Affinity Designer's Export Persona is severely lacking in functionality, making it very frustrating to use.

[tonycoculuzzi]

I've been using the Affinity programs for a few years now. For the most part I'm really happy with them, but today I started work on a document with many slices (with more being added) and it turns out, the export persona is very lacking in even the most basic features:

No way to reorganize slices in the Slices panel
The fact that we can't reorganize slices in the Slices panel makes it impossible to keep slices organized. This is necessary for grouping, selecting, and modifying slices easily, which quickly becomes frustrating with the current lack of organization functionality. I just want to be able to drag-to-reorder slices in the Slices panel.

No Copy/Paste/Duplicate
"Creating hundreds of slices of identical sizes and settings? Too bad, you need to create every slice individually!" If I have multiple slices for each element (up, down, hover, etc) and I need to create 50 of these elements, that's 150 individual rectangles that need to be drawn, renamed, etc. This can take hours. This workflow is a nightmare.

No Auto-Slice
This one surprised me. There's no way to quickly slice around existing elements, or auto-slice by grid, etc. Again, this forces users to hand-draw each slice rectangle. Nightmare workflow.

Lacking multi-selection edit
Selecting multiple slices should let you modify the properties of all selected slices. The Export Options can be modified together, but changing or adding multiple export formats quickly becomes tedious (and impossible, when you get into the 100s of slices range)

 

I've been a huge proponent of Affinity over the past few years, recommending it at every chance I get. Lately though, the lack of functionality (and usability) in the Export Persona makes me regret my decision to go all-in on Affinity's ecosystem. (Not to mention the bugs on Windows, but that's a topic for another time)

[guywholikesaffinityapps]

I agree.
I barely use the export page because most of the times, the whole document is what I need.
But the moment I need to export just a part of an 'artwork', but a very specific one,

I cannot just snap-select an element to be exported. So I end up creating a new document with the exact measurements and copy and pasting (and here snapping it into position) in the new document.

And while I partly like the Affinity programs for not having an unnecessary feature for everything and instead letting the user do it through workarounds that are actually faster than using a special tool like that,

this wouldn't be an unnecessary. It would be a small but convenient addition. As well as the other mentioned tweaks.

Edited June 10, 2021 by guywholikesaffinityapps

[garrettm30]

2 hours ago, guywholikesaffinityapps said:

I cannot just snap-select an element to be exported.

You can automatically create a slice for any object in the layers studio, including groups. If there is an element, or group of elements, that you want exported, just select it from the layers studio (while within the Export persona), and click the Create Slice button at the bottom of the Layers studio.

When it comes to drawing a slice, I think it is a pity that the Slice Tool does not follow snapping. I have often felt like that was an oversight, especially as Affinity generally has such good snapping options.

[retrograde]

Would love a way to perform a grid slice to slice up a document for import into Unity as an isometric tileset of a static background.

[hawk]

+1

Trying to slice up a large grid of sprites is almost impossible right now. (I didn't make the sprites, it's just one large image.) I'm having to manually make hundreds of slices without even any snapping! (Forgot there's slice-to-slice snapping at least, but I'm finding it to not be 100% reliable and having to adjust some of the slices by 1 pixel.)

What would help me right now is:

1. A way to convert a layer slice to a regular slice. Then I could make rectangles all over the grid easily with power duplicate, select all, make slices, convert to regular slices, hide/remove the rectangles and export.
2. Fix the inordinate beach-balling when exporting a large number of slices. I clicked export for about 600 slices five minutes ago and it's still beackballing on the destination folder picker...

Thanks!