No Desktop Option in Open or Place Sidebars

[Richard Wagner]

When trying to place an image in Affinity Designer or opening an image in Affinity Photo there is no Desktop option available in the sidebar. My only choice is Macintosh HD with the Applications, Library, System and Users folders available which is quite useless. I am currently running MacOS Catalina version 10.15.3. Is this a permissions issue with the current MacOS or does it have something to do with the Affinity apps?

Thanks for your help,

Richard Wagner

[firstdefence]

Welcome to the forum Richard, On the side bar do you have Favorites showing that will normally display Desktop as a favorite.

Open a finder window and then select Finder > Preferences

Click on the Sidebar icon at the top of the preferences window, you can now edit what you see.

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp2803/mac

PS. the display you see in Finder has nothing to do with Affinity.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, firstdefence said:

Click on the Sidebar icon at the top of the preferences window, you can now edit what you see.

You can also drag folders from the main Finder window into the sidebar to add them to it. A line will appear indicating where they will be placed. You can drag sidebar items up & down to order them however you want.

You may also find it useful to create a few Smart Folders & add them to the sidebar. As explained in some detail here, they are actually saved searches that show all the files that match certain properties, as if they were all in the same folder.

A few smart folders I have found useful for work with the Affinity apps:

All EPS files:  

All SVG files: 

Every file Affinity can open:  

That last one is an example of a Raw Query, here set to kMDItemKind == "Affinity Openable*" so it finds all files that in the Finder show a Kind beginning with "Affinity Openable."

There are dozens of search criteria available from the "Other..."  menu choice, so for example to find all tiff files that include an alpha channel with a sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color profile, you could use this:

As @firstdefence mentioned, these are features provided by the Mac OS, not Affinity.

[RNKLN]

Hmm. Using AffinityOpenable* gives me no results. When i remove the Openable part (Affinity*), i get a lot of files that Affinity can open, including .abr, .svg, .psd and more. However, no .jpg, .jpeg or .png.

[R C-R]

18 minutes ago, RNKLN said:

Hmm. Using AffinityOpenable* gives me no results. When i remove the Openable part (Affinity*), i get a lot of files that Affinity can open, including .abr, .svg, .psd and more. However, no .jpg, .jpeg or .png.

I have no idea why you get such different results than I do, other than possibly there is some difference in how Raw Queries are handled in Catalina vs. Mojave?

With the raw search set to kMDItemKind == "Affinity*" or even kMDItemKind == "Affinity* (without the closing quote) I do not get .svg, .psd, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, & several others, but that is probably because none of those file types show a Kind in Finder beginning with Affinity, even though they are file types Affinity can open.

[RNKLN]

Let’s assume it’s a difference in OS version. Has happened before.