Amateur John

A DAM would be useful, very useful. 'Need' is different to 'would like'. If Affinity produced a DAM that could manage Affinity files and maybe other files associated with our projects, and pricing was reasonable then I would buy it. Almost everyone writing on this thread puts the emphasis on organising photographs. An Affinity DAM would manage all the assets associated with Affinity publisher, photo and design. That would be very powerful. Can Adobe Lightroom manage InDesign and Illustrator files?

The three workbooks have become more than a little out of date due to the progress made on the applications. I would consider them still useful to new users albeit a bit confusing in places.

Remember 'The Mythical Man Month' . It was a book published in the mid seventies about the development of an IBM operating system. The project ran late and IBM threw more and more people into the team. Progress slowed. Much later Pro-Engineer, a CAD CAM company was founded by a very small team of software engineers who were fed up with their large employer. They produced a very successful innovative product which became more popular than that of their previous employer. I expect that there are many examples where small teams successfully challenge big teams. A small expert and enthusiastic team in which everyone knows and understands what everyone else is doing can make rapid progress. Big teams get bogged down with lack of communication and lack of shared understanding. A small company like Serif does compete with the Adobe leviathan. I have bought the full Affinity licence although I only use Photo (and Publisher occasionally). I wish the company well.

Walt's method works with Nikon Studio. Like LR it is necessary to change the default .exe file type to *.*

It is very important that version 2 of any application is not full of bugs and crashes. The present live versions are stable and have few bugs. Version 2 must not introduce significant new bugs. Version 2 must be stable from the day it is released. I am as impatient and curious to know what is brewing as anybody. I also am prepared to wait for a product that is only released, even in beta, when it clearly is more than what we already have. Releasing product too early would be frustrating to us users and reputationally damaging to the company. Patientes estote.

Its nothing to do with DAM. It does give a very good raw conversion with raw edits in a sidecar file. It is probably the best Nikon raw converter. It does not have any of the advantages of Affinity for ambitious editing. A problem with it is that it can not open a file in another application such as Affinity or even the unmentionable using a hidden 16 bit tiff file. Even NX-D can do that. If Nikon fix the obvious bugs and omissions then Studio could become a good front end to Affinity. We still require an alternative to LR for DAM. DAM does not seem to be within Affinity's realm of expertise. That is not a criticism. Affinity is a company of creatives. DAM depends on database experts. The difference between artists and technical nerds. perhaps?

So was I. I am no longer trying it on the 1.9.0.932 release. You can use the program perfectly well without registering it. Have you tried it on the current beta? I see that you are new here so I hope that you do not mind me reiterating that one should not use beta versions on live projects. Its best to work on a copies of your files.

This seems to be partially fixed in the new Photo Beta 1.9.1.952 . It works at the second attempt in all Photo, Designer , and Publisher betas.

I have started a new thread .Registration with Affinity Store versions of all Apps. This was requested by Patrick Connor

The applications install without errors. When I try to register a product it hangs for a few seconds with a message asking me to wait then it crashes. I have already reported this in beta but it still happens in the new release.

Yes I bought from Affinity Store. So far I have only tested Photo in case you wanted me to do a first attempt with publisher or designer after changing anything. I have tried Photo several times. This is the same problem that I reported in beta.

When I try to register Photo 1.9 I get the "Please wait a moment" message and then after a few seconds I get a crash. I enabled the function to automatically send a crash dump and then tried again with the same result. My system and photo language are both UK English

I still get the same behaviour with the current betas. Since no-one else is reporting this I assume that there is something amiss on my computer. I have used DISM.exe and sfc with the parameters suggested in Microsoft's support pages and the file system seems fine. I have also checked my McAfee logs and no events are shown to indicate that it has blocked communications. Might I have a problem with a port being closed?

I also assessed Eagle. It left a lot of itself around when I uninstalled it. Fortunately I had created a small test environment. I am now assessing abeMeda .

