rwillett

Hi, I'd like to move the ruler origin in Affinity Photo around as I have a lot of photos to measure and change (dozens 😒). In Afinity Designer I can simply drag the ruler from the top left square to the point on the image, change the ruler to mm and it's done. I need the funtionality in Photo rather than Designer. For some reason I cannot find how to do this in Affinity Photo. Google isn't my friend today. I have searched and searched but to no avail. Is this even possible? Thanks Rob

We know that Linux on the desktop won't give us the video and editing facilities but we'd keep a Mac or two around just for that sort of work. Its horses for courses. We use the old Mac Pro's which are getting long in the tooth. They have been (massively) upgraded, hacked and abused (but in a nice way) and we like the design and the expandability. We've seen the reports on the new new Trashcan and the estimated delivery timescales. Apple absolutely dropped a bollock with the Trashcan model (IMHO). The passive cooling a triumph of form over function, it completely limited what the machine could do. Also the sheer cost of the model, that combined with the lack of non Thunderbolt expandability, just meant we walked away from it. I know the designers like them, but we're more into Big Data and development. We have largish databases that need lots of local disk, we also use non thunderbolt monitors as the cost of the thunderbolt ones are "Wow! How much". @Harrym, There is more chance of me becoming an astronaut than using Windows :) Anyway back to the task in hand, we now have Photos working on the Mac, we needed to completely stop SIP, turn off the photoanalysisd, reboot, check Photos (yep, tick that works), turn some of SIP on, reboot, check (still works). Over the weekend we tried out Neofinder which we liked and might well keep as its a great way to index Affinity Design programs, we had a look at DXO Optics 9 (sometimes works on Sierra, but is not supported and will normally simply crash on startup, known issue but as its older and free we can't complain), will download DX Optics 11 this week, ON Photo 2017 which looks interesting, Media Pro, nice cataloging but limited editing facilities, Pixave (which has an interesting design, looks very much like Bear, the Evernote replacement). We throw a spare 23GB collection of images to see how the programs handle them, such as import, simple editing and that sort of stuff. Some programs are super quick (Media Pro), some slower (Pixave). Since we now have Photos working, we can work our way through these and see how they suit us. We will still try Capture Pro as well, and we have to say we do like the processing abilities for DXO Optics 9 (when it worked). We hadn't appreciated the variety of stuff out there, so the issues with Photos has actually been good as its forced us to consider what we are doing and are we doing it right. Rob

Thank you for the thoughtful and excellent advice. We use Mac's as clients and are very familiar with Linux/AIX/Solaris and BSD. As you have rightly pointed out launchctl keeps getting changed, we also need to get up to speed on the Mac subsystems, since we 'mostly' use these as clients we normally do not need to get to grips with yet another low level subsystem. As an aside, we're about to move our servers to Ubuntu 16.x LTS and we now need to get systemd working with a whole load of our backend processes. Whilst they *should* just port over, its just hassle we don't want :( Points 3 & 4 is excellent points to consider. One options is for us to simply empty our Photos Library into another DAM. Leave the Photo app (and all its sub processes as-is), If the Photo Library is empty, we have no facial analysis issues. Another option is to remove some of the 3rd low level kernel drivers (kexts) that we use for 3rd external disk arrays and graphics cards. This requires us to move to new Mac's and we hate the trashcan Mac. We're waiting to see if Apple produces a decent replacement to the trashcan Mac otherwise I can see us moving to Linux on the desktop with Mac's for odd video and image tasks. On Point 5, we understand the security issues of disabling SIP. SIP is not going to stop everything anyway, so we always have to be careful with or without SIP. We have quite a lot of tested security in front of our Macs and Linux servers and we're sensible about how we connect to the internet and what we do. I'm not saying that we are perfect but we're aware of the big bad world out there. So fa, we have had zero issues with kexts until now. We're significantly more interested in our disk arrays than in Photos though, so if push comes to shove we get rid of Photos by never using it or by disabling the analysi daemon. Thanks again for the points. It's always a pleasure to read cogent arguments and sensible sentences. Rob

