Why does Affinity Photo take soo long to load?

[enginestar]

Love everything about Affinity Photo...

Except one thing...

Loading time.

OK... it's a beast of a program... I get it.

I only ever do super simple things... like crop and resize and occassionally cut out...

I've been round the block and have tried many other programs - nothing beats it for usability.

Would love to have a 'light' version + the existing 'monster version'.

🙂 

 

[GarryP]

Cropping and resizing can usually be done with the software installed with your OS (e.g. Photos on Windows).
If that’s all you normally need to do then just use the OS application for that and keep Affinity Photo for the more-complicated stuff.
Why use a pile driver to just crack a nut?

[Joachim_L]

13 minutes ago, enginestar said:

Loading time.

I would say it depends on your machine. 635 MB PSD takes about 10 seconds to load in AP and Photoshop CS6 on my average PC.

Damn, today (always) is GarryP faster than me.

[GarryP]

Sorry Joachim_L.
I would suppose further discussion of this would need more explanation of what is meant by “loading time”.
Is it the time it takes to load (start) the application, or the time it takes to load a document?

[Joachim_L]

3 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Sorry Joachim_L.

No worries. "Then you reach that age, 52, 53, your muscles and brain give up, they wave a little white flag , and without any warning at all you're suddenly a  slow, old bastard". <- Inspired by Carter USM

This is what I would call loading time ...

 

[enginestar]

Thanks for the replies.

Total loading time is about 10 seconds for me as well.

When waiting, it seems an eternity.

After loading, when opening an image, it takes about another 5 seconds.

As for using other software - please name some. 🙂 

I've tried others... and the others just are missing that hidden usability and look and feel.

 

[GarryP]

Starting Photo on my restarted laptop (nothing of Photo in any memory caches) takes around 13 seconds (from icon press to menu being displayed), restarting Photo takes around 9 seconds, whereas starting Photos (the Windows app) only takes around 3 seconds.
There’s probably not much you can do about document loading times other than try a faster storage medium.
If you tell us which OS you are using then you will probably get various suggestions for other software to try.

[R C-R]

For reference, on my old & slow iMac with a conventional 7200 rpm HDD & just 8 GB of RAM, if AP has not been used recently (so there is no part of it cached in inactive memory) and I do not have a lot of other apps open that use a lot of memory, it takes around 10-15 seconds to load to the point where the splash screen has disappeared & the workspace window, tools, & other panels appear.

It used to take longer but I discovered that was because I had loaded down my Mac with lots of active fonts I never use. Deactivating most of them via Font Book improved load (launch in Mac-speak) times considerably for all my Affinity apps.

Document load times vary all over the place depending on the file size & its contents, how much RAM is in use & by what, & so on.

[Petar Petrenko]

Loading depends on many factors, like:

1. How many apps are starting together with the OS.
2. Maybe OS is doing defragmeting or upgrading/updating.
3. Antivirus search for viruses.
4. No SSD. Even their speed may vary from 500-3500 MB per second.
5. ...

[coderman]

I'm running macOS 10.15.6 on a 2019 (7,1) Mac Pro - with 96GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, 12 Core Xeon and the W5700X. Quite a powerful machine, with a very quick SSD. All other apps load instantly, but these Affinity apps take upwards of 30+ seconds on first open which seems like forever by comparison. I've tried resetting the app by holding down ^Control while opening it, and clearing the user data but it makes 0 difference on the next reboot.

This has spanned multiple versions. Currently running ver 1.8.4 

I'm not the only one with the issue. It's not a configuration issue, it's a clean install of macOS, on a beast of a computer. The issue is the poor coding of the app. I've also gone to the point of removing all unused fonts down to the bare minimums of a fresh macOS Install.

This needs to be fixed ASAP

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, coderman said:

I'm running macOS 10.15.6 on a 2019 (7,1) Mac Pro - with 96GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, 12 Core Xeon and the W5700X. Quite a powerful machine, with a very quick SSD. All other apps load instantly, but these Affinity apps take upwards of 30+ seconds on first open which seems like forever by comparison. I've tried resetting the app by holding down ^Control while opening it, and clearing the user data but it makes 0 difference on the next reboot.

FWIW, yesterday I replaced my old iMac with a 2020 (20,2) model running Catalina version 10.15.6 (19G2021). It has a 10th generation 3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel i7 CPU & Apple's latest soldered in 1 TB SSD, so its power is probably more or less comparable to your Mac Pro, at least for first launch times.

As initially configured my first-launch times for AP were around 12-15 seconds. I just spent an hour disabling around one hundred (!!!) of the 'additional' fonts that come installed by default with Catalina but not the huge collection of Noto fonts that show up in the "All" category in AP (which I could only disable if I disabled SIP), but after doing that, my first-launch times for AP are at most one second faster.

I suspect this is because on first launch the Affinity apps iterate through every enabled font to populate the app's font cache, support the glyph browser, etc. There are about seventy (!!!) Noto fonts including around one hundred font styles in the "All" category, so checking all those Noto fonts probably takes longer than everything else combined.

