DRM

I presume that the MSI installer is the existing application install mechanism which places executable files in places like: "C\Program Files\Affinity\Affinity\Photo\Photo.exe" In other words, somewhere where one can find them, make shortcuts and call them from existing Third-Party applications such as PSE. Is there any estimate when this will arrive?

This is getting pretty much off the topic but does make a diversion, given that I really have become an "old timer". When I started as a graduate student, I was in a research lab at 11 pm one night and met an astronomer whose code wouldn't load. He was trying to simulate galaxy formation and had a statement "Dimension Galaxy (1000,1000,1000)". This was when the lab's IBM had perhaps 8M bytes of memory. He was pretty disappointed when I explained the problem.

By definition we were "Real Programmers" because we used Fortran rather than Pascal. (This definition is an adaptation of an article in the NYT entitled "Real men don't eat quiche"). And I also had a CDC7600, a Cray and I very big IBM available, probably none of which were as powerful as my current Smartphone. However, those days are long gone, thank goodness. Now people just want to buy applications which have been pre-tested and install themselves...

I have been watching with interest as a small number of enthusiasts have been trying to come up with workarounds, but I don't see these being useable by the average photographer. We may be able to click the "install" button and then actually to edit images, but few customers of either Affinity or any of the other editing products will be comfortable running system scripts which they don't understand. I really liked the post which included the line "I have written a launcher utility that you can place anywhere on your system". I don't know what a "launcher" is, although I could of course guess. Then the code would need to go in a file, presumably with an extension and privileges which are not specified. Fifty years ago, I wrote a convolution integral in IBM 360 Assembler, but that hardly qualifies me as a Windows-11 system programmer. Maybe I shall wait until a fix is tested and made available for use by the average user!

I once had to rebuild my system disc manually after a slow hardware fault which led to my nightly backup already being corrupt. A nightmare which took me a week at 16 hours/day. I can only recommend having several off-line system disk image backups. I use Acronis and this saved my life when an SSD failed.

The reply by Mark Ingram totally misses the point. Photo-2 may well load an image as he specifies, and in fact as I mention above, I can make a shortcut to this this (pseudo)file which will run the program. However, there seems that the workflows of a large number of people have been broken because the executable has been stored in some new way which most existing applications don't know about. Thus, suggesting that we all have to wait until all these many third-party applications are modified (and expecting us to buy the new versions) is a non-starter. Affinity seems to have used some new mechanism for storing applications which has broken the workflow of very many customers, and they need to come up with a fix or workaround. Why not simply use the same installation mechanism as with the previous version? That worked fine!

This is a super pain. I have managed to make a shortcut to the Photo 2 application on Windows 11 which works, despite the file seeming to have "0" bytes, so presumably even that isn't the real file. However, if I try to browse to the Photo 2 executable (or I guess its alias) as an external editor using Adobe PSE it tells me "The file can't be accessed by the system". I have no idea why. (Evidently I never tried to add "<>" to the username!!!) The file type of ".exe" is the only one allowed. As I have 25'000 files in the PSE database this makes the new editor essentially unusable for me. I would dearly like to export the PSE database to a photo database made by Affinity, but they don't have one. Thus, it would seem that I have bought a totally unuseable product, as have many other people. Don't the developers test these sorts of things before releasing a new product? I am hopping mad. This is just the way to lose customers!

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my various messages. I ran the sfc scan as suggested. In fact I had to run it twice, because the window closes by itself when the scan finishes (which I think is odd), so if you aren't watching it you don't know what happened. Anyway, the second time I sat and watched and it reached 100% without any error messages. As to the bugcheck, almost all those I ever remember seeing were due to an attempt to address an illegal location. Presumably the error must occur in the execution of system code (as you suggest, a driver or service), otherwise the application could crash and not the whole O/S. However, as the bugcheck occurred whilst Affinity was in a blocked state, and the blockage occurred twice when attempting "Refine" on the same area of the same image, I would still put money on a bug in Affinity. Presumably it makes a system call with illegal parameters which are not checked ? (If I remember, the European Space Agency crashed their first Ariane 5 launch by not checking the range of an input parameter.) I guess the most sensible thing for me to do is to wait and see if I get a BSOD in any other circumstances before digging deeper, although it would be interesting for someone from Affinity to try to replicate what I did as I sent the jpeg and details of what provokes the problem. Irrespective of the BSOD, the fact that Affinity blocked twice at the same point surely indicates that there is a bug in their code, especially as I was not the first person the see a problem like this? Schönes wochenende, David M.

