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Affinity Photo cannot open files from SMB share


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I am on macOS Big Sur, running Affinity Photo 1.8.6.

I have a few photos exported from Photos app and wanted to retouch some of them. Exported photos are on an SMB share. When I try opening files with Affinity Photo (either by right-clicking and going through "Open with…" or by going to File / Open) I get an error like this:

Quote

 

Failed to open file

/Volumes/Exchange/Mila/Alferovskoye, 8 June 2019/IMG_2645.jpeg

The file is already open in another application.

 

Opening up a local file poses no such problem.

I tried moving the file to a different directory (to avoid spaces and commas in the name) — same result.

Opening the same image from the same network location with Acorn or Pixelmator raises no issues.

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  • Staff

Hi @ceesaxp,

Welcome to the forum.

Loading files from a NAS or any networked drive/share isn't something we recommend. If for what ever reason it gets disconnected you can potentially lose all your work and cannot save back to the file. We recommend moving the file from the network to a local location and then load/save to that file. Once saved the file may be moved for storage back to a network location, this does add a few steps to your workflow but it reduces the risk of file corruption.

There are also some none Affinity related known bugs/issues with SMB support on Mac which could relate/contribute to the issues you're experiencing.

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13 minutes ago, Lee D said:

Loading files from a NAS or any networked drive/share isn't something we recommend.

Perhaps this is something Serif should overthink. I know companies where it is strictly forbidden to edit files on local drives and everything should be edited on network drives. From my experience it happened from time to time that the connection to a network drive was lost while working on a file there with Indesign. Indesign warned me about storage problems, but I was still able to save a complete working copy to a local drive.

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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  • 3 months later...

I apologize for bumping an old thread but I wanted to offer a solution to this problem for those who arrived here via Google like me. The behavior in Affinity Photo seems to be caused by cross-protocol file locking being enabled on the Samba server. For those who have access to their smb.conf file, set fruit:locking = none. This can be set on a per-share basis so you could also create a new share specifically for photo editing with this option turned off. Please be aware that turning off cross-protocol file locking can cause data corruption if the same file is accessed via multiple file transfer protocols at the same time. It would be great if the Affinity software could include a bug fix for this in future versions 🙂

Edited by Eddie_C
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