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PhLo

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  1. Hurray on scripting. Hopefully that means all titles - Photo, Designer, Publisher (coming). I'm currently only using Photo, and that is where I would most like to see scripting. I personally don't really care which language. Most people savvy enough to even know what a programming language is and to want scripting should also be smart enough to adapt their programming skills to use whatever language is provided, as long as there is a thorough document somewhere describing all the available functions. Scripting is one of the things holding me back from regular use of Affinity Photo. For most regular purposes it holds its own. Though I am capable of fully utilizing all the features, lately I find myself using photo programs mostly for repetitive tasks such as resizing and otherwise processing a batch of photos. Reason being, I have been doing web work, and that requires a lot of that type of activity. Currently Affinity has no place in that particular workflow because who in the world wants to apply the same functions to hundreds or thousands of images? No one has time for that. Macro recording doesn't cut it because some tasks require a bit of adaptation based on a particular image context, so a canned recording won't work. For example, I need to resize every image within a folder so the "short side" is 500 pixels. The short side might be the width or the height depending on the orientation/aspect ratio, so a macro can't cover this situation. This need could also be accommodated by updating the resize dialog in Affinity Photo, and this really should be done because it has the weakest resize dialog of all programs currently. Corel PaintShop Pro and Irfanview both have a "resize by side" which includes shortest side, longest side, fit to defined box, and a host of other intelligent resizing options. This would be cinch for developers to add too because they are just zippy calculations, letting the "other dimension" float up and down based on a locked aspect. SUPER EASY additions, probably a day's work for a developer since all the resize and aspect locking logic is already there (maybe longer than a day to get the ui team involved so it looks nice ). Even so, this and a million other things should also be possible via a scripting language because scenarios get far more complex for power users. Another benefit of scripting is to be able to stack all sorts of operations or only run them based on programmatic cases, if statements and so on. My simple scenario requires me to resize the shortest side to 1000, 500, 250 and 125 pixels (because in web, you often have the same image resized to several different sizes for different displays, thumbnails, etc), but to also make sure the first never has a dimension in either direction above 5000 pixels (possible on panoramas). I want to do all that in ONE step, not several. A few days ago I was quite easily able to write a Python script for Corel Paintshop Pro to do just that even though I have never touched Python code before. Opening a well-documented sample script that cycled through every image in a folder, it was pretty easy to start writing my own code. After each resize, it runs a "revert" command so the next resize is always running off the original resolution and the least "lossy" situation occurs with image data. Anyway, it would be exciting to see Affinity Photo add this feature, and again I don't give a rip which language is chosen. As a web designer/developer, JS is by far the best choice since everyone and their uncle knows it already. The primary thing of importance for me is to access every single function in every menu and tool via a line of code, and to be able to set every single option available in those dialogs through code. Another feature that is ideal is to be able to still record a "macro", but then be able to save that as an editable script (say JS). Then you should be able to edit that script with logic changes. This is how Corel Paintshop Pro goes about it. This way you could have a save/export step in your macro, something that is more easily done by physically clicking on buttons and recording in a macro. But then you could edit that saved macro and see all those options and change little "fiddly bits" in the code (love that British expression). The other very important feature is to be able to cycle through files in a folder, and NOT only via a file select batch feature on the file menu. Its far faster and more convenient to run a script routinely on a folder where you have been dropping files for processing instead of manually choosing them in a dialog all the time. Because Corel Paintshop Pro has been doing scripting for quite a while, there is a big community of people discussing that stuff on their forums. I read quite a bit of it, and there are a lot of advanced scenarios that people who use scripting will wish to see. Writing all of them here would be way too huge a wall of text... and my post is already that. There is a user on their forums LeviFiction who is something of a scripting expert, and he could definitely have some pointers to developers on what users like to be able to do via scripting.
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