Affinity Photo Batch Job – alternative way to assign files?

[hifred]

Hi All,
we have a huge image-folder with thousands of PSD files which we want to batch export to PNG. While Affinity Photo does this quickly we run into limits with the GUI – as seemingly one can only add files to the job with the OS-default browse dialog (win10 in our case). We want to process several hundreds of images at once – and the Windows native file picker which doesn't work with file-metadata totally isn't up to the task.

All image in our folder are cleanly grouped with keywords – it would be super simple to drag and drop all similar assets to the processing queue – but unfortunately this method seems not to be supported at this time. Is there possibly another way to access the batch tool, where drag and drop is supported? We for overall workflow reasons prefer not to create subfolders, merely for exporting.

[walt.farrell]

If the files are all sorted together in the File Explorer window that Affinity Photo opens, you can use standard Windows processing to select them: click the first one, then scroll to the last one and shift-click on the last one. Then click Open.

[hifred]

Thank you. Imagine a folder with tremendously many files. They are instantly sortable in a way every DAM software can deal with – but not the native Windows File Picker. I can not identify by file-name or by preview-image what we want to happen with the particular file (output format / size). Hence, my question.

[David in Яuislip]

1 hour ago, hifred said:

huge image-folder with thousands of PSD files

If it's a single folder then @walt.farrell's method will work. If you need to include sub-directories then this 

may help. However, exiftool can move image files into folders based on metadata so you could run the batch file on the lot then use exiftool to move files into folders depending on keywords. However^2, png files don't contain exif data so it depends on how you've added the metadata and whether that is passed on by Affinity during a batch run and whether exiftool can read it. If it doesn't then you could use exiftool to move the psd's into keyword folders to start with. Good luck

[hifred]

Hehe, I really only asked whether one can access batch processing in another way where Drag and Drop is supported. I might have missed it.

Walt's method would be difficult to use in our case and creating folders would mean moving hundreds of GB, just for exporting. We could easily create folders based on Metadata in our DAM but deliberately decided against doing this – tagging is far more powerful.

I think I have my answer: No,  there's no drag and drop enabled way to add images to an export queue.

👋

 

PS: I checked the thread @David in Яuislip linked but  the search-method doesn't help us either. Hopefully, Affinity adds Drag and Drop soon, because the overall Exporter performance is very nice.

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, hifred said:

Imagine a folder with tremendously many files. They are instantly sortable in a way every DAM software can deal with – but not the native Windows File Picker.

If you're sorting based on tags, and if your DAM is tagging the files in a way that is compatible with standard Windows file tagging, then you can still do it from the standard Windows File Manager dialog that Affinity invokes. It has  a Search box. In that box you can type, for example, "Tags: " and follow it with a tag to search for.

[hifred]

That's interesting, thanks! I just tried this out. It works (albeit slowly, as I have turned off OS native indexing – don't need it). Search seems only to support standard letters, though. If I enter a keyword / tag with a Tilde ~ Search can't find anything.

[v_kyr]

Did you also tried with quoting the tilde (aka:  Tags:"~"Hintergu...)?

See related search stuff Q&As on the net ...

• Wat is the syntax of search strings in File Explorer's search box?

• Searching for files with a tilde in the extension

• How to Search in File Explorer in Windows 10

• MS Advanced Query Syntax