Armelline

If only it did what that says. 95% of the time I try to clip a canvas it has zero noticable result, despite there being swathes of empty pixels all around the edges. There's got to be some other factor involved or it's buggy as anything. Edit: I just tested and it does what's expected when a layer is rasterised, but if there is an image layer it will not work. A little ironic since I just spent a bunch of time trying to find out if there's a way to automatically rasterise pasted images rather than inserting them as an image and all I found was patronising comments telling people they shouldn't ever want to do that.

The app appears to attempt to make connections to those (and others which may be related to the later beachballing issues, these are just the ones that cause beachball at strartup though), and attempts them repeatedly. Seemingly at the expense of everything else. Though not always. My new router arrived today so the issue will be moot, but I'm not a fan of apps constantly connecting to online services I don't use so it would definitely be nice to be able to block them without it breaking things so hopefully they can make it fail more gracefully. Thanks for the help, and sorry if any of my frustration has bled through (which I have no doubt it has).

Any application that can't be used without internet is poorly designed. Any application that attempts to connect to a server or another app, fails, and locks up rather than silently trying in the background is poorly designed. I don't see any evidence that the problem is related to any attempts to find other Affinity apps on my system, though. It seems to be directly related to the app attempting to connect to events.api.serifservices.com and/or things.seriflabs.com. If I deny those (or simply don't have internet), beachball galore. If I let them through, no problems. No universal Little Snitch rule being applied, only denying those specific connections.

The problem literally only occurs if my internet is down (i.e. there is no network connection and no access to the router - no wifi or ethernet attached) or if I block all outgoing connections with Little Snitch. I definitely don't rule out the possibility it's something else, but that seems a huuuuge coincidence if so. I can't rule out one of the many OS processes, but I tested Affinity being the only application (manually) opened and the problem persists. I also can't rule out there being a system setting involved, but I am 100% certain I manually changed no system settings in the time between it not happening and it starting to happen, and installed no system updates. (Though I'm about to install a system update now.) It happens consistently on app startup (normally ~30 seconds but sometimes several minutes) and seemingly randomly while just working.

This is sounding very much like Affinity Photo is bascially unusable for me without internet, which seems absurd. I am not trying to use any online services or my Affinity Account. My license is activated so shouldn't need verification on every startup. Software update checks should be entirely optional. I'm not trying to access any help or lessons. But even if I *was* specifically trying to use those features, Photo should surely be failing far more gracefully than just beachballing for up to several minutes at a time. Even Photoshop doesn't behave this badly when I don't have internet and that app is simply insane with the number of connections it tries to make. Similarly, it trying to poke around my system looking for other apps should, if required at all (and I'd argue it's really not), be failing more gracefully if that's the cause. It shouldn't *need* anything but itself. Very much regretting paying for the upgrade to 2 right now. I can't believe that because my internet is down half the time I'm having to use *Photoshop* instead of Affinity because it handles no internet so much more gracefully.

Thanks for the response. I'll note that it happens when I have no internet as well, which is why I investigated with Little Snitch. When you say "needs to have access to the local network" do you mean literally needs to be seeking devices on the local network, as when my internet goes down it's the router going down so the local network goes down with it. I do not have any other Affinity apps, though, only Photo. (I also don't really see why I should need to provide internet to Photo at all, though, unless I'm using internet connected features.) I also cannot guarantee that the lack of internet even is the issue. Just that it starts beachballing pretty consistently when I lose internet, and doesn't when I have internet.

Not that I'm aware of, though several I've been working on are PSD created in Photoshop by someone else.

macOS 13.6.7, Affinity Photo 2.5.3. I have been having a lot of problems with my internet recently leading to periods where I'm working with no internet. I noticed that Affinity Photo also started having issues at the same time, with long, frequent beachballing and freezing up. It's consistently doing it, and proving to be a huge headache. Doesn't do it when I have internet. Suspecting that it was trying to make a connection to Affinity and locking up while it tried, I added some Little Snitch rules to deny Affinity Photo any connections to the internet even when I have working internet. Constant beachballing and freezing up. Is this a known issue? Anyone else able to replicate it? Anything I can do about it? Thanks!

I too would love this option. Every image I've ever added in Photo I've needed to rasterise. Being able to set it to rasterise images by default would save me non-trivial amounts of time (cumulatively) but more what others have said about wondering why nothing is happening when trying to do stuff to the layer. I moan and moaned about crop to selection until it got added so I feel absolutely no qualms about moaning about this. More options is almost always better, and this seems like a pretty sensible option to add. But then I often find myself wondering what goes on in the Affinity devs' brains so maybe it's just me.

They have. I've been waiting for the sale and am testing V2 now. Crop to selection is in and can be used in the way I wanted. Still not sure if it's worth £40 to upgrade just for that, but will see how I get on with V2 today and tomorrow.

I'm debating if it's worth me upgrading to V2 of Photo with the current sale. I only really know of one feature that was added that I want, so I thought I'd give V2 a trial and see how I like it. I can't for the life of me find a single place I can download a V2 trial. Is a trial for V2 available? Edit: I found a trial link for the Universal License from the FAQ, and a separate Photo link is available there. This can be deleted. Thanks

I *could* have if I'd known about it before reading your message just now. Seems I entirely missed the sale. Bizarre that I didn't even get an email about it from Serif. Guess I'm waiting until Black Friday.

Apparently it's in 2.1 but I can't speak to the implementation as it wasn't there in 2.0 so I did not buy 2.0 and there's no upgrade pricing. Affinity Photo is great value, don't get me wrong, but I'm not really keen to pay £70 for one feature. Edit: Apparently I said this 3 months ago and forgot.

That's amazing news. Just a shame it didn't come during the 50% window. I know I'm going to sound super ungrateful now, but I can't justify £70 just to get this one feature. Would have (and still would) bought the £35 "upgrade" without hesitation, though! Really glad to see this coming, though!

I have not bothered to upgrade to v2 because of this missing feature and this thread. The resistence to the feature by Affinity, the snark and condescension from some of the "pillars" of this community, both make me deeply wary of investing more money in this software. Such a small, simple thing to add. (And I'm sorry I simply won't believe it's hard to add - it just needs to read the topmost, leftmost, bottommost, and rightmost positions of the selection and then move the existing crop boundaries to those positions. If even that is too much work then the code must be absolute spaghetti. And there are many other ways it could be achieved more elegantly, I'm sure.) They are losing money over this feature. Clearly not enough for them to care, though.