AF Designer and Photo document preview in Finder very small and fuzzy

[deepblue]

557 / 5.000

Hi there,

when I have created a document in Affinity Designer and save it on the desktop, can I display the document by pressing the spacebar in the finder. A small preview is displayed in the Finder. Is there a way to display the preview window to zoom in to view the Affinity Designer document? Unfortunately, the preview is very small and very blurry. Is it possible to change this?

Thanks very much.

Best wishes Mark

[Lee D]

As this is outside of the app I'm not sure if our developers can do anything.

[deepblue]

Hello, thank you for your answer. I have now tried the document preview in the Finder with various programs (Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, AF Designer, AF Photo, Pixelmator and Amadine).

The document preview is only displayed very small with AF Designer and Photo. As soon as I open the Finder preview for an Affinity Designer document with the spacebar, I get a small preview. If I now want to enlarge this preview at the bottom right, the graphic appears pixelated and very blurred.

I think only the developers of Affinity can change that. The problem is not with MacOS or with the system (Intel/Silikon).

So it would be great if you could enlarge the document preview a bit.

Thanks very much.

[paschulke2]

This is of course not "outside of the app". The feature to show a good preview of a file in the finder is called "Quick Look":

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/quicklook

Quote

Providing Quick Look Previews for your Data Types

To provide Quick Look previews for your own file types, create a Quick Look Preview Extension with either a view controller or data based preview.

Unfortunately, Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer do not provide this extension and all you get to see is a small png of your photo or designer file in the finder. It's not a bug, but the unwillingness to properly implement a very useful standard feature of Mac OS.

[deepblue]

Thank you very paschulke2 much for your information. Yes, exactly Quicklook is called the function.
Why is this preview not supported by Affinity Designer and Photo?

Especially with MacOS it offers a lot of advantages and is very useful and I can't understand either
why doesn't Affinity implement this awesome preview on your products.

Actually, almost all programs on the Mac use this useful standard function.

Is the function --> Quick Look Preview Extension planned for Affinity at all?

I would be very happy if someone from Affinity could comment on this.

Thanks very much.

[helloalys]

Hi everyone, i think i figured out a way. Mac can see PSD thumbnails so i tried exporting my affinity documents as PSDs everytime, and it works! 

[BBG3]

I need to have a better preview before opening my files. Thank you @deepblue for saving my time writing this problem.

Thank you

[Oufti]

On 2/26/2022 at 2:10 PM, deepblue said:

Yes, exactly Quicklook is called the function.
Why is this preview not supported by Affinity Designer and Photo?

Especially with MacOS it offers a lot of advantages and is very useful and I can't understand either
why doesn't Affinity implement this awesome preview on your products.

Actually, almost all programs on the Mac use this useful standard function.

Is the function --> Quick Look Preview Extension planned for Affinity at all?

In version 2, at least it exists for Affinity native files — even if it's not very powerful (no multi pages preview, nor zooming). 

The related files are embedded in Affinity's programs content:
e.g., for Designer, it's in /Applications/Affinity Designer 2.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/QuickLook.qlgenerator (when installed from Serif site). 

[gsax]

On 9/4/2023 at 11:49 AM, Oufti said:

In version 2, at least it exists for Affinity native files — even if it's not very powerful (no multi pages preview, nor zooming). 

The related files are embedded in Affinity's programs content:
e.g., for Designer, it's in /Applications/Affinity Designer 2.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/QuickLook.qlgenerator (when installed from Serif site). 

yes, found it - but NO PREVIEW - JUST SYMBOL.... (OSX 14 - AD 2.3.1

[Oufti]

43 minutes ago, gsax said:

NO PREVIEW - JUST SYMBOL....

Weird…
Here with Monterey: 

 

Possibly some delay is needed for the previews to be created when the window has many items to show?