iPad Affinity Designer - Home screen document not pulling from cloud

[Greg Paskal]

I use Affinity Designer on both my iPad and iMac. I use Google Drive as my cloud solution (although I have seen the same issue with iCloud). The issue I am seeing is once I open an Affinity Designer document from the cloud, the Home Screen has a thumbnail I can open that same document from in the future but when using this feature, the Home Screen does not check for an update of the document on the cloud and simply opens up the last local copy.

This introduces a workflow issue that could be costly. If I save my work from the iPad to the cloud and then open and edit that document on my iMac and save the updates back to the same cloud location (same filename). When I go back to editing that document on the iPad, the version shown on the home screen is now out of date unless I reopen it from the cloud. It seems to be the preview on the home screen on the iPad should check if the document has changed and ensure to open the document from the cloud (especially if it originated in that location). Since it does not do this, it's now possible to edit the outdated version of the document and upon saving again to the cloud, overwriting the changes made to the version stored (and previously edited) on the iMac version of Affinity Designer.

I would appreciate any assistance as I try to refine the workflow and get the most from Affinity Designer.

Greg

[stokerg]

Hi Greg Paskal and Welcome to the Forums,

The Home screen isn't connected to the Cloud and the projects loaded on this screen are local versions.  The only method that i can think that would help here is Saving the version on the iPad and then closing it from the Home screen.  That way when you come back in, you'll have to open the file and will get the latest version from the Cloud.

I'll leave this here for now as someone else might have a better workflow that i'm not aware of and if they haven't, i'll get this moved over to Feature Requests  

[Paul Mudditt]

On 1/12/2020 at 8:59 PM, Greg Paskal said:

I use Affinity Designer on both my iPad and iMac. I use Google Drive as my cloud solution (although I have seen the same issue with iCloud). The issue I am seeing is once I open an Affinity Designer document from the cloud, the Home Screen has a thumbnail I can open that same document from in the future but when using this feature, the Home Screen does not check for an update of the document on the cloud and simply opens up the last local copy.

This introduces a workflow issue that could be costly. If I save my work from the iPad to the cloud and then open and edit that document on my iMac and save the updates back to the same cloud location (same filename). When I go back to editing that document on the iPad, the version shown on the home screen is now out of date unless I reopen it from the cloud. It seems to be the preview on the home screen on the iPad should check if the document has changed and ensure to open the document from the cloud (especially if it originated in that location). Since it does not do this, it's now possible to edit the outdated version of the document and upon saving again to the cloud, overwriting the changes made to the version stored (and previously edited) on the iMac version of Affinity Designer.

I would appreciate any assistance as I try to refine the workflow and get the most from Affinity Designer.

Greg

The home screen is only meant to be a temporary sandbox, where for user convenience all your work is auto saved to. Once you complete your work you should not leave it on the home screen as if you ever deleted the app because of a problem you would lose your work. You should always save your completed work to a cloud location and close it(delete it) from the home screen. So then your workflow should always be moving between platforms to use the cloud file as your master and not the temporary workspace on the app’s  home screen.