runtime:Textures:image.png"'. In this case, poser will look through all the Runtime-folders in the order in which they appear in your LibraryPrefs.xml in turn, and use the first matching file it finds. The order of the Runtime folders in the LibraryPrefs is relevant, the Folder that contains the prop that references the texture is not. So, if i have the two runtime-folders C:A and C:B and C:BRuntimeLibrariesPropsB.pp2 uses the texture ":Runtime:Textures:B.png", it will use "C:ARuntimeTexturesB.png" if it exists, it will not check for "C:BRuntimeTexturesB.png". So i have to be careful when i make a copy of a prop (in order to modify it) and copy it into another runtime-folder (perhaps this is what you did?). It usually does not what i want unless i reassign the texture and save it again (in which case poser writes an absolute pathname "C:BRuntimeTexturesB.png" into it). Most commercial objects for poser contain texture references like this.

The remark of wimvdb, that you can have only one texture with any given filename at any given time, however, still applies.

If the filesearch is set to "deep", i am under the impression that poser searches for the texture on my whole harddrive (not just the textures folder) for any texture used. I have no idea what "shallow" does or what other poser-versions do.