Assets sharing between Photo and Designer - Syncronise assets between apps

[Smoere]

Hello every one,

I use both Affinity Photo and Designer and have started importing and working a lot with assets, which is a great great tool.

But I cannot find a way, how to automatically share the assets elements between the apps automatically.

Is there any clever way, that allows Affinity to updat or synchronise the assets automatically between the apps? Or do I need to manually import them, each and every time I create a new asset in any of the apps.

At the moment, f. eg I export the assets from Photo in order to reimport it into Designer and the other way round. Very time consuming and I'm sure there must be a better way, just cannot find it.

Many thanks for some support and suggestions.

Cheers,

Chris

 

[Joachim_L]

Currently there is no way to share assets among the applications, except for exporting and importing. I hope this will be changed in a future version. In the meantime you can make the action a bit faster. Here is the Windows way: Close the applications and copy the file to the corresponding directory for AP or vice versa: "C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\user\assets.propcol". Then start the application again.

[v_kyr]

Well I didn't tried out, but in order to share one and the same assets file among apps, you can try to make a file system symbolic link to a central saved one for every app.

[Joachim_L]

Personally I would prefer a folder based approach for assets with a file for each asset instead of one file holding all the assets. It even happened to me, that I corrupted an assets.propcol (no backup, lesson learned) and all my collected assets were gone.

[v_kyr]

Hmm that would enhance file I/O loading a lot then for many assets, also makes sharing them overall more time consuming and difficult. Thus using a container based file format as actually has at least advantages in reducing file I/O and sharing a single file vs xxx seperate files. - However, the apps could all use/share a common one (aka global shared place Serif/Affinity folder path) and beside that keep their individual places too. So as a user you could have and use both, global common shared once and app specific ones.

In order to prevent for file damages, some build-in backup/restore strategy would be helpful, or at least a messaging service which will remind you to do so periodically.

[Move Along People]

-

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, haakoo said:

Embed assets in the document works ...

Might unnecessarily blow up file size.

1 hour ago, haakoo said:

New in the latest pub beta (win)663>drag/drop is added,export to ...

No automation then, since every time would need some user interaction to keep in sync.

1 hour ago, haakoo said:

When using publisher as starting point ,imported assets are available in all three personas.

I don't have Publisher and now?

You see, there is quite some difference here in contrast to having a default common initial shared repository, especially if things should be available automatically even when creating new docs from ground up.

[Move Along People]

-

[v_kyr]

17 minutes ago, haakoo said:

Ieder antwoord roept altijd nieuwe vragen op.😉

Ik doe suggesties hoe je het ook kunt doen.

Alles werkt correct, alleen denk ik dat de oorspronkelijke poster het wilde automatiseren.

[Move Along People]

-

 

 

[v_kyr]

Mogelijk, moet u altijd probleemloos testen wat het beste werkt.

[Smoere]

Hi guys, thanks for the replies.

Yes I am looking for a way to automate the synchronisation of the assets folders of both (or three incl. Publisher) apps without having to export/import. Especially every time I add an assets in one app, I need to start the whole export/import process all over again

I have a MAC and just checked where the assets.propcol file is. So it's actually in three different folders, one for each application. So no common assets folder for all. A folder based approach is in my eyes the easiest way to solve the challenge

Hope that could be an interesting feature for a future upgrade for an otherwise really great great product

Many thanks

Chris

 

[v_kyr]

2 hours ago, Smoere said:

I have a MAC and just checked where the assets.propcol file is. So it's actually in three different folders, one for each application. So no common assets folder for all. A folder based approach is in my eyes the easiest way to solve the challenge

You can make a workaround yourself, just rename in two of the app folders the "assets.propcol" file (the extension) in order to keep them as a backup. Then link (best a real symbolic link) the remaining intact "assets.propcol" file of the third app into the other two folders.

For how to do a symbolic link via the terminal see:

• In Terminal.app "man ln"
• or use ManOpen, also available as newer code builds here

For a Finder/GUI approach to perform symbolic links see for example ...

• Create a symbolic link in the Mac OS X Finder
• Create symbolic links in the Finder via AppleScript
• SymbolicLinker
• CommanderOne
• ForkLift 2 free (there are also serveral other file managers which do support this)
• ...etc.

... if you want to try using instead the Finder Ctrl-Click/Right-Click "Make Alias" see here ...

• How to create shortcut in Mac OS X
• Linked Files and Folders in OSX from Finder
• ...etc.

Note: personally I tend to do such things via real symbolic links (aka ln -s ...) since those can be followed inside a terminal/console and GUIs like Finder & Co.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

You can make a workaround yourself, just rename in two of the app folders the "assets.propcol" file (the extension) in order to keep them as a backup. Then link (best a real symbolic link) the remaining intact "assets.propcol" file of the third app into the other two folders.

I would suggest caution when doing that, as the apps probably do not expect a different program to be updating those files, and if you make a change to the file from one of the apps while the other apps are running you may experience corruption issues.

[v_kyr]

58 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

...if you make a change to the file from one of the apps while the other apps are running you may experience corruption issues.

This (the later one) might be more an issue then, since it can lead to a conccurent access on a maybe already opened/aquired file handle. - Here some tools for inspection like Sloth for macs or Win Sysinternals (handle, Process Explorer etc.) can come handy in then.

[Smoere]

Ok, many thanks for all the great input.

I hope affinity is reading this post. Hopefully in the future they'll be able to integrate some smart solution to solve this challenge.

Cheers,

Chris

 

[walt.farrell]

39 minutes ago, Smoere said:

I hope affinity is reading this post.

They may read it, but if you want to make it an official request you should post in the Feature Requests forum.

[Smoere]

#Walt.farrell

thank you, I will.