[enginestar]

I don't have a super beast machines like you guys...

But... I have to admit... ALL other programs on my computer launch super quick.

Sad to hear Affinity suffers from bad coding. I'm sure they will fix

[R C-R]

35 minutes ago, enginestar said:

Sad to hear Affinity suffers from bad coding. I'm sure they will fix

I am not so sure it is bad coding. I think it is more an intended tradeoff sacrificing longer launch times to maximize how quickly fonts & glyphs become available once the app is running.

Besides, at least on my new iMac subsequent launches of the apps are very quick (no more than 1-2 seconds), as long as the font stuff is still in memory.

But that said, I just noticed that TextEdit somehow excludes all those Noto fonts from its font menu dropdown, & the only way to use them in that app is via the Format > Font > Show Fonts menu item, & that results in a blank format field in the app itself.

If Affinity could somehow manage to do the same, I suspect first-launch times would be much shorter.

[telemax]

With an Internet connection, AP starts in 3 seconds.
Without an Internet connection, AP starts in 13 seconds.

Windows 10

[R C-R]

FWIW, it seems that the very long list of Noto fonts seen in Affinity for Macs running Catalina is also an issue for at least some Photoshop users:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/bug-in-photoshop-with-macos-catalina-noto-fonts-are-crowding-font-list/td-p/10688944?page=1

Plus, according to some of the posts in this Apple discussions topic this also affects Illustrator, InDesign, Office 365, & maybe some other third party apps, while Apple's apps somehow suppress the Noto fonts from their dropdown font lists (like I mentioned seeing in TextEdit).

So while I don't know for certain if that has anything directly to do with the long first-launch time issue, it seems clear that the issue of all those fonts cluttering up the Affinity dropdown list is not something Serif can fix unless maybe they can get Apple to tell them how to suppress them like Apple does in its own apps.

[Aad Slingerland]

Replacing an 'old fashioned' hard disk with an SSD (Solid Sate Disk) makes a huge difference...

[russnem]

Onto my 3rd Mac now with Affinity Photo and on all three of them, Affinity Photo takes (comparatively) forever to lead. Today was almost 15 seconds. Everything else on my M1 Mac, my iMac Pro before this, and my 27" iMac before that, launched almost instantly. But Affinity Photo is just ridiculous. 

[Ron P.]

😯 Wow, I have an old Win machine,Intel i7-4770 @3.40GHz, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD (Primary), 500GB SSD (Secondary), 1TB 7200rpm HDD, 3rd, all internal, not to mention all my USB external drives.

To launch APhoto, 4.9secs.

[h_d]

16 minutes ago, Ron P. said:

I have an old Win machine

It's specifically connected with Apple's security settings on apps downloaded from the Apple App Store, nothing to do with the age, speed, memory or hardware configuration of the machine. I bought Photo and Designer from the Apple App Store and they exhibit the issue. I bought Publisher from the Affinity Store and it does not.

[v_kyr]

See related:

• Slow startup (all Affinity apps)

Quote

... I think the startup time lag has more to do with the MacOS's security implementation (signing/signature, notarization ...) mechanisms for apps here. Since MacOS contains authorization and malware detection mechanisms which do check/scan every app during it's startup (similar like build-in virus scanner and firewall mechanisms on Win). So the whole is more a matter of this and that somewhere during this whole process, some processing takes an unnecessary long time to complete then!

 

[jmwellborn]

All three apps open within 2-4 seconds on my Macbook Pro with Big Sur.  Bought them all originally from the Affinity store and used Migration Assistant to move them over from my iMac (versions 1.8.4). The apps used to open on My iMac with Sierra in around 4 seconds.  Upgraded to High Sierra, and the same apps (v. 1.8.4)  now take 15-30 seconds each.  But transferred to Big Sur and upgraded to 1.9.3 and they are incredibly fast once again.  So it is surely not Affinity’s fault.   Anyway, so what?  “Time is money”  but 12-15 seconds??????   

[v_kyr]

Under Catalina they are jumping around endless and do take nearly ~ a minute to start each (MAS bought and upgradet 1.9.3 versions).

 

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

Under Catalina they are jumping around endless and do take nearly ~ a minute to start each (MAS bought and upgradet 1.9.3 versions).

I bought AP & AD from the MAS. I am running Catalina on my iMac. From a cold start each takes no more than 10 seconds to launch. If I have used one since I started my iMac, the launch time (to the splash screen) is less than a second -- maybe 2-3 bounces in the Dock.

[v_kyr]

11 minutes ago, R C-R said:

From a cold start each takes no more than 10 seconds to launch.

On my side here it takes much much longer under Catalina, in contrast to that a cold start on El Capitan is pretty fast.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

On my side here it takes much much longer under Catalina, in contrast to that a cold start on El Capitan is pretty fast.

What are the specs of your Mac running Catalina? Also, how many fonts do you have enabled?