Does assets make Affinity heavy?

[Jorge Aramuni]

Does Affinity embed the assets (in the Assets Manager)? Or the assets are linked to a folder? I'm worrying about Affinity become too heavy if dozens or hundred of assets are embedded.

[GarryP]

I’m not sure what you mean by “embedded” or “heavy” but the more assets you have the longer the application will take to launch as the application checks the contents of the ‘assets file’ so that it knows which assets are available. (It's probably way more complicated than that in practice.)

The number of assets you have should not, as far as I’m aware, slow the application down while in use – any ‘slow down’ should only be during application launch. There may be some slow-down in some cases, see below.

Edit 1: See explanation by Walt below about possible slow-down during asset management/maintenance.

Edit 2: Also see the post by PaulEC below, who, I think, is actually answering the question raised.

Edited August 29, 2022 by GarryP
Added clarification.

[PaulEC]

The assets are stored in an assets file, they are not linked, so it can result in a large assets file, which may be important if you have limited space on your hard drive.

[walt.farrell]

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

The number of assets you have should not, as far as I’m aware, slow the application down while in use – any ‘slow down’ should only be during application launch.

Having a huge number of Assets in the Assets panel (and in the assets.propcol file) will slow startup, as you mentioned. It will also significantly slow the addition, deletion, renaming, moving, or removing of assets in the Assets panel. And it can also slow down navigation within the Assets panel (changing categories, scrolling, etc.) 

[Old Bruce]

5 hours ago, Jorge Aramuni said:

1. Does Affinity embed the assets (in the Assets Manager)?
2. Or the assets are linked to a folder?
3. I'm worrying about Affinity become too heavy if dozens or hundred of assets are embedded.

1: Yes, for Assets in the Assets panel. But not in the Assets Manager, that is for managing each document's added files. They are stored in the bowels of the application.

2: No.

3: It will become heavy and slow if the hundreds of assets are large (in bytes, 16 KBs versus 100 MBs)

[thomaso]

7 hours ago, Jorge Aramuni said:

• Does Affinity embed the assets (in the Assets Manager)?
• Or the assets are linked to a folder?

In addition to what was said above:

• Embedding vs. linked: An asset itself must not contain a linked item.
For instance a picture frame containing a linked image will embed this image if added to the Asset panel.
That means you can not use an asset as library for instance for certain client items linked to one specific original file on your disc. (e.g. a logo).

Also 'container' file formats are not allowed, as e.g. .afpub, .afdesign, .afphoto, .PDF, .EPS. If you try to add one of these types an error message pops-up which sounds a bit confusing or misleading by its mentioned "embedded" documents:

• Embedded, app vs. document: Aside the general storage in the Asset panel you can embed the currently selected category (with all its sub-categories) within an Affinity document. This will make sure the assets are available if the documents gets opened in another Affinity app on the same or on another computer, and accordingly will increase the document's file size by the asset file sizes.

If you open a document which contains embedded assets you get asked whether you want to import them to make them available for use once the document fully opened. Once imported they remain in the Asset panel even if this document gets closed (regardless of being saved or not). To remove them you need to delete the category.

• Export / import: You can export | import asset main categories, they include all their sub-categories. This allows to choose a custom storage location for the created .afasasset file. You may name the file but if imported they show the initial name of their category.