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Hi rushingabout,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
Just drag the picture's layer over the text or shape object's layer in the Layers panel. 
Alternatively select the picture, copy it to the clipboard (menu Edit ▸ Copy), select the shape or text object then go to menu Edit ▸ Paste Inside.

A more recent set of tutorials for 1.7 (and above) is available via affinity.serif.com or from Designer's Welcome screen.
The legacy tutorial set, also available on YouTube, includes:
1. Getting Started
•        Discover Affinity Designer
•        For Beginners
•        For Beginners Too
•        Using the Help System
•        CMYK Setup
•        Designing from a Sketch
•        New from Clipboard
•        Actual Size Zoom
•        Editing PDF Text
•        Using the Grade UI Kit
2. Artboards
•        Artboards: Basics
•        Artboards: Exporting and Printing
•        Artboards: Colour and Opacity
•        Artboards: From Content
•        Artboards: Design Aids
3. Drawing Lines and Shapes
•        Pen Power
•        Shapes
•        Convert to Curves
•        Corner Tool
•        Drawing Perfect Triangles
•        Stylish Strokes: Textured Lines
•        Stylish Strokes: Dashed Lines
4. Colour and Opacity
•        Complex Gradients
•        Adjusting Noise and Opacity in Fills
•        Transparency Tool
•        Changing Colours
•        Blend Modes
•        Colour Picker Tool
•        Colour Palette from Document
•        Colour Palette from Image
•        Pantone Colours
•        Global, Spot and Overprint Colours
•        Quick Opacity Setting
5. Layer control
•        Layers Panel
•        Lock Children
6. Object control
•        Selecting, Finding and Isolating Objects
•        Rotation Point: Overview
•        Rotation Point: Worked Example
•        Vector Scaling Options
7. Symbols and Assets
•        Symbols (1.5)
•        Assets (1.5)
8. Painting
•        Shading Using Raster Brushes
•        Adding Raster Texture
9. Text
•        Artistic, Frame and Shape Text
•        Text on a Path: Overview
•        Text on a Path: Worked Example
•        OpenType Typography
10. Media
•        Using Raster Images in a Composition
•        Film Noir Style Illustration
11. Saving, exporting and sharing
•        Save History
•        Soft Proofing
•        Exporting
•        Exporting: Layers
•        Exporting: Slices
•        Exporting: Continuous
•        Exporting: Automatic Directory/Folder Creation
•        Exporting: Multiple Outputs from a Single Slice
•        Exporting: Transparent and Coloured Backgrounds
•        Exporting User Settings and Keyboard Shortcuts
12. Design Aids
•        Constraints: Overview
•        Constraints: Worked Example for Web Design
•        Snapping and Dynamic Guides •        Snapping: Candidates
•        Snapping: Object Creation
•        Snapping: UI and Web Design
•        View Modes and Split View
•        New View
•        View Points
•        Grids: Icon Design
•        Grids: Floor Plans
•        Isometric Grid Drawings: Part 1 (Single Planes)
•        Isometric Grid Drawings: Part 2 (Multiple Planes)
•        Isometric Grid Drawings: Part 3 (Layers and Compounds)
•        Grids: Coloured Lines
 

The Affinity website has a Learn section where you will find links to tutorials, (purchasable) Workbooks and some "Getting Started" guides (in English) :
 Affinity Designer Getting Started Guide   Affinity Photo Getting Started Guide   Affinity Publisher Getting Started Guide  There are subtitled tutorials for each of our applications
Affinity Designer on Desktop basic operations vector tools design aids advanced operations pixel tools export persona text tools effects and adjustments Affinity Designer on iPad basic operations vector tools advanced operations pixel tools export persona text tools effects and adjustments Affinity Photo on Desktop basic operations corrective and retouching creative tools advanced filters and adjustments export persona workflows and techniques Affinity Photo on iPad basic operations corrective and retouching creative tools advanced filters and adjustments export persona Affinity Publisher on Desktop basic operations page layout text tools typography advanced StudioLink interworking with Designer and Photo publishing and sharing

Thank you for letting me know there was a way; I toyed with it a bit more today and I figured out what I was doing wrong.  When I would try to import, I was not checking the "export text as curves" option so I was getting an error in cricut design space.  Once I checked this, it worked perfectly!  Yay!  

Yes they normally are.
Could you post a screen shot of your export settings, or better yet attach a sample file🙂
Edit: maybe helpful to read this faq for cricut and affinity.
 

