Affinity 1.9 Creative Assets Install from My Account

[ethos7]

Hi All,

I just purchased and installed Designer, Publisher, and Photo and it came with all these free assets such as Snow Overlays, Fog Overlays, etc. - these became available to download via the new My Account syncing process. After I registered each product it offered me to download them and install them automatically, which I did for each app. But when I was done it seems that it downloaded them each three times, which was over 2GB of content each time. It did not seem aware of if a creative asset was even usable in that particular app. And in each asset it does not say anything about which app they could be used for.

How should this have been done?

Could I have just downloaded them once from any one app and had the asset available in whichever app it is supposed to be available in?

Or do I need to figure out which app it should be used in and only install it in that app?

If it can be used in multiple apps do I need to have it duplicitously downloaded for each app?

This is all the Desktop apps on a Mac running Bug Sur (not M1)

Edited February 4, 2021 by ethos7

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, ethos7 said:

It did not seem aware of if a creative asset was even usable in that particular app.

Anything that was downloaded should be usable in that application. The function checks for that.

1 hour ago, ethos7 said:

Could I have just downloaded them once from any one app and had the asset available in whichever app it is supposed to be available in?

No. The Assets must be installed in each application you will use them in.

 

1 hour ago, ethos7 said:

If it can be used in multiple apps do I need to have it duplicitously downloaded for each app?

Yes, if you want to use it in each.

Note that you can remove the from any application you don't want them in.

[Keene]

i downloaded these assets  but have no way of knowing where they went. in my down loads is one affinity file at 529mb about.

if these are the files do i just install it. labelled affinity photo 190.

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, Keene said:

i downloaded these assets  but have no way of knowing where they went. in my down loads is one affinity file at 529mb about.

if these are the files do i just install it. labelled affinity photo 190.

If you downloaded them using the new function you should find them in the Assets panel in the Studio.

[Keene]

thank you

[ethos7]

Thanks Walt. Seems a terrible waste of disk space if this is the case. This is especially problematic with the premium Mac puts on getting a hard drive bigger than 256GB. I hope Affinity rethinks this process, especially with a unified “persona” thing happening. To have to add the same asset three times is a serious waste. A central asset location accessible to all apps would be much more functional and less work for the end user. 

[walt.farrell]

41 minutes ago, ethos7 said:

especially with a unified “persona” thing happening. To have to add the same asset three times is a serious waste.

For Publisher, with its 3 Personas that can use Assets, you have only one Assets file.

But the full Designer and Photo applications would each have their own copy, too, if you install them there.

I'm sure that Serif would like to change that, but they've mentioned before that the sandboxing rules applied by Apple and Microsoft cause issues. Maybe someday they'll figure out how to make the sharing work even with those restrictions.

[den-lim]

Yeah, I had the same problem. My mac is only 128GB and I lost a whole lot of space!

What I did was to uninstall all the added assets from Publisher. I'm assuming most of the assets are for creation, so I only installed on Photo and Designer. I also removed any assets that's over 1GB.

[R C-R]

14 hours ago, den-lim said:

Yeah, I had the same problem. My mac is only 128GB and I lost a whole lot of space!

It would be somewhat helpful if the assets downloaded via the My Account window permitted users to delete individual assets (like one can do with manually installed assets) so that for example one could cull the numerous very large Daub paper textures (450+ MB) down to just a few favorites.

It is possible to do that now, but only by installing the entire asset category, dragging one into a new document, & then switching to a new or existing manually created asset category, selecting that layer in the document, & then using "Add from Selection" to add it to the manually created one. Once the desired ones have been added, the downloaded category can be uninstalled from the app, reclaiming a lot of space.

This does not eliminate the duplication across the different Affinity apps but it does allow users to customize what they want to be available in each of them, categorized however they want.

[3doutlaw]

New user here, and the software I installed on my D Drive (lots of new laptops have smaller system drives, but big d drives)   When I installed the account free content from within the software, it is downloading to somewhere on C, it is losing space...    Is there a setting to put it on D where the software actually is?

