Richard S
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Everything posted by Richard S
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Thanks. Today, it seems that nothing (and no-one) likes me. ;-) Better luck next year?
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- affinity photo
- autosave
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Thanks. Great idea: Setting the Windows Scaling to 120% is a reasonable compromise... until Affinity resolves the issue. The "Export" & "Cancel" buttons are visible. (Forum won't let me upload a screenshot.)
- 47 replies
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- affinity photo
- autosave
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Thanks for this. An interesting discovery, and useful work-arounds. I hope Affinity locates and fixes the crash problem very soon. I hope Affinity recognises that many people (need to) use Windows Scaling so as to work comfortably with their PCs, and that Affinity soon resolves these problems.
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Sadly, I've had to switch this laptop back to AF Photo V1. So the problem with large unwanted "autosave" files has come back. Some of these files are over 200MBytes, so the laptop's hard drive is filling-up fast. AF Photo V2 was hopeless on this laptop: Although its 1366 x 768 screen meets the Affinity tech spec, unfortunately a design bug in Affinity V2 means that its dialogues don't work if "Windows scaling" is set to 125% rather than 100%. (Some ancient Serif "Plus" programs had the same problem. I thought that Serif / Affinity had learnt the lesson.) If I set Windows Scaling to 100%, text is too hard to read. The first AF Photo V2 dialogue to fail is the vital Export dialogue. (Which in AF Photo V2 is a single long dialogue instead of the two dialogues in V1.) Unfortunately, the "Export" and "Cancel" buttons are fixed on the bottom margin, below the bottom of the screen. There is no way to scroll to them, and "tabbing" to these buttons does not work properly either.
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Bought & installed Affinity version 2.03 on a Windows 10 laptop with a 1366 x 768px display. This appeared to meet the Affinity tech specs. Affinity version 1 had worked OK on this laptop. But, on first use of Photo 2, the processed photo could not be "exported" using the File... Export dialogue: The "Export" & "Cancel" buttons are hidden below the bottom of the new combined export dialogue. The height of the dialogue cannot be reduced by dragging & the dialogue cannot be repositioned to make these buttons visible. The trick of "Tabbing" through the various setting in this dialogue to reach the "export" button did not work because the tab sequence was not obvious. See the attached screenshot. Other dialogues in Affinity 2 may suffer from similar problems. At present, this means that Affinity 2 is not usable on this ordinary Windows laptop. This is a serious accessibility and usability issue. Please consider making these buttons visible. BTW. As is fairly common, the "display scaling" in Windows is set to 125% so as to make text readable on this laptop's small screen.
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Thanks. That's good news... for Affinity. We seldom "save" Affinity Photo files; just "export" the results of the tweaking.
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Thanks. But as always, it is easier to guess suitable search terms AFTER you have found the answer! Thanks for pointing to the "File Recovery Interval" setting. In our use, where we are mostly tweaking existing photo images, that feature is probably not helpful, so I will probably increase the "Interval." BTW. I have just processed a photo on my Windows 11 desktop PC from its internal hard drive, using Version 2.03. Affinity saved no "autosave" or "crash report" files. BTW2. I've now cleared old "hidden" drivers for USB storage devices in the Windows Device Manager of both PCs. For some reason, these entries seem to accumulate in Windows when you use lots of USB devices, or the same devices via different USB ports. When these entries hit a limit, Windows seems to misbehave. One symptom is that the "Safely Remove" feature becomes unreliable.
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Yes, but Affinity provides a setting for fixing the GPU problem. There is also information in the Affinity Help file. There is no setting nor information about this problem with accumulating unwanted autosave files.
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Thanks. Win10 Pro probably has better features for dealing with external and networked files. I'm wondering whether Win10 Home still allows access to settings such as "write behind" which might delay the writing of large files to these external drives? (With each update, Microsoft seems to "simplify" (ie. dumb-down) the amount of user control.) Alternatively, perhaps the scanner automatically set the TIFF files to "read only" and that is upsetting Affinity? I'll have another look.
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Maybe, but trying to help diagnose the troubled laptop's full hard drive by telephone, I had no idea that the problem was caused by a glitch in Affinity or that Affinity could cause such a problem. Once I had physical access to the laptop and had found & cleared the problem, I did search Google and these forums, but although I saw a few posts, none seemed relevant and many related to Beta versions. How many ordinary (non-technical) users have unknowingly suffered this glitch then ditched Affinity or their troubled PCs?
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Thanks. Apart from Win 10 Pro instead of Win10 Home, it sounds as if your PC is a more powerful desktop. Do you normally process files from your PC's internal drives, rather than external USB hard drives? Do you often process large TIFF files? I hope that a change to the configuration of the laptop can reduce the problem, but wonder what? Laptops are normally set to optimise saving of battery power.
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Many thanks for doing this. However, this Affinity problem was a complete surprise to me, followed by the lucky discovery of the hidden 750GBytes of appdata files. How many other Affinity customers have been hit (unknowingly) by this problem and then assumed that their PCs or MACs were broken, or that Affinity programs were "rubbish"? At the very least, Serif / Affinity needs to warn customers: eg. the help file for the next Affinity update should have information about these autosave files.