About fifty years ago I could toggle in the bootstrap loader on a PDP11 using the keys on the front panel. I now feel like I am drowning in the complexity of Windows-10. Maybe I can blame Dave Cutler, whom I once met... The most relevant message I have found is this one, but without a minimum of training it is essentially impossible to decode the web of error messages, even after applying a filter. The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x00000050 (0xffff878eeb44f0a0, 0x0000000000000011, 0xffff878eeb44f0a0, 0x0000000000000002). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\MEMORY.DMP. Report Id: ed3f0cc9-ee22-4bfc-8108-d519e0306f00. I'll try and run a scan for faulty files shortly. Concerning the PC: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700 CPU @ 3.00GHz with 16 GB of RAM (not 8, that was my last machine) It has a 500 GB SSD for the o/s and user accounts, plus a 3 TB HDD used for image and music files and nightly system backups. There is also a networked WD 3TB disk which stores the last 5 copies of all changed files. The display is a calibrated BenQ 4K 32 inch driven by graphics card VCQP2200-PB 5GB GDDR5X (160-bit). The o/s is Windows 10 Home, build 19043.1023. (Latest 21H1 with all updates). A/V is Bitdefender. Applications: MS Office, PSE, Affinity, iTunes, Canon DPP, Acronis, Edge, FileMaker Pro, Brother Print. NO games or risky apps.

Dear Komatös, thanks for the suggestion. I'll try it over the weekend. However, that the BSOD arrived after Affinity blocked for the second time, and has not done so for many years, is enormously suggestive. The PC didn't crash yesterday, probably because I used the task manager to stop the Affinity application after a few minutes, whereas today I just let it run to see what would happen. And now I know. It looks like Affinity is using some sort of system resource until it runs out. It isn't CPU, but maybe it is memory or threads, or? I don't know how Affinity is written, but maybe there is a race condition between several threads or processes. However, I am 99% sure that the proximate cause is the Refine function, perhaps provoked by working on a low-contrast image.

I am also using Affinity Version 1.9.2.1035. Yesterday I clicked on "Refine" and Affinity blocked, although it used only about 1% of CPU, so no idea what it was doing. Maybe out of memory (I have 8 GB, but is there a limit)? Today was worse. I tried to edit the same photo once more, and when selecting some distant mountains across the Salar de Uyuni salt flat (so low contrast), not only did Affinity block once more, but for the first time in years I got the "Blue Screen of Death". Data was sent to Microsof t and the system rebooted. I enclose the jpeg (4397) so the Affinity team can experiment themselves. The selection which crashed was along the line at the top 20% of the photo between the salt (at 3700 metres) and the distant mountains. The selection line was horizontal along the white salt until it reached the mountain on the right in the middle ground, where I tried to select along the ridge top. This has crashed Affinity twice (and Windows once), so you should be able to reproduce the problem "chez vous." Please let me know if this helps! David M.

The instructions distributed to update to 1.8 say that if you bought Photo from Affinity it would check for updates when the program is opened. This did not work in my case. However, after logging in to my Affinity account I was able to download the new version.

Microsoft are trying to move everyone to Office 365. I DO NOT WANT TO USE REMOTE EXECUTION !! I would gladly ditch Microsoft Publisher if I could move to Affinity. However, I have a dozen or more documents which I took months to write, so I also need a conversion tool, and this must go for millions of other people. I have almost moved from PSE to Affinity Photo (although I still need an organizer/database), so would be happy to switch Publisher as well if there were forward compatibility.

After the additional recent comments on the format issue for Raw files, let me make one more point. Canon, Nikon, Sony and the rest sell hardware. There is no charge for DPP or similar software without which the purchasers of said hardware can't make full use of it. Thus, one might have imagined that it would be in the interest of the camera manufacturers to make their new products as easy and attractive to use as possible. Thus, as the professionals and enthusiasts who wish to use Raw format will certainly do so because the intend to edit their images (with Photoshop, Affinity, or whatever), surely it is in the interest of the camera companies to publish definitions of each new format as it comes out? Canon et al know that the software companies will reverse-engineer the codec eventually, as will the competition, so slowing them down simply makes their new products less attractive to potential customers (us!) and I can see no possible advantage in doing this. It is interesting to compare the situation with workstation companies in the 80s. DEC, Apollo and others tried to keep their systems closed, and they folded. Sun was much more successful.

Having just bought an EOS-R, I produced some CR-3 raw files and discovered. as everyone else in this thread, that Affinity doesn't have a codec. However, neither does Windows Photo Viewer, nor my version of Adobe PSE, and I suspect most other applications. And this is without even thinking about opening the Dual Pixel Raw format. So far, apart from DPP, the only other app I have found which will read CR3 format is from CEWE Galerie Photo, so everyone will be pleased to hear that they can at least print their pictures! Maybe it would be helpful if all camera companies would settle on an industry standard format? Otherwise the software companies are obliged to spend their lives playing catch-up. David M.