I have sent 2 photo files, 1 designer file, and 2 publisher files. The files which are under 2000 KB are from first attempts. Those over 2000 KB are second attempts

Photo 1.9.0.876, Publisher 1.9.0.874, Designer 1.9.0.876 . All seemed to install correctly on my main computer. When I try to register the app, after the "Please wait a moment" message is shown for a few seconds The app crashes. The system is running Windows 10.0.19042. I have16.0 GB memory and plenty of space on my C and D drives. The second time that I ran the programs all seemed fine until I clicked on the my account icon. This opened the window which invites me to login. When I attempt to do so then the app crashes. I have also loaded photo and publisher on to my laptop, which is a much lower spec machine. It all works perfectly there. I have logged out of my account on the laptop and closed the apps.

Indeed a DAM does normally use its own structure. My first experience of a simple system now called DAM was a system which I built over 35 years ago. It was for controlling CAD drawings in a multiuser environment. The files were on a server and copies were moved into user directories on the same server. A later system built with a colleague added functionality for engineers. The new database (now Oracle) and drawing files were on a server. The user interface was built with Oracle forms and the stuff hidden from end users was written in C and SQL. That sort of system is not what is needed for a single user system. I have been retired over 25 years and my skills with C ,Oracle 8 and Oracle forms are long forgotten. What is needed is something like LR. The database needs to run without the services of a DBA. LR uses a local SQLite which is perfect for the job. I have not investigated neoFinder or abeMeda in detail but it seems to use a similar system. Ideally one needs to be able to recover all files even if the DAM becomes obsolete. That seems to be the case for LR and abeMeda. Extracting the files from Eagle without Eagle would be very laborious. Eagle seems not to use a proper database. I see it as very ingenious but a dead end.

NeoFinder is for Apple only. abeMeda seems to be a Windows lookalike. abeMeda looks pretty good. I would have liked to be able to update a partial catalogue starting at a node where I had been working. Perhaps I have missed something.

Thanks for your suggestion of Eagle. I have been trying it in a test environment. All files are copied not linked. Sure one can see affinity thumbnails (which you cannot see in Bridge). You can open files in Eagle into Affinity photo. The problem occurs when you want to save or export the files back to Eagle. As far as I can see you have to store stuff in a temporary holding are and the import from there to Eagle. Also the file structure in the library would be a nightmare to untangle should one want to later abandon it. As far as I can tell Eagle cannot integrate well with any application that generates additional files rather than just modifying existing files. I will leave it installed for the rest of the trial period. Perhaps I have missed some important features.

I hope that all you at Affinity and all members of the forums have a happy and well earned holiday.

I have pre ordered the print edition. I would have liked both pdf and print. I am surprised that Affinity are surprised to receive 15,000 orders. I would have expected even more. Desktop printing is enormously popular. Affinity publisher is an amazing app but its professional features does make it challenging for casual users without prior knowledge. I took over the job of editor, producer, and general dogsbody of a newsletter for our local country park volunteers, only an ambitious stone's throw from Affinity's HQ. I know that I do not make the best use of this, mainly because of my own ignorance and slightly because of conservative constraints on layout from our members. I look forward to receiving my book. Before using AfPublisher I also used AfPhoto, and the AfPhoto Book was very useful. The integration between packages is seamless. Not only do I look forward to my copy of the AfPublisher book ,I also hope someday to the AfDatabase book.Even more the AfDatabase app. This is becoming the major omission of the Affinity products. I realise that this is not perhaps in Affinity's range of expertise but it is needed to complete the suite. We want Affinity's version of he LR DAM. 😊 I hope you do not mind me reminding you of the competitors product, even in tiny feint type. t

This update is not of importance to me because I use Windows however I think it worth commenting that Affinity get honourable mention about it on Thom Hogan's ByThom website which has a huge following by Nikon users over the English speaking world.

I wouldn't dream of running a batch of raw to jpeg. I run a batch of raw to afphoto. then edit and export to whatever format and size that I need.

Affinity batch process works on raw files. Sometimes with a long list you will get a not responding as they load; just give it time. The running of the bath process has been reliable for several releases.

FastRawViewer is a useful tool for quickly sorting through a batch of raw files before submitting them to Affinity Photo's develop persona. It is not a DAM and its authors do not claim that it is. Thanks for mentioning it. It is useful.