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Thanks. If this continues, I'll try to look more closely, but am a bit distracted at present.
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Thanks. I believe that Affinity was NOT set to reopen documents on startup.
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I have not done reliable tests, so have not identified exactly why and when these files are created. But having cleared them a couple of days ago, I was surprised to find another 1GBytes of unwanted files from yesterday's use. From memory, each autosave file was about 140MBytes. Each original TIFF files was probably about 80MBytes. So this problem very quickly fills the PC's hard drive.
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Yes, from memory, that is the same location. But I've since deleted everything so cannot check.
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Thanks. But in our usage, once a TIFF file has been processed into a JPEG, it is unlikely to be accessed again. So if Affinity's clean-up mechanism relies on accessing the same file again, it will fail in our usage. I can understand that this clean-up mechanism might suit some users, particularly "digital artists" who put a lot of effort into each creation, perhaps adding more detail each day to the same file, but this mechanism is less useful to people who use AF Photo to process lots of different images. Perhaps that's why my old Serif MoviePlus X6 video editor has an option which automatically "deletes oldest unused helper files"? Note. Admittedly, those helper files are a just time-saving feature rather than a safety data-recovery feature: If these files are deleted, the program recreates them if they are needed in future.
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Thanks. Yes the build-up of these large files is a problem. I would prefer Affinity to offer to recover problem files next time the program is opened; if the user chooses not to recover old files, Affinity should delete them. But no visible crash or recovery messages have been reported. I have not tried matching the (hidden) crash report files with the (unwanted) autosave files so do not know whether each autosave file is related to a crash report.
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Thanks. In my simple use on my Windows 10 / Windows 11 i5 desktop PC, I've noticed very few crashes with version 1, and none yet with version 2. Sometimes after major updates, Affinity has run more slowly, but has usually become faster when later updates contain better optimised code. My main use of AF Photo is to tweak JPG photos for posting on Social Media and my websites. I seldom use lots of layers or complicated adjustments. When I have time, I'll try my old Windows 10 i5 PC and see whether it has loads of there unwanted autosave files.
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Yes, I uninstalled Version 1 to save space and to avoid the possible confusion of trying to open new files using the old version. I was also hoping that any strange glitch might not affect the new version. It looks as if Photo Version1 has been creating these massive unwanted autosave files (and stored but not displayed crash reports) each time it is used. I'm wondering whether it's something to do with using the external USB hard drives?
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Thanks. I gave up on Macs in 1986, at about the time Steve Jobs first left Apple. 🙂 (I moved to my still much missed Acorn RISC/OC before being dragged to firms' PC.) I've now uninstalled their Version 1 and installed their new Version 2.03 so I hope this behaves better. Interestingly, Version 1 had added 1GBytes of unwanted autosave files, yesterday, without displaying any crash reports, although it had stored a couple. Thanks again to everyone.
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Thanks. I saw your previous post about this when I searched the forum. With so few posts about this, some during Betas, I was wondering whether there is a specific reason for problems with this particular Windows laptop? It has a modest i3 CPU, and is several years old. The owner frequently works with large (80MByte) scanned TIFF files stored on external USB hard drives, tweaking them and exporting as JPEGs. Windows usually warns if the PC is shut down while a program is running or if an external hard drive is still busy, but perhaps AF Photo takes time to tidy up after working on these large TIFFs? Serif / Affinity should not expect it customers to delve into the Windows Appdata file. So if this is a widespread problem, the Affinity programs should provide a way to clean up obsolete files. Having failed to help diagnose the reason for the "full hard drive" by telephone, I'd feared that the laptop or at least its hard drive needed replacing. Have other (non technical) Affinity customers fallen into this trap? I've bought them a copy of Affinity 2, hoping the laptop meets its specs. We'll see whether the problem happens again. At least we now know where to look. Thanks to everyone who has answered.
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Thanks. Yes, this was a non-technical owner. So it was safer to keep Windows folders hidden in order to reduce disasters. But this also made the problem harder to diagnose by telephone. The owner had used Google to look for how to cleanup their hard drive, but those solutions were defeated because the Windows Appdata folder was "hidden." Other programs can clear old files, automatically or manually: Eg. Serif MoviePlus X6 can delete its obsolete "helper files." But I've found no similar feature in Affinity, nor any reference to autosave files by searching the Affinity Help.
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Looking for help and advice please: The hard drive on a Windows 10 laptop was almost full, so running very badly. Eventually I discovered that the User Photo Appdata folder had about 750 GBytes of unwanted Photo Autosave files, plus masses of crash reports. The laptop's owner had not mentioned seeing crashes. Questions: 1. Have other people had this problem? 2. Is there any way to stop AF Photo doing this, or any AF Photo feature for clearing these files (manually or automatically)? 3. Any other suggestions, please? These unwanted files were in the AF photo folder within the Windows User's "hidden" AppData folder, so had not been reported using normal Windows file or storage tools. The files had dates going back months, including today, even though no crashes had been noticed. BTW. That copy of AF Photo 1.10 was set to NOT send crash reports or to reopen files on startup.
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Thanks for that tip about the LibreOffice extension. I hope Affininty Publisher is soon updated to at least provide a means of exporting text and stories, so that the same content can be used in other programs.