Its downloading to C:\Users\-ME-\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\temp\601f1310

Since that is a temp, where is the end location for this? (Spray Paint textures for affinity designer)

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, 3doutlaw said:

Since that is a temp, where is the end location for this? (Spray Paint textures for affinity designer)

When installed, that one would end up in C:\Users\-ME-\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Designer\1.0\user\assets.propcol

In theory (though I have never tried) you should be able to use symlinks in your Windows file system so that C:\Users\-ME-\AppData\Roaming\Affinity redirects to something like D:\AppData\Affinity instead. Google (or other search engines) should find some interesting instructions if you ask about moving appdata on windows. (Note that I would not move AppData itself, but moving AppData\Affinity might be feasible using this approach.)

For example:
https://superuser.com/questions/1250288/can-i-move-my-appdata-folder-in-windows-10
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/complete-guide-to-symbolic-links-symlinks-on-windows-or-linux/

Edit: I've done this now. See below.

[3doutlaw]

OK thanks.  I can live with those, but will need to be careful for anything else.  Probably limit my purchases, so that's a good thing    Be nice to see the location editable, as locations like Documents can be relocated to D drive for a user without the need for links, or even ProgramData.  It's too early for me to start complaining!  lol

[BrettD]

Timely thread! But the Sunday morning 'head fog' means my neurones are not firing properly despite my MBP and Big Sur working just fine...

I list of new assets pop-up when I opened Designer this morning and I thought great, some really useful stuff there, and proceeded to download them.

Now, like Keene, I have no idea where the downloads went - can't find them anywhere to import in Studio>Assets. They don't show in Assets panels except for one (the Fog one) in Photo. It's probably obvious, and therefore simple, but I can't get my head in the correct logical space to find them. (I did somehow manage to import the 'Fog' asset - but don' ask me how...). Anyone able to direct me??

3doutlaw's suggestion of including an editable location for downloads such as these assets would certainly make early Sunday mornings, in particular, less of a challenge! Now for those scrambled eggs 😀

 

 

[walt.farrell]

1 minute ago, BrettD said:

They don't show in Assets panels

So what is showing in the Assets panel Category pulldown?

One "trick" that has worked in some cases for some other users: In the Assets panel, click the hamburger (settings) icon for the panel, choose Create New Category, and add one. Now see if everything else shows up.

[walt.farrell]

So, in case it helps someone:  I have now moved the Affinity folder from C:\Users\Walt\AppData\Roaming to E:\Affinity-AppData and all the Affinity applications seem to work (though I'm not sure about performance yet; E is local but not an SSD).

Steps I took:

1. Created E:\Affinity-AppData
2. Ensured no Affinity applications were running.
3. Copied the contents of C:\Users\Walt\AppData\Roaming\Affinity to E:\Affinity-AppData
4. Deleted C:\Users\Walt\AppData\Roaming\Affinity
5. Started a Windows Command Prompt by right-clickng on its icon and choosing More > Run as Administrator then issued the following commands
6. cd \Users\Walt\AppData\Roaming
7. mklink /J Affinity E:\Affinity-AppData

(Obviously, substitute your Windows username for Walt in all of that. Also, at step 5, if for some reason your command prompt didn't put you on disk C, switch to disk C by using the command "C:" (without the quotes) to get there.)

Notes:

• I am not recommending that anyone do this, merely reporting that it worked for me, and has not caused any issues yet. And it recovered a significant amount of space on my C drive (but I have a lot of Affinity Store content installed, across all 3 applications, or 6 counting the beta versions).
• It is not something documented or recommended by Serif as an intended user action.
• If it breaks some Affinity processing, Serif will undoubtedly say it shouldn't be done. (And it's very unlikely to have been tested by them )

[BrettD]

29 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

So what is showing in the Assets panel Category pulldown?

One "trick" that has worked in some cases for some other users: In the Assets panel, click the hamburger (settings) icon for the panel, choose Create New Category, and add one. Now see if everything else shows up.

Hi Walt, thanks for the response. See screen capture of the Assets panel in Designer.

........... Oh wait!! I added a new category and clicked on the menu item originally labeled 'iOS12' at the top of the panel and lo and behold, there they are! Your prompt about creating a new category made me think and indeed look more closely. It wasn't a 100% intuitive location for the new assets for me (have rarely used them and then the default list usually sufficient). Then again, it is Sunday morning here and I have made and shared my scrambled eggs. So thank you!