We are aware of how Apple is moving forward using various techniques for visual recognition. Its interesting and I can see that some of their ideas may be used in their self driving cars. My concern now is that we are moving away from the original post which was looking for an alternative to Photos that can use Affinity Photo into low level OS X debugging. We are reasonably happy about moving away from Photos as we can now see that there is a range of decent software that out performs Photos for some things. We still need to evaluate the software for our needs and its still not clear to me if the high end software is better than the cheaper software for what WE need. We're happy to look at the software and work something out for our needs. We're still very keen to use the Affinity range of products, Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are docked in the tray as we use them so much, Affinity Designer especially, and if Affinity did produce a Digital Asset Management tool, that incorporated their software and allowed round trip editing, decent searching, videos and allowed 3rd party software like Screenflow, we'd jump at buying it and using it.

Yes we are very familiar with the system logs and seeing where things crash, My personal background is UNIX development, cd'ing to /var/log/* is now memory muscle. I never even think about typing it, my fingers just do it :) We think that your point of turning off SIP JUST to turn off the facial analysis and then turn it back on may be something we haven't properly investigated. We think we need to check SIP a little more.

Thanks for this. We are going to look again at the SIP stuff and make sure that we have done what we need to do. SIP is not just on or off, you can turn bits of it on and off. Its entirely possible we have got SIP configured incorrectly for what we need and this is the first time this issue has come up. The only thing we have issues with is the facial analysis. If only Apple would put the blasted boolean flag back in to turn this off, this problem would not arise. We are certain its photoanalysisd thats causing the problem. We can do what we normally do and work for hours/days with no issue, but the moment we start up Photos, we get the issue. We can move the Photos library out of the way and start up Photos and it doesn't crash the system. The problem is, once its started up once, it runs at a low level in the background, it crashes, restarts the machine, 40 secs (or whatever later) after you login, it crashes again. We know that 50,000 photos takes a long time to process (sadly). We think its weeks or at least many, many days. We see this as an opportunity to move to a better photo and asset management system rather than a massive issue with Photos. I mention in another post that we've possibly become lazy and just rely on Apple when there are better products out there. Just because Photos's is free, doesn't mean we should use it. We have had issues with corrupted iPhoto libraries in the past and we always have a slight worry that we could lose everything with the golden walled garden that is Photos. Deep down in Photo's there's an SQLite DB library. If something goes wrong and the database becomes corrupted, it can become impossible to correct. I'm certainly not knocking SQLite as we use it in our products and we have a 300GB database of traffic data, its fast and reliable, BUT if Photos, as the application layer on top of SQLite, gets something wrong, its very difficult for 3rd parties to correct as the Photos's Data Model is unknown and pretty difficult to understand. This is the disadvantage of Apples walled garden approach. We will check SIP again as we're not arrogant enough to think we're perfect.

I've seen that script before and we have manually tried to do something similar. The script simply iterates through various services and tries to turn them off. The problem is that 'sudo launchctl load' doesn't work for us. There's only two lines in it that actually do something in the disable.sh script, the rest is just working out what to do. sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/${agent}.plist launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/${agent}.plist Though we hadn't renamed the .plist, though we had editing the .plist to turn it all off. Launchctl doesn't seem to work on photoanalysisd.

