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It's now 2023, and every time I start my marquee one pixel wrong, I have to stop and redraw it instead of just touching the spacebar to shift it! That, along with the lack of a "Crop To Mask" function, is driving me mad [the Crop tool is an incredibly slow and clumsy way to trim screenshots]. Affinity does not seem to realise that to increase sales they do not have to clone Photoshop, but they do need to eliminate daily teeth-grinding editing annoyances that make people give up after using the trial version.

@walt.farrell Thanks for checking this. The presets function seems so non-functional I could not believe it was working as intended.

Using the Rectangle tool, I created a rectangle with my required settings (no fill, red stroke, 2px). On the Rectangle sub-toolbar, I clicked the cog icon and selected Create Preset. Typed a name ("Red Box 2px") and clicked OK. Created another rectangle and changed the stroke colour to blue. Clicked the cog icon and... Create Preset is greyed out. I cannot save any new rectangle presets. If I select my blue rectangle, click the cog and click the icon for my previously saved Red Box 2px preset, the rectangle stays blue, so I cannot apply a preset either. So how do I make use of presets? The only way to re-enable the Create Preset button is to go into Manage Presets and delete my first preset, so I can't build a collection of presets. Are the preset functions broken, unintuitive, or am I missing something? The help page for the Rectangle tool says simply: "Presets—click to display a pop-up panel from which you may select an existing preset (if any are available) or create a new preset.", so that's no help.

Now in Affinity Photo 2, I am in the Photo Persona and want to use Adjustments. However, the tools in the Adjustment panel are in a seemingly random and wacky order that makes no sense. I am not interested in White Balance, HSL, Recolor, or Black & White, but they are all near the top of the list. The very first thing I tried when seeing this panel was to reorder the Adjustments to put the ones I need at the top - but I can't, so have to scroll all the time. It seems strange that I can drag to rearrange the presets within each Adjustment, but you forgot to make it possible to rearrange the Adjustments themselves? Please can you make it possible to drag the Adjustments into a preferred order? It is little daily teeth-grinders like this that take the sheen off Affinity products.

I agree - this forgetting defaults is driving me to insanity! Here's how it goes: I select two objects, and click the single Alignment button on the toolbar. Select the Align Center and Align Middle buttons, and also select Last Selected in both drop-downs. Click Apply and my first object aligns on the last selected, just as intended. Select two more objects, click the toolbar buttons called Align Center and Align Middle in the toolbar and what happens? Both objects move, completely forgetting the options I just set! Therefore every alignment action means accessing a little dialog, instead of just clicking the (effectively useless) toolbar alignment buttons. Does anyone at Affinity ever use their own tools?

This is wrong - the CSS standard assumes 96 dpi (https://www.w3.org/TR/css-values-3/). It is extremely annoying that Adobe Illustrator sets all its exported SVG bounding boxes assuming an archaic 72 dpi, so when that SVG is imported to almost any other browser or application it appears at the wrong size. This is the main reason that my company moved to Designer, as the SVG scaling can be set to 96 and saved as a preset (Adobe refuses to do anything about this fundamental issue, even after years of knowing about the issue). However, we sadly discovered that Designer refuses to save SVGs with linked raster images (Illustrator can), and insists on embedding the raster data in the SVG, bloating it out. The only real answer is to use Inkscape, that gets everything right as it was designed to uphold the SVG standard, which follows CSS' 96 dpi.

I am getting a horrible issue where the word STATUS (it's a frame text object) is being split into: STA<tspan x="156.484px " y="664.092px ">T</tspan>. Wherever there is an "AT" or "TA" pair, Affinity messes it up, with the resulting SVG having visibly wrong kerning between the AT and TA letter pairs. If I manually remove all the unnecessary <tspan> tags in a text editor, the SVG is clean and correct with proper kerning! But there is an even worse error: the word "firmware" (also a frame text object) is being split terribly. The "fi" is turned into a <g> block of curve code, while the "rmware" remains as a text object... with the "r" also having an unnecessary <tspan> element around it. Put simply, what should have been clean and simple SVG output has been wrecked by Affinity.

In 2022, just discovering Designer... and I can't believe controlling guides has been made so awkward. If I select a guide, I can't see/adjust its position anywhere in the UI (no options appear below the menu bar like other tools), I can't right-click it for quick settings, and the huge Guides Manager (titled only "Guides") stops all workflow while it gets in the way - and it can't be docked. Controlling guides should be quick and easy - at least a dockable panel or toolbar options - as it's currently unnecessarily difficult.

This is a significant missing feature that prevents me dumping Illustrator for good ☹️. I use simple macros in every Illustrator session, and although Adobe makes using their full API as difficult as possible, at least the application can record its own commands. Photo has macros, so why not Designer?

Can I suggest you put links to release notes in the download landing page (the page that appears when the software prompts you that there is a new version available)? That landing page contains a nice list of all builds, but no indication about the fixes in each, which is very unhelpful. Even Adobe makes it easier to see what [little] has changed in each new build of their dusty relics; I had to use Google to find this page for Designer!

I agree. I spent ages trying to make Designer export my SVG with a linked bitmap but it insists on embedding it, despite the fact I have set the Image Placement Policy to "Prefer Linked". It's easily-fixable issues like this that prevent people dumping Illustrator (despite its wrongly-scaled, wrongly font-named SVG output). I expect most people jump straight from Illustrator to Inkscape, which is free but does everything correctly.

Just another poor user here, slowly tearing their hair out as they try to move to Affinity Photo. Let it be clear, I hate Adobe and use Photoshop only because my employer gives it to me. However, I use Crop to Selection every day to quickly trim screenshots (and sometimes make more complex selections), and it is an obvious feature that must be added to Photo for efficient workflow - why else are so many people screaming out for it here? Perhaps what concerns me as much, is that if any Affinity staff read these forums, why have they ignored customers for so long, just like Adobe do?

I'm just moving over to Photo from Adobe Photoshop, and I am prepared for things to work a little differently. But if I do "New From Clipboard", it is an annoying (and unintuitive) extra step to have to "Rasterize" the already-raster data that just came in from the clipboard. There should be a "Paste as pixels" option in the Preferences - and it should be the default - to avoid alienating every user coming from any other package. This issue wasted me hours and almost had me uninstalling my trial version.