Crop Context toolbar vanished from Affinity Photo

[Shirehorseman]

The context toolbar for the crop tool is no longer visible when I just opened Affinity Photo, just when I needed to start an important job involving straightening and cropping over fifty images for a publication. All other context toolbars function correctly. I was using an earlier version, and have since updated to 1.8.2.620, but it made no difference. HELP!!

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

What Persona are you in? Have you tried View > Show Context Toolbar?

If that doesn't help, can you provide a screenshot?

[Shirehorseman]

hi Walt - tried View>Show Context Toolbar and it's checked - all other context toolbars show as they should - it's only the Crop that doesn't. I'm in Designer Persona, and as you will see, the Context toolbar is just blank. Weird.

[Move Along People]

-

[walt.farrell]

44 minutes ago, Shirehorseman said:

I'm in Designer Persona, and as you will see, the Context toolbar is just blank. Weird.

You've posted in a Photo forum, but you're using Designer. And as @haakoo mentioned, cropping in Designer works differently

[Shirehorseman]

Apologies to @haakoo and @walt.farrell if I didn't make it clear (thought I had). I'm using AF Photo, but in the Designer Persona, which is the only Persona which has the crop tool - at least that's how it appears on my PC!. Blame Serif for misleading terminology!

[Ellila]

Hi, I have this problem except I am in Affinity Photo. I have the Context Toolbar on and for all other tools it works but when I click on crop tool the bar is empty

[walt.farrell]

On 3/21/2020 at 2:55 PM, Shirehorseman said:

Apologies to @haakoo and @walt.farrell if I didn't make it clear (thought I had). I'm using AF Photo, but in the Designer Persona, which is the only Persona which has the crop tool - at least that's how it appears on my PC!. Blame Serif for misleading terminology!

Sorry; I missed your response a couple of months ago. Note that to "tag" someone you need to type the @ sign, then start typing their name, and select the name from the pulldown list that hows up.

Your screenshot was definitely from Designer, not Photo. And yes, in the Designer application only the Designer Persona has a crop tool, and it does not have any Context Toolbar options.

[walt.farrell]

28 minutes ago, Ellila said:

Hi, I have this problem except I am in Affinity Photo. I have the Context Toolbar on and for all other tools it works but when I click on crop tool the bar is empty

Yes, that's definitely Photo

However, the edge and corner markings that are showing seem, to me, like they are for the vector-based Crop Tool from Designer, and that Tool would not have any Context Toolbar. But that tool should not be accessible in Photo.

Can you give us a screenshot that includes the complete Layer panel, too?

 

[carl123]

It's a Publisher file @walt.farrell

That's how the APhoto crop tool will work on some layer types in Publisher

Edited May 19, 2020 by carl123
God told me to

[Ellila]

It's really weird.

I closed everything and opened Photo and started completely new file. The toolbar for crop is showing now. I have no idea why - BUT it works only when I open Affinity Photo separately.

I bought first Affinity Publisher and usually start work in there and then flick between Photo persona and Publisher persona based on what I need - here it happened first that when I went to the Photo persona window there was no Toolbar for crop tool. When I closed everything, opened Affinity Photo instead and opened that same project the toolbar was still not showing. Only when I started the new file in Photo the toolbar appeared.

 If I open Publisher first and flick to Photo persona it's still not showing the Toolbar even after starting new project, I don't know if it's bug or if it's just not accessible this way but it's kinda annoying, it beats the whole purpose of having Publisher - Photo - Designer interconnected.

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Ellila said:

If I open Publisher first and flick to Photo persona it's still not showing the Toolbar even after starting new project, I don't know if it's bug or if it's just not accessible this way but it's kinda annoying, it beats the whole purpose of having Publisher - Photo - Designer interconnected.

As @carl123 mentioned, it's based on the kind of document. The Crop Tool in the Photo app is for cropping the complete document. That is only possible when you have a document based on a canvas, which is normally what you have in Photo.

If you have a Publisher document, it will usually have Pages rather than a canvas. And for such a document, you can only perform vector cropping, which is a kind of masking. So, in the Photo Persona of Publisher, or in Photo itself when working on such a document, you only have the vector version of the Crop Tool, which has no Context Toolbar.

[Ellila]

Thanks guys! Will need to do more studying and experimenting with this

[cyderstone]

Thank you for this thread; after reading it I saw that I was trying to crop an .afpub file in Photo. The thread tells me this is not possible - thanks again. So I saved the image as an .afphoto with this filename extension so that I would be able to crop it. When I double-click on this file to open it, Photo is opened by default, not Publisher. Good, that's what I want and expect. The filename extension is shown as .afphoto. However, I cannot crop it, I get the Publisher cropping symbol (arrow with a rectangle bottom-right). It seems that once I've been to Publisher I can't return to Photo, for some tasks at least, even though it's an .afphoto file.