Thank your for this detailed update. We knew some of this but not all of this. We hadn't picked up on point 1. We can see that makes sense now. Also we hadn't picked up on point 2 either. Point 3 doesn't work, I have read so many pages that state this SHOULD work, but it doesn't. We think that there is some low level interaction with SIP (which has many facets), launchctl and Photos (or rather the daemons). Point 4 can also be measured in weeks or months :) Point 5 is correct, if you open up the .plist file for the analyisd program then you can see the relevant flags. We had a good dig around with Xcode. Point 6. We suspect that some of low level stuff we have may be contributing to the problem. Our main machine has been extensively modified at hardware level and with custom kexts for stuff like fast network cards and dual graphic cards. Until now, we have had had no issues at all. The system has been reliable. We do run large databases (300GB and upwards) and some of our queries can consume 100% of every core and all 32GB of RAM. The fans come on like a jet aircraft taking off :) However it works reliably and has never crashed, until now :) We think this is more likely an issue with our hardware. Moving away from Photos is not a major issue for us, its an up front hassle but we feel longer term it will be for the good. There's clearly lots of decent software that will do a great job of 1) Photo editing of which Affinity Photo is one of the tools. We like Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo as they work (most of the time) the way we think. We are happy to support Serif as they make good software. We moved from Pixelmator to Serif as these are better products for us. As an aside the Pixelmator Magic Selection tool is better than the Affinity one and the only times we use Pixelmator is for that tool :) 2) Digital Asset Management. We use Affinity Designer a lot, specifically around artboards and for preparing multi layered help screens for mobile apps for Android and IOS devices. We need a better solution than the directory based system we have. We just need to work through the options and see what#s best. Moving away from Photos is forcing us to think through what we actually need, be it Capture One, DXO Pro, Neofinder, Pixave, etc etc and thats good. We'd become a bit lazy and taken what was available without really considering if Photos is the best solution. We would have preferred to stay with Aperture, but hey ho, life moves on.

We know SIP quite well :) It's already partially disabled as we have some custom kernel stuff. We hadn't gone down the path of removing the axtual photoanalysisd program yet. We *may* do this if we can't find a good replacement for Photos. We are still experimenting with various programs to see how they all fit together. Thanks for the suggestion. Rob

This doesn't work either. It seems as if some of Apples programs do not obey launchctl. Very, very frustrating!

I have spent £1,000's and possibly £10,000's of pounds over the last 30 years on commercial software that purports to do something well, to find it doesn't actually do what I want it to do. It's cost me more in time trying to bend a piece of software to try and make it work than to investigate what is the best software. My experience is that it's worth spending time up front trying to understand the way the software works, what support is available, what the alternatives are, does it fit in with how I'd like it to work, how quick is it with large amounts of data, does it support round trip editing, what video formats (if any) work? How does it integrate with other software. YMMV. So I respectfully disagree that Capture One is the definitive answer to my problem. It might be, it might not be, I don't know. I'm happy to spend my weekend investigating what works and doesn't work as any software I do buy, be it £10 or £300 for photo management software, will probably be the one I use for the next 4-5 years. Moving 300-400GB of data is pretty easy, recreating the work inside it, less so. I look through the Applications on my Mac and I can see a lot of stuff, some expensive, some less so that I brought but found out they didn't really work the way I wanted them to (or even work at all). There's some expensive stuff in there :( Thanks Rob

We found a free copy of DXO Pro 9. Its nice but 'seems' to us to be for the initial workflow of taking hundreds of photos from a shoot, processing them and then making them ready for inclusion into a library. Nice piece of work though and its fast. We couldn't seem to work out how to get Affinity Photo to round trip photos in and out, but we'll keep looking at it. We also now have a large list of software to quickly check i.e. Pixave, XNview MP, Luminar, On1 Photo 2017 :)

No we didn't try removing com.apple.photoanalysisd. We've already rebuilt our Mac twice with Carbon Copy Cloner as it screwed things up. We tried to disable it and it will not disable which is so frustrating. We're UNIX engineers and we know the Linux/Unix stuff well, but launchctl is a nightmare as its poorly documented and seems to change from version to version. We ran the program anyway and it didn't report an error. We're going to take a CCC backup as we now have the Mac back to a decent state again and will run Photos once we get the backup done. We're slowly working our way through the various photo management software to see if there is a better application for what we want. We really like AP and would love to incorporate and keep it in our workflow. I'll report back how the remove goes.

Not sure yet, it's on the list of things to test :) Rob

Thats possibly an option, we liked to have a bit more functionality though