XnviewMP freezes Affinity Photo

[Webfrit]

Hello and greetings!

This week I purchased a license of Affinity Photo. I had tried the software before but hadn't seriously worked with it and suddenly I ran into a serious performance problem. Every time I selected a whole image to paste into another one, Affinity Photo would freeze for a few seconds. If I selected only a part of the image, it didn't happen, but if I made a full selection, it would freeze. 
It took me a couple of days to find the guilty: XnviewMP. When this photo viewer was open (usually whenever I work with image files) Affinity would freeze. If I didn't use it, everything worked perfectly. 
I was surprised because I never had problems with Photoshop CS6 and decided to try other editors. Finally I found that the same thing was happening with GIMP. I did a web search and saw that several GIMP users had reported the same error. This only happens with XnviewMP not with Xnview classic. Does anyone know what could be the cause of this conflict between these programs?

Thanks and sorry for my primitive English 😅

[Ron P.]

Welcome to the forums @Webfrit,

Are you selecting from within XnViewMP and pasting into Photo? Are you working in Photo, selecting and pasting from images open in Photo, and XnViewMP just happens to be open in the background?

So far I've not been able to replicate this.

[Webfrit]

Thanks Ron.

No, I'm not trying to copy and paste between XnViewMP and Photo, simply when I'm working in Photo and XnViewMP is open in the background the software freezes for a few seconds.

I link a video where you can see it clearly. Look when I open XnViewMP and then when I try to copy and paste.

Video Affinity Photo freezes when XnViewMP is open

Turning hardware acceleration on and off doesn't change anything. By the way, I work with a Ryzen 7 2700X, 16GB RAM and a Radeon RX 580 8GB

[Ron P.]

What version of XnViewMP are you using? I hadn't updated it until now, version 1.0. After doing so I started seeing the short freezing. I played around with having XnViewMP opened to various folders. It seemed worse when it was open to a folder where I was copy/pasting using image(s) from that same folder.

Caveat, I can get a short freezing with AP, without having XnViewMP open. I think in this situation it's more to do with the images and where they're located on my system, for example, on a secondary drive.

The freezing I'm seeing is 1-2 secs only.

[Webfrit]

I use the latest version but I also tried 0.84 and one of the first ones, 0.26, and always with the same result. 

In my case I don't notice any difference when I have an XnViewMP window open with the photos I'm editing and as soon as I close it Affinity Photo behaves perfectly without any lag or freezing.

I have been reading in some forums about the same conflict between XnViewMP and GIMP (especially linux users) and many point to the QT libraries as the cause of the problem. As the classic version of XnView does not use these libraries it does not generate the error.

Others also point to some background operation of XnViewMP with the clipboard, but it's hard to determine if one doesn't have too much programming knowledge.

I have been looking for some dll conflict but without success.

Thanks.