Autosave - never

[Frog]

Please add an option for the preferences of AutoSave for the time of 'never'.

[Ben]

The Autosave feature is actually auto backup.  It doesn't write to your main file, but instead writes to a hidden backup file.  In the event of a crash or forced quit, the backup file can be used to restore the state of your document when reopened.  It is advisable to leave this feature on, and keep the preset of 300 seconds.

 

We also use smart saving features which mean only incremental changes are actually written, so the majority of autosaves happen very quickly, and won't impact on front end performance.

[Frog]

While it is understand this is acceptable for novice users, in the area of high end graphics we have different requirements. Our typical image size is 40,000x20,000 pixels. For a typical file, this translates into about 8 minutes to save a file on the highest speed Thunderbolt2 SSD based RAID storage. Please understand why we prefer the option of disabling disk activity as our productivity is hampered by tasks not desired.

 

Simply stating that the saving of autosave is 'very quick' has no meaning. I currently have a 56,000x28,000 pixel document open and the app has been 'very quickly' saving the data for the last 12 minutes as the rest of the UI is frozen.

 

Our first impression is that large files keep the background tasks (such as saving change data) so busy the UI becomes unresponsive to inputs. This occurs to the degree even closing a window is not possible.

 

Too, the lack of a progress bar for operations such as opening a file leaves the user wondering what is happening. On these large files that typically require minutes to open the user is left hanging as to what is happening.

 

Another concern is how much disk space is being consumed by saving of this data. Noticing a large file can be closed and reopened very quickly suggests a caching strategy, which, while nice, could prove overwhelming for disk space. How does one delete this cache file?

 

As a side note, we just purchased Affinity Photo today for evaluation. We appreciate this is a new product and there is room for advancements which is good. First impressions? Affinity Photo is very impressive but possibly not suited to large images. Yes, we are entrenched in that 'other' photo editing program and welcome an alternative but we also realize there is a reason the 'other' program rules supreme.

[TonyB]

Only the first save/autosave should take any appreciable time. We actually designed Affinity to handle massive images so to find someone actually using it for big images is great and any issues you find are probably easy for us to fix.

 

We don't store any cache files apart from the actual afphoto file itself. The afphoto file format should be small in comparison to most other editors out there. Also when you save again then only the differences are saved so it would be good to see your usage.

 

Perhaps you could describe your usage and we can tune Affinity to fit your use case. Autosave should actually improve your save performance so once we have sorted out any other issues then all should be good.

 

Again, Affinity is designed for this, so work with us and we could surprise you how efficient Affinity can be.

[Andy Somerfield]

Hi,

 

If you are "noticing" autosave - ie. it is locking up the UI - then this should be considered a bug and we can try to reproduce it.

 

There is no caching involved with our save / load - it goes so fast, primarily, because we stream data from the file on demand.

 

Thanks,

 

Andy.

[Mick O'Dwyer]

"the lack of a progress bar for operations such as opening a file leaves the user wondering what is happening."

 

This.