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In the Affinity apps, there are several ways of creating new layers without the Layers panel being open. Also, in most workflows not every layer needs a name. So how would a Finder-like feature like this one cope with that?

That produces a very pleasing effect, at least on the photo in your example. Have you given any thought to creating a macro to do this? It seems doable.

AFAIK, the geolocation info is not used by any Affinity app. Of course, this might change in the future, particularly if/when Serif releases their own DAM. By then, perhaps Photo for Windows 10 will have its own Location panel (I assume based on Bing Maps).

In addition to providing a map of a location as a visual reference, it is useful because it provides an interactive way to add or edit the GPS coordinate metadata embedded in a file. There are 3 ways it can do this: Drop a "pin" anywhere on the map. Set a location based on a text search (like "Albuquerque, NM" or "London England" or even with the addition of a street name for a more precise location) Set the location to the current one (if System Preferences is set up to allow apps to use the Mac OS Location service). That metadata (for example as EXIF geolocation metadata) can in turn be used by DAM or other apps if the file is exported to (or already is in) a file format that those apps can read. (From what I can tell, while this metadata is embedded in native Affinity format files, it is not exposed to the Mac OS Location service, so the file would have to be exported to some file format like JPEG, TIFF, or whatever.) Just a guess, but perhaps it is just that it is relatively easy to implement on Macs & much harder or more complicated to do in Windows 10?

Assuming everything is visible & unlocked I think all you need to do is select everything on the canvas or artboard (CMD+A does this in one step) & click the desired flip button on the toolbar or select the desired flip option from the Layer > Transform menu. If you have more than one artboard, do this one at a time for the contents of each of them.

A few do, most do not. Typically, those that do try to identify objects in the image using what is currently known as "machine learning" (ML for short) rather than "artificial intelligence" (AI for short), possibly because AI implies broad, human-like cognitive capabilities while ML implies the capability only to learn how to do some specific task through training. How well it works depends on what kind of image objects it has been trained with & how extensive that training is.

I am not sure what you are looking for but maybe applying the filter to a duplicate placed above the original in the layer stack, & experimenting with its layer opacity & blend modes might work for you.

As @stokerg mentioned, this functionality is built into the Mac version of Affinity Photo's Develop persona. The online help topic Location Panel (Develop Persona only) explains its primary features (although I have never seen the "History" button). As it says, this panel is only available to users of Mavericks (OS X 10.9) or later. I am almost certain it relies on the same Mac OS API that powers Apple Maps because there is a tiny "Legal" link in the panel just above the Scale guide button that when clicked opens https://gspe21-ssl.ls.apple.com/html/attribution-141.html. This would explain why it is not available in the Windows version. That legal document might restrict the reuse of map data outside apps (so that might preclude using screenshots of the panel in documents) but I am clueless about that so consulting a lawyer before doing that is probably a good idea. Anyway, at least for Mac users it is useful for adding GPS location data to native Affinity format files, although there are other apps that would probably be much easier to use to do that.

A new Mac Designer beta that fixes the .abr import issue was released today. As I mentioned here, this means this beta can be used to generate .afbrushes files from .abr files that can then be imported into the current Mac retail 1.7.2 versions.

Yay! For Mac users who own both Photo & Designer, this means that even though there is as yet no Mac Photo beta with this fix, we can import .abr raster brushes into this Designer beta's Pixel Persona, & from there export the brushes as .afbrushes files. Then we can import the .afbrushes file into Photo 1.7.2.

And for me on my Mac the app does not crash, just displays the truncated message followed by the 'must close' one.

But who would maintain this, decide which resources were best suited for various users & the kinds of projects they are most interested in doing, classify them all, take responsibility for curating resource lists from dozens of sources they have no control over, & so on?

My "retention specialist" explained that my special offer price was good for a year, after which the price would revert to the normal price ... but that after a waiting period I could probably get a new special offer. The implication was I would once again have to say I was considering switching providers. Pretty silly, huh?

Metal compute acceleration is not the same thing as using Metal for display rendering, which my iMac supports. In fact, it seems to be free of some of the glitches a few Affinity Mac users have reported when using Metal rendering.

Why?

Maybe, depending on the 'flavor' of Metal being used by Preview & Quick Look. My 2012 iMac does not support Metal compute acceleration, so perhaps that is why we get different results? Also, FWIW I get the same preview Inspector data you are showing (16 bit, 240 DPI, etc.) but a completely black screen. The Tiff section says the TIFF is uncompressed, which together with it apparently not really being a flattened TIFF, might explain the relatively large file size vs. its pixel dimensions.

That sounds exactly like what can happen if you tell a cable company you are considering dropping their TV & Internet service & looking for a different provider. Do that & you might get transferred to what they call (I kid you not) "a retention specialist" who will make you one or more special offers, often pitched as available only to their "loyal customers" but really not much if any different from what they offer new customers.

How did you manage to open the file? On my iMac I first get the truncated file message & then a 'must close' one that says something about connection to the file being lost.

Should Photoshop do that if the file is saved as a flattened tiff (like the OP mentioned)?

Maybe, but probably not. That is because: Most DSLR's capture image sensor data at no more than 16 bit resolution (& most at only 12 or 14 bit). RAW bit depth is about dynamic range, & most of the 'extra' LSB data is likely to be noise. There is also the practical consideration for stacks that a bunch of 32 bit depth stacked layers would create an enormous amount of data to process.

It opens the same way for me using Affinity Photo for Mac. Apple's Preview app opens it but as an all black image & Quick Look displays it as all black as well. Also, Photo opens it as an 8 bit, not 16 bit, RGB image. I am not sure why that is but it may have something to do with another oddity: Finder's "Get Info" says the tiff file has no alpha channel: but it clearly (no pun intended) does. In fact, by filling the alpha channel (in the Channels panel, right click on Background Alpha & select "Fill" from the popup) the result is a normal looking photo.

If you are unwilling to post any sample .afphoto files to this topic, could you at least tell us the pixel dimensions of your documents, some indication of which live filters you are applying to them, & how they are ordered in the Layers panel?

Is that a typo or do you really mean your document is 5 km on a side?

FWIW, the Heart Tool may be the simplest of solutions, but it is limited to one adjustable property (for some reason labeled "Spread" in the context toolbar), so there are symmetrical heart shapes it can't create, like those labeled "2" & "3" in this heart shapes.afdesign file:

Are you a Mac or Windows user?