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Affinity Photo Slow Loading Issue in v1.8.3.641


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Dear Developers and Software Engineer,

We noticed the installation time of Affinity Photo v1.8.3.641 takes too long and the loading speed of the program too. The problem is your software installs 5,800 files which is a massive number of small files and this makes the installation process so slow due to the huge numbers. Plus, it created 493 folders during the install process and this also contributed to the slow process. To make your software installs faster and launches faster, your programmers and coders need to reduce or package those thousands of small files into a few hundred larger ones. Keep the number of installation files under 1,000 and the number of folders under 200 and the install speed and app loading speed will be significantly faster. For instance, if you have 10,000 files that are 1KB each and you install them or copy them, you will see it takes forever to do so. However, when you archive/zip those 10,000 files into a 10 MB single file, copy or install it only takes 1 second or instantly. Your developers need to package all those files into a few hundred larger ones to speed this up. You can see this as an example from the "install.wim" file in Windows 10 setup ISO file. This single 4GB file stored/packaged over 100,000 tiny OS files inside it and you copy it only takes a few second since the system only deal with 1 file instead of 100,000 files individually. Most programmers and software engineers don't understand this concept and they make huge number of files spread out in their software which makes everything install very slow and loading very slow. A good offender of this is Photoshop CC 2020 since it installs over 20,000 files, 5,000 folders, and about 50,000 registries. We don't want to deal with painfully slow loading speed like Photoshop CC 2020 due to their massive numbers of files, folders, and registries installed. Don't make this mistake like Photoshop please.

 

To improve the install and loading speed of your software, keep the number of installation files small, under 1,000 is golden, folders under 200, and registries small, lower number is always best. How do I know the installed numbers? I used Total Uninstall Pro to capture the full installation of your software and the report is attached for your reference. You can use it to capture/monitor all apps or software out there and it will provide the exact installed size and files, unlike Windows Add/Remove report that is always inaccurate.

 

You guys made the best User Interface for Affinity Photo, it looks nice with colorful icons and tools, unlike Photoshop. Don't change your UI since it is nice and perfect that way. Please don't add extra crap like Photoshop did such as Creative Cloud Experience and other cloud features that takes up disk space and people don't use them. Most people don't know that Photoshop is very bloated, 5GB, with crapware that installed into your PCs which is why it is painfully slow at installation and loading speed. Keep Affinity Photo light, clean, fast, with more advanced offline image manipulation and retouching features.

 

I am running Windows 10 v2004 May 2020 updates.

 

Send this feedback to your head of software development department so they can improve your software.

 

Sincerely,

AffinityLover

Affinity Photo captured installation.png

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Hi, thanks for the feedback. The majority of those files are for the documentation, which isn't loaded at startup, so shouldn't affect the startup speed. We could package the documentation files into larger chunks, but then we'd need to unpackage them at some point, so you would trade off a faster install for a slower initial run of the Help browser. On top of that we would need to prompt for admin access in order to do this (currently Affinity does not need elevation for any operations), whereas the installer is already running as admin.

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Here is a real world practical scenario, you can convert all those thousands of tiny documentation files into 1 large PDF file. This helps reduce the large number of files installed and speed up the installation process. I don't know why you would need to unpackage large files for loading purposes. Can you just make your software to call on and read that single large files instead of unpacking it to load? I'm not talking about archiving all those thousands of files into an archive format like zip or rar. You can achieve this by coding the program to do read from a large files. Some software out there were able to achieve this and it make them loading much faster. Maybe you guys can consult with an expert coders that can make this happens, just a suggestion. Thanks

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27 minutes ago, AffinityLover said:

you can convert all those thousands of tiny documentation files into 1 large PDF file.

The Help is organized as a hierarchy of HTML files, to allow easy display and searching. Dealing with a Help file in PDF format would be a much different user experience, with much less flexibility in organization. For example, with the current approach the display can be different if you're on Windows vs Mac, to display different keyboard symbols or for other purposes.

Installation does not happen very often. Why does it matter if it takes a little extra time?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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It matters to some people since it makes the user experience less enjoyable. I saw other software out there compiled into a single help file that is not a PDF type. It works exactly the way the HTML version works with all structures and links. If you can make that happens, then it will be great. If you don't want to improve your products, then that's ok.

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I prefer PDF Help files for the reason that I make notes and highlights similar to a student's text book. Can't take any notes or highlight on an HTML Help file. Yeah, searching is fast. Search is much slower on a PDF file but I use Bookmarks to fix that problem.  

Its very common for Enterprise software to get very bloated. Management has to keep those thousands of employees busy doing make work.

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  • 6 months later...

There is no doubt that the current version of Paint loads EVERY TIME very slowly compared to previous versions.
I am now retired, but I pioneered the use of CGI in the Film & TV business back in the 80's by founding CAL VideoGraphics in the UK and therefore have spent a great amount of time with similar products.
I love working with the Affinity products and generally no longer use Adobe PhotoShop or Designer.. but the now much slower loading times is definitely something that needs solving!
Keep up the good work.
Peter Claridge
 

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