Link with Apple Photos incomplete

[stuartbarry]

I have been doing an extensive amount of work on the link between NeoFinder (NF), Apple Photos(APP) and Affinity Photo (AP). It almost works (creating a neat DAM/editing solution to rival Adobe Lightroom (LR), but the link is broken in one significant place.

Both LR and APP work in a similar fashion: they are catalogues that retain information about the development status of photos and allow you to make non-destructive changes. As such, your view of the image through either reflects the most recent changes made, but the underlying file is not changed. That is very useful, especially if you wish to retain a raw file (typically 25MB and more) as a reference and use that to drive further changes and outputs in various formats, without the overhead of retaining multiple, large versions of the file.

Both LR and APP have a link to AP. The crucial difference is that LR asks the question "edit including Lightroom settings?" when jumping to AP. That gives a beautiful workflow with LR showing the current status and AP used to make edits based on the view just displayed by LR.

But APP does not work this way. Clicking on the link from APP to AP causes AP to open the original file. So the link out to AP does not fully work. But the link back to APP DOES work. If you ask the image to be saved it knows that it came from APP and saves the current changes back to the APP editor (the document status box confirms that this is an APP photo). If you decide to make a change in future you have to start all over again.

I don't know whether this requires a change on the Apple or Serif side, but it is certain that Serif could apply more pressure on Apple than I can to make the change. Can someone at Serif please, please consider this and make the change - you can then compete fully with LR and I can achieve my goal of switching my workflow.

[stuartbarry]

I can add some more information. I have just updated all my Affinity Apps to 1.9 and installed the latest 11.2 MacOS update that includes some changes to Photos. Nothing much seems to have changed, except that I noticed the following behaviour.

• Going from Apple Photos (APP) to Affinity Photos (AP) there are several options other than 'edit in AP'. If you select any of these other options, for example Affinity Retouch, you get the window supplied by APP that tells you to edit in AP then exit. This DOES include the latest APP edits. On the right hand side you just get that set of editing options, but not the full AP interface. Making changes followed by 'save changes' returns you to APP with the changes intact.
• If you choose 'Edit in Affinity Photo' from the APP extensions options you get the full AP window, but with the original file, NOT the latest APP edited version. If it is a raw file you end up in raw processing and have to develop as usual. When leaving AP you are asked if you want to save changes, and these are preserved back to APP.

So the Apple and Affinity workflow is half way complete, but the ability to use the full power of AP is not there unless you create a new file and edit that independently in AP.

I about to install a new Mac Mini and will test this again with a fresh set of hardware to see if there are any changes, compared with my old MacBook Pro.

[Adrian991]

I’ve just started using AP as an external editor for APP but when I save the file after completing the edit in AP and close the file, at the bottom of the APP screen is a notification that the image will be flattened because it exceeds the 16MB change limit, what is going on here?