We often get questions from customers who are creating designs in Affinity Designer to be used with a Cricut cutting machine. As long as your document is setup correctly in Affinity Designer it should import into the Cricut Design Space app without any issues:
Make sure your document is set 72 DPI The Cricut Design Space app will take all layers within your document and reorder them before cutting to prevent material wastage. If your design has multiple Curve Layers but you want to retain the layout of your document, you will need to merge all the separate Curve Layers into one Curve Layer. Select all the Curve Layers and go to Layer > Geometry > Merge Curves The Cricut Design Space app will push all layers within your document to the edge of the material when cutting. Again, this is to prevent material wastage. If you would like to add padding around your document, you can add a Rectangle Layer around your Curve Layers before merging all Curves into one layer We advise that you export to SVG, being sure to uncheck SetViewBox (under the 'More...' options) to ensure the correct size of the design is retained. If you've done all of the above and your design doesn't look correct when opened into the Cricut Design Space app, we suggest that you open the exported SVG into another app to see if it looks as expected. If it looks fine, this would indicate an issue with the Cricut Design Space app and we would suggest that you contact Cricut's support team to look into your issue further.

There are none by default, but you can make your own.
Use the menu View > Studio and figure out which menu entry you want a shortcut for. Open the application Preferences, then click on Keyboard Shortcuts. For Designer, you'll get a dialog something like this:

  Change the pulldown near the top that says File to View. Scroll down. Eventually you'll find, for example:

and a bunch of other Studio-related possibilities.
  Type the shortcut you want into the box on the right. Further Help: https://affinity.help/designer/English.lproj/pages/Workspace/customizingShortcuts.html

The panels shouldn't close when you choose File > Place, they should remain where they are but the Place file dialog box should be on top. Do you mean that the Place files dialog box is opening behind some of the panels and they're in the way? If so, I think I saw somebody else complaining in another thread about a z-order bug. Z-order refers to the third dimension, the stacking order of user interface elements. Somebody else said various user interface elements were appearing in the wrong order for them.

Update to want list.....
1. Pattern Brushes - STILL WAITING
The Ability to turn any vector shape into a repeating pattern brush.
A feature commonly used to create stitching brushes in fashion design.

2. Brush Profiles - FEATURE COMPLETE
The ability to add a shape profile to a brush.

3. Image Tracing - STILL WAITING
The Ability to automatically trace a raster image and create a vector version.

4. Pattern Creation - STILL WAITING
The Ability to create a repeating pattern or print that can be saved as a swatch and used as a fill.

5. Offset Path Tool - FEATURE COMING SOON
A tool that automatically draws a path parallel to an existing path at a specified distance.

Can Affinity tell us if they really are working on a vector fill or not?  A post in 2014 suggests that it was in the mix.  (See below.)  That's 7 years ago.  Is it any closer, or should we plan to count on other resources/tools?
> On 10/9/2014 at 1:33 PM, TonyB said:
>  We will add a vector fill tool but we want to do it right so it might take a while.

Would it not make more sense to offer plugin support earlier rather than later? That way, the community itself will help you proactively build and popularize your products - hopefully leading to a snowball effect. I see it as a potentially very powerful growth mechanism.
 
I'm sure you guys have thought about it but I'm curious what your thoughts are.

Hi. Until the update 1.9 I was able to export SVGs from Affinity Designer to Cricut Design Space at actual size - meaning if I design something that is 30x30cm, it opens in CDS at the same size. DPI needed to be set to 72 to achieve this.
Since 1.9, the resulting SVG now opens in CDS a lot larger than the size it was created at. Fine for me, but not for my customers who buy the SVG.
The 1.9.1 release does not fix this.
Any reason why this is now happening, and is there a work around?
Thanks.

+1 for pattern in Designer

Hi texasqueenie74 and Welcome to the Forums,
If you open the image in Designer you can use the Blend Ranges to remove the white background.
Select the layer and then click on the cog icon thats on the Layers panel, just before the Lock icon and this will bring up the Blend Ranges.  Under Source Layer Ranges, drag the last point down, so it looks like the attached screenshot.  That should remove the white background. 

In an ideal world there would be symbol swatches included for things like hatching of various types (lines, wavy lines etc), dots of various densities, soil-type symbols, and so on.
Basically all the things that you would normally fill areas with for plans and drawings of various types. You shouldn't need to create these from scratch in any illustration-type application.
This is basic functionality in my view and it is tragic that it is missing.

