About Assets Manager - does adding loads of textures here slow down the Affinity Designer

[Chillr2021]

Hi I was thinking of adding lots of high resolution textures to the assets manager but then thought would this slow down the whole software having to load all these big files, is it not recommended to do this? can anyone advise.

 

Cheers

Phil

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

All the Assets are stored in a single file, assets.propcol, which can grow very big if you do that. And with everything in a single file like that, if there is an error writing to the file when you're adding a new Asset, the entire file will be corrupted, and you'll have to start over adding them again. So make sure you have good backups of the items you put into the Assets panel, and good backups of the assets.propcol file.

And yes, it will impact performance. But no one that I know of has ever measured how big an effect on performance it has.

[carl123]

1 hour ago, Chillr2021 said:

Hi I was thinking of adding lots of high-resolution textures to the assets manager

If they are small high-res textures that you use in a repeating pattern to create a larger pattern that's probably OK

But if they are large (e.g. page size) high-resolution textures, don't do it!

 

1 hour ago, Chillr2021 said:

Hi I was thinking of adding lots

How many is a lot nowadays?

50, 500, 5000, 50000

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, carl123 said:

But if they are large (e.g. page size) high-resolution textures, don't do it!

It can work, and is supported. Some of the texture content you can purchase from the Affinity Store is delivered as Assets, and can be automatically installed

But yes, the assets.propcol file gets big. I think mine are several GB in size.

[carl123]

My "don't do it!" is based on user reports of losing all assets due to a corrupted assets.propcol file, the failure of some users to backup their assets.propcol file, program initial load time with a large assets file, and performance issues re the same on less-than-optimal PC configurations.

I deleted all the free asset textures Serif recently supplied as assets (and jpg files) and just downloaded the jpg files instead

 

[Chillr2021]

Thanks guys, yup thought it would be not recommended but worth asking, I won't do it then, probably of took ages too lol. Thanks again.

 

Phil

[walt.farrell]

As long as you have the appropriate backups it might be worth an experiment

But for the most part, keeping individual JPG/PNG/TIFF image files in a well-organized file system and using File > Place rather than the Assets panel may be less work, and less disk space, overall.

[Chillr2021]

Yes Walt thanks I have recently organized lots of my resources and ditched lots of things I'll never use, I think I was turning into a resource assets horder so yeah I still have lots of textures and using file>place sounds the sensible option.

Cheers

Phil

 

[R C-R]

Personally, I mostly use Assets just for simple things that I can organize into categories & subcategories in some way that makes them quicker & easier to access than if they were saved in individual files.