Affinity Suite: managing the order of tabs

[Pyanepsion]

Hello everyone,

I have selected thumbnails 06 to 15 from a project in Affinity Designer. They appear in a complete mess. If I want to rearrange them by hand, moving each tab into the correct order of the bar, it becomes particularly complicated, because if I move away from the title bar ‘rail’, the tab becomes free and independent.

The order of the tabs is important for good work management. We open all the images for which the work is similar in one go, which makes it possible to limit errors, (and even later, when the Affinity suite knows how to do it, to automate this type of task). Each tab is then closed as it is worked on, in order, which allows you to know where you stand.

Spoiler

In reality I have 185 images to work on, which is common in a project, and not 10 as in this example. Hence an even greater difficulty.

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Pyanepsion said:

In reality I have 185 images to work on, which is common in a project, and not 10 as in this example. Hence an even greater difficulty.

The Affinity applications are certainly not designed for that.

1 hour ago, Pyanepsion said:

it becomes particularly complicated, because if I move away from the title bar ‘rail’, the tab becomes free and independent.

Yes, that is an intentional feature, but it means you need to be very careful with your mouse work when rearranging the tabs. A different mechanism would be useful.

[Pyanepsion]

11 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

[185 images] The Affinity applications are certainly not designed for that.

Of course it is! A magazine, a newspaper, a thesis, an instruction manual, a travel guide, a school book, etc. often contains several hundred illustrations. Fortunately, these can be produced with the Affinity suite.

13 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

A different mechanism would be useful.

Yes, both suggestions (automatic order and manual arrangement) are consistent with what is usually seen in most software. It would be good if Serif looked into this issue, as this is a considerable waste of time!

[PaulEC]

I have a similar problem in Photo. I have a folder with 99 numbered files, I'd really like to open them all, then work on them in the order they were scanned. Having to work on them in a random order is not the end of the world, but it would have been easier if they were displayed in the right order. It would be really useful to have the option of arranging the tabs by file name. (Plus a few other options, like date created etc.)

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, Pyanepsion said:

Of course it is! A magazine, a newspaper, a thesis, an instruction manual, a travel guide, a school book, etc. often contains several hundred illustrations. Fortunately, these can be produced with the Affinity suite.

But it is not designed to have that many files open for editing concurrently.

[Pyanepsion]

16 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But it is not designed to have that many files open for editing concurrently.

You obviously do not work on such files.
Most professionals who do, however, tend to group all jobs in alphabetical order so as to limit errors or oversights, either by doing each job in the order of creation (e.g. scanning for PaulEC) or of the workflow (raster or vector images), etc.
This of course requires that the files be named accordingly: scan number, YYYY-MM-JJ date, order of appearance in the final document, etc.

[walt.farrell]

51 minutes ago, Pyanepsion said:

You obviously do not work on such files.

I have opened a large number of files for editing.

This tends to end up exhausting system memory. Additionally, the tabs become very narrow and it becomes impossible to identify which tab is for which file. Also, even the Window menu in the Affinity application is limited to showing 10 window (file) names.

Ergo, the applications are not designed for doing that.

[Pyanepsion]

 

53 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

This tends to end up exhausting system memory. Additionally, the tabs become very narrow and it becomes impossible to identify which tab is for which file. Also, even the Window menu in the Affinity application is limited to showing 10 window (file) names.

✏️ This shortcoming, the number of tabs in the tab bar, etc. has little to do with the present suggestion, you should perhaps open another topic in the same Suggestions section of this forum.
That being said, you probably have a problem with your software or your hardware, because in my case, despite a hardware that is a bit limited in memory and graphics card, I don’t have any problems with slowness, memory saturation and tabs that are too small, as shown by this loading of 169 files. Only loading and closing are a bit long, but that’s normal since you have to load each file when opening, and check that none has been modified when closing.

[MikeTO]

57 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I have opened a large number of files for editing.

This tends to end up exhausting system memory. Additionally, the tabs become very narrow and it becomes impossible to identify which tab is for which file. Also, even the Window menu in the Affinity application is limited to showing 10 window (file) names.

Ergo, the applications are not designed for doing that.

FYI, on macOS with Separated mode off, the tabs do not become very narrow. They get narrower until they're at a small but still useful size and then an overflow menu appears to the right from which you can select a tab. The Window menu can't be used for switching tabs with Separated mode off - there's just a single window listed.

On macOS with Separated mode on there aren't any tabs of course but the Window menu will happily show far more than 10 documents.

[Old Bruce]

For opening 99 files and having them in an alphabetic order it is possible to write a script (I used Python for a proof of concept) which will open them in Affinity Photo or Designer, or Publisher. My files tend to be large enough that more than a half dozen starts to slow things down so I tossed it.

[Pšenda]

9 hours ago, Pyanepsion said:

You obviously do not work on such files.
Most professionals who do, however, tend to group all jobs in alphabetical order so as to limit errors or oversights, either by doing each job in the order of creation (e.g. scanning for PaulEC) or of the workflow (raster or vector images), etc.
This of course requires that the files be named accordingly: scan number, YYYY-MM-JJ date, order of appearance in the final document, etc.

But none of this is the reason why all files "must" be opened and edited at the same time, which is what Walt writes about.

[Pyanepsion]

Still on the same subject, the selected tab is not very visible against a dark background, unlike the light version.