Hi, Have been playing with AFFINITY PHOTO (desktop) for several months now - really do love it, replaced 3 other programs I was using.  Am still learning but I could not find answer to my question in forum.
How can I move an entire BRUSH CATEGORY into another BRUSH CATEGORY?  I have tons of brushes imported and it's insane to scroll through to find one.  So I'm trying to move five categories of star brushes (which each have several individual brushes within each set) into a new category to hold them all.  The only instruction I can find is for moving each individual brush from one category into another category - and that will take forever! 
Can I not just move an entire category at once into another brush category?
And can I have subcategories within each brush category?  Like for STARS:  single, spray, galaxy, etc.
Thanks if anyone knows.  I realize I have a ton of brushes imported but I really do use and need them all. 
Grateful, Mandy

I recently did a job where, to fill an object with a pattern, I had to hand-assemble the pattern. And then, because the pattern needed to be warped to suggest a contour, I had to rasterize it, export to Photoshop and warp it there (Yes, AP might have done, but I was on deadline and I'm more used to Photoshop). And then, because I needed to be able to manipulate the pattern as vectors, I had to re-vectorize it in Image Vectorizer (which did a pretty lousy job). The whole thing took almost a day. Part of the time was spent in experimenting with drawing vector shapes to my own custom guidelines - a failure. Vector fill patterns, and even more, Vector Warp would have saved me hours and the client money. I hope this feature will be added soon. If not... I guess I'd have to go back to Illustrator, which I hate.

Sorry David P I posted the wrong link at the beginning of my post about the technique - here is the link that features a couple of screen captures which explain how to setup the data merge cells and the work around for drawing overlaps: 
I realised in the above links I have guides switched off which makes it a little harder to illustrate the technique, so I've just done another grab 
Screen_Grab_2020-11-16_at_14_30_24.mov

While we are waiting for a vector fill function to appear in Affinity Designer, does any of you guys have a tip on how to get as close as possible to that ingenious function of PhotoLine:
...i.e. a fill bucket that fills areas of bitmaps with vector fills (!) and creates a new vector layer for this purpose -- totally brilliant.
 
I am aware that probably no other program can do this at the moment, therefore I'm looking for a simple tool that can fill unicolored (say, empty white) areas of bitmaps with bitmap hatch lines, whereby this bitmap hatching however must be renderable with variable width, and with high resolution. Thus, it is not sufficient if the hatch lines are 1 pixel wide, as is the case with most bitmap editors.
In other words, how do I fill a uni-colored area of a bitmap with a high-resolution, scalable bitmap hatch -- ideally with variable line width, variable angle, and variable spacing?
Thanks for any ideas on which graphics/bitmap editor can do this!

@Friksel  Thanks for solving a problem I was having using the "new" Stock Palette feature in Affinity Designer. I have rewritten your suggestion here in case anyone searches the forum for "Stock Vectors" or similar...
In the Stock Palette, the Pixabay option offers a helpful checkbox to look for just vectors but a vector dragged into your document will be an Embedded Object Layer, so you cannot edit it directly. Double click that Embedded object in your document, not the Layer itself, and it opens in a new document as an editable vector. Switch to that document and the vector has been converted to curves on separate layers. You can edit them there, then copy and paste the vector back into your original document. Or you can simply copy and paste the converted vector layers back into your original document and then resize and edit them.

Hi Cobrasoft,

This is not possible to do with placed SVG files. You will have to open the SVG and copy and paste it in your document to edit it. I'm moving this to Feature Requests as I can see how it would be useful!

Even Heart Icon would help to identify a favourite brush or different colour dots a person can add to the brush example would help.  Like in Apple Mail. 

But a duplicate would avoid the 'no brush at all' part, right? That would also avoid the need to lock the original, although I see that it would complicate updating the original if you wanted that to affect the favorite as well.
 
Maybe for now a workaround would be to use duplicates & rename them with a prefix or suffix to indicate which category (or artist or whatever) they came from? That might be easier than trying to identify them visually or resort to an info button....

You can create as many new categories as you like, and you have a choice between copying or moving any brush to another category. Go to the Brushes tab menu (accessed via the 'hamburger' icon in the top right-hand corner) and choose the 'Create New Category...' option; name the new category 'Favorites' and go to a brush that you want to move; right-click your chosen brush and choose 'Move to Category... > Favorites'.

Alfred, any chance you could do a quick sample with pictures to show how to get the seamless tile?  I really did try but I was totally lost and would love to know how to do that.  I have a number of nice patterns but they are not seamless.