I'm too confused now to even give a reasonable response. Basically you could say I'm trying to put an image on a dinner plate, it's a polygon smoothed object created with a cylinder primitive.

I would begin by selecting the faces that make up one side of the plate and assign a shader to it (a phong say).

Then with those faces selected I create a planer UV that looks reasonable in the UV editor. The UV has been given a name, I have to assume it is there somewhere now part of the object.

At this stage I think I just need to go to my phong shader's color channel, import an image file into it and I expect that it might just automatically fit perfectly since as you could see in the image, it all lines up with the UV snapshot.

But it doesn't, it's as if there is no UV, only the default mapping I would get if I'd just loaded the image onto the shader's color channel before creating any UV.

Something is not making a connection in this process.

I can do the exact same proceedure to boxes and planes, it works, but with this disk shape nothing happens. I'm stumped, I can't find any tutorials that are just doing a simple thing like this.

I need to work it out to texture speedometers and headlight glass.