Publisher: struggles with iCloud Drive.

[RNKLN]

Hi,

I'm struggling with iCloud Drive. I believe some problems with have been discussed on the forum in the past, but I couldn't find them.

My situation is as follows: I have two MacBook Pro machines. With one of them I have some general issues with iCloud Drive. The other one is working fine (apart from the issue described below).

On both machines, including the machine which is working fine, when I go to Finder, I don't see a Publisher folder. Folders for Designer and Photo are there. I do have some Publisher documents stored on iCloud Drive, though. When in Publisher I can open them (via the Open dialog which points to the Affinity Publisher by default or because it's recent), work on them and save them.

Funny is that, in both Open and Save dialogs, in the sidebar the Publisher folder isn't shown. The only ways to Open the Publisher files is via the Open Recent list or because the Publisher folder is shown by default.

Also funny is that, when I take my iPhone and use the Files app, I do get to see the Publisher folder on iCloud Drive, including the latest saved version of the files.

Also, on the machine with general iCloud Drive problems, I don't get to see the Publisher files. Even not when I use the Open dialog. But I do get to see the Publisher folder in both the sidebar and the drop-down list on top of the Open dialog.

In summary:

Machine 1 (the working MBP)

• No Publisher icons in Finder
• No Publisher folder visible in Open and Save dialogs sidebar
• Files can be worked on.

Machine 2 (the problem MBP)

• No Publisher icons in Finder
• Publisher folder visible in Open and Save dialogs sidebar
• Files don't show up

iPhone

• Publisher icons in Files
• Files can be seen and duplicated.

Anybody with a suggestion?

 

Edited December 22, 2020 by RNKLN
Screenshots added.

[GaryLearnTech]

Hi @RNKLN I believe I have found at a least part of the explanation for your anomalies.  As far as I can see, the three special Affinity folders are optional.  (Obviously, you can create your own ones with similar names.)  In System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud, you should see something similar to the following.  (Note that this view is the same on both Big Sur and Catalina.)

 

Click the highlighted Options button from the first screenshot to be presented with a list of compatible apps.  I'm betting that you've got different selections made between your two machines.

 

In the final screenshot from the Finder, there was only the Designer folder when I looked at this earlier.  When I saved a test file into the Photo folder from the app itself, the new Affinity Photo folder showed up in the Finder.  Both have the apps's icons on the folders.  (Yes, there's an oddity with the Photo icon on the Designer folder.  I believe I've seen that discussed here before, but I'm not fussed - it's close enough for me just now.)

In contrast, the plain Publisher folder was created directly in the Finder in the old fashioned way: cmd-N .  These hopefully illustrate the difference between what I referred to earlier as special folders and regular folders.

I suspect that if I was to create a special Publisher folder (by saving a file directly from within Publisher), there might be conflicts of some sort with the manually created one.  Consequently, I shall either be deleting or renaming the one in the example below to avoid any possible problems in the future.

 

Hope this points you in the right direction!

[RNKLN]

Hi Gary, thanks for your help.

The bad news is that i've checked all Affinity products on both machines. Also, i've tried to uncheck and recheck the Publisher setting, but this didn't change anything.

Some (partial) good news too. In the meantime, i've enabled iCloud for my Admin account (i work with an Admin account and a User account; the User account is the one for which i'd setup iCloud drive) on the 'problem' MBP. All folders now do show up, including the Publisher one (but the problems i have with this problem machine remain). So, there's no need to create the Publisher folder yourself.

And yes, the issue with Designer having the Photo icon has indeed been discussed before, i'm convinced (and that's what i'd been searching for but couldn't find; it may contain the solution for my issue too).