This suggests that it isn't possible to flit between the three members of the Infinity suite. (I appreciate I perhaps need to get advice on a new thread about this, but it was the earlier posts which initiated the issue so I hope I haven't completely wandered.)

[Rosa Rodriguez]

Hi to everyone! I had a similar problem: I was working in Photo and had also opened Publisher and Designer.

I was trying to crop an image in Photo but the cropping handles did not appear so I could not select the part of the image I wanted to crop. After reading this post, I closed both Designer and Publisher, re-opened Photo with the same image and then I could crop it without problems. Is this a bug? 

Thanks anyway for this post! 

[carl123]

On 2/22/2022 at 5:01 PM, Rosa Rodriguez said:

Hi to everyone! I had a similar problem: I was working in Photo and had also opened Publisher and Designer.

I was trying to crop an image in Photo but the cropping handles did not appear so I could not select the part of the image I wanted to crop. After reading this post, I closed both Designer and Publisher, re-opened Photo with the same image and then I could crop it without problems. Is this a bug? 

Thanks anyway for this post! 

If this happens again, please start a new thread and upload a screenshot showing the full app and the "missing crop handles" so we can investigate further

[Rosa Rodriguez]

On 2/24/2022 at 2:50 PM, carl123 said:

If this happens again, please start a new thread and upload a screenshot showing the full app and the "missing crop handles" so we can investigate further

Oh ok, sorry. Will do. Thanks!

[sbishop58]

I've got Affinity Photo 2 running on my Mac.  Some how my Crop Tool context tool bar has gone missing.  However, if I export the image to a .jpeg or open a .tiff file, or open some other .afphoto file, the context tool bar is present.  I've ensured the 'Show Context Toolbar' is checked, i.e., on.  What's gone wrong with this .afphoto file?

[carl123]

8 hours ago, sbishop58 said:

What's gone wrong with this .afphoto file?

If you are saying it's just that .afphoto file it happens with. Can you upload it to the forum?

[sbishop58]

Sure Carl,  I've uploaded the file.  Please keep in mind, the problem is probably caused by me but I don't know what I've done to the file.

675375655_SerpentintheWoods_v2_20221210_085400.afphoto

[carl123]

You appear to have a Vector Crop applied to the Raw/Pixel layer

If you select the Raw/Pixel layer then the crop tool you will see the blue bounding box of the vector crop which you can adjust

Was this document/image first cropped in Affinity Designer or Publisher?

[sbishop58]

Sorry I don't have those applications, e.g., Affinity Designer or Publisher.  I have only Affinity Photo and recently purchased Affinity Photo V2.

Can you suggest of a way to get the Crop Context Toolbar back?  I'd like to learn what I did to have modified the image such that the Context Toolbar is no longer available, so that I don't invoke that command(s) again.    

[walt.farrell]

8 minutes ago, sbishop58 said:

I have only Affinity Photo and recently purchased Affinity Photo V2.

Have you ever installed any of the add-ons (macros, assets) from the Resources section of the forum that let you have Artboards in Photo?

Did you create this file yourself? Or did you open someone else's file or template as a starting point?

It's definitely using the Vector Crop Tool, which should only occur if you've done a crop in Publisher or Designer, or you have an Artboard- or Page-based file, rather than a Canvas-based file.

[sbishop58]

Thank you for your comments.  I'm quite the novice image editor and have not installed any of Serif's add-ons from the Resources section.  I created this picture myself taken with my Nikon Z7 a few days ago.  Also please see the metadata.  For this photo I used Nikon's Studio NX to exported a TIFF file and I used Affinity Photo V2 for all subsequent edits as shown in the layers panel and history if you want to examine that.  

I'm always poking around trying to figure out how to use the application so I may have imposed or set a 'vector' layer or attribute on the image in a way that Affinity Photo potentially perceives it as a vector data rather than raster data.

[carl123]

9 hours ago, sbishop58 said:

Can you suggest of a way to get the Crop Context Toolbar back?

If you select all layers in the layers panel and do a File > Copy Edit > Copy then a File > New from Clipboard, the new document that is created appears to lose the vector crop and functions as normal as regards cropping. You will lose the history but the file will be a lot smaller

 

Still intrigued how the document acquired a vector crop but no more time at the moment, may revisit the document at a later date

But if you notice it happens again, please do report it