Photo 2 installation directory??

[Grainger]

11 minutes ago, Transglobalist said:

Just FYI Walt--and for reasons unknown--this does't always work. It fails on my system every time. I've tried rebooting, reinstalling, etc, before moving, and all three apps fail upon move. (In case it isn't clear: "We can't move Affinity Designer 2. The operation didn't complete correctly. Try again later. If you need it, the error code is 0x80073cf6.")

The intended drive is D:/ -- which is where my current Affinity 1.10 apps all live.

 

I got the same error (in german 😉).

Edited November 9, 2022 by Grainger

[Transglobalist]

Just now, Grainger said:

I got the same error (in german 😉).

FWIW, I successfully moved a couple of other Windows apps using this technique, to make sure the failure was solely with the Affinity apps. The other apps moved without issues.

[Grainger]

12 hours ago, Transglobalist said:

FWIW, I successfully moved a couple of other Windows apps using this technique, to make sure the failure was solely with the Affinity apps. The other apps moved without issues.

Exact the same here, the app for my HyperX Mouse, Keyboard and Headset moved without any problems.

[Jaroko]

14 hours ago, Wizaerd said:

So there are several issues...  These Affinity apps now appear to install into C:\Program Files\WindowsApps which is a hidden folder that we apparently cannot access, not even on our own systems.  Using a Registry hack, I was able to finally look inside that directory to find where the Affinity stuff now installs.  I have been able to successfully add these paths to Cartoon Animator and it will open the apps as expected.

C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityDesigner2_2.0.0.1640_x64__3cqzy0nppv2rt\App\Designer.exe
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityPhoto2_2.0.0.1640_x64__3cqzy0nppv2rt\App\photo.exe

However, my ON1 apps (Effects, Portrait AI, etc...) no longer recognize that Affinity is installed, and it no longer automagically installs as plugins for Affinity Photo.  

And unfortunately, the registry hack I followed to get access to WindowsApps now breaks all my other ON1 apps, and McAfee is now counting them as viruses.  So while the registry hack is my own fault, I still blame serif for making it necessary in order to find the actual executables.  

Bottom line, I am greatly displeased with Ver 2.0.

The batch file and/or shortcut does not work for applications looking for an EXE.  

Do you have Cartoon Animator 5? My CA5 will not open Designer and not Photo. With v1, there was no problem at all.  

[john30]

That will work untill an update and then will have to be redone. Its a mess.

[mb6391]

Yes it's a mess - like others I have found a couple of programs that will not access the Apps section and no, I have no intention of amending/lowering the security for this folder.

What on earth were so development team thinking? Anyone from Affinity care to comment on this thread - I doubt it.

Anyway, refund requested. Maybe if/when it's sorted I'll be back but it's highly unusual for any programmer to admit an error!!

[Riveratore]

Hey I have the same problem.

I use Adobe Bridge from where I used to jump to affinity photo. Now Affinity is not installed in standard way and the Adobe Bridge need to admin access which can not be done of course. It's fluctuating.... I have a lot of DNG files that are very slow to load preview outside of Adobe Bridge. The link to open from Adobe to Affinity is very important to me. :((((

[Deschdy]

Look here:

That means: The Affinity developers can't solve the problem. No good news!

 

[Wizaerd]

4 hours ago, Jaroko said:

Do you have Cartoon Animator 5? My CA5 will not open Designer and not Photo. With v1, there was no problem at all.  

Yes, I do.  And they open fine for me, but I had to do the registry hack in order to even find them.  Without that hack, it is doubtful it would work for me. 

[EDIT] It worked yesterday, but today it doesn't work at all now... Grrrr..... 

If I had known this was going to be so problematic, I most certainly would not have upgraded.  The aliases mentioned above do not work.  And while Serif should've come up with a better installation plan, I blame Microsoft.  It is them who are hiding files and folders on our very own systems, and implementing "standards" for companies to follow that propagate that inaccessibility.

[john30]

Clearly Serif knew there was this problem and went ahead as apps, so no its them that have created the problem and expect every other program publisher bail them out. Given many commercial computers have apps blocked it was a doubly stupid thing to have done, who are they trying to attract professional users who many will be blocked from installing let alone using the apps.

[Transglobalist]

31 minutes ago, Deschdy said:

Look here:

That means: The Affinity developers can't solve the problem. No good news!

 

It's potentially even worse than that, they're passing the buck and playing the blame game. From the thread you linked:

 

I was an enterprise software developer for 20 years, and this is a typical "pass the buck" response and ludicrous on its face. I.e. "...out of our control and related to Windows App Sandboxing" is hindsight CYA, and leaves out the obvious, obligatory, and truthful version:

"Oh, yeah, I guess WE made the choice to change the behaviour of our entire suite--installing it as a Windows App. That's on us. And hey, we thought it was [cool? clever? technologically savvy?] to install differently than 95% of all professional shrink-wrapped software packages! Who cares that OUR choice would impact/destroy the workflow of wide swathes of our user base! And heck, since we're so [cool|clever|savvy] let's not notify potential buyers of the change or impact, either. Let them eat cake (and we'll just blame Adobe, Microsoft, DxO, etc anyway. Suckas!!!)

Probably wasn't a developer who made the choice anyway. This is the reason the gods created middle managers. 🤣😂

Still hoping for a better solution than the .bat file junk.

[Transglobalist]

57 minutes ago, Riveratore said:

Hey I have the same problem.

I use Adobe Bridge from where I used to jump to affinity photo. Now Affinity is not installed in standard way and the Adobe Bridge need to admin access which can not be done of course. It's fluctuating.... I have a lot of DNG files that are very slow to load preview outside of Adobe Bridge. The link to open from Adobe to Affinity is very important to me. :((((

It's very important to lots of people! In the meantime, Walt's batch file hack may work for your situation.

[Wizaerd]

5 minutes ago, Transglobalist said:

It's very important to lots of people! In the meantime, Walt's batch file hack will work for your situation.

Unfortunately, the batch hack will not work for everyone.  The app I'm trying to use to open the Affinity app looks specifically for an EXE and will not accept a batch file.

[john30]

Yes there are many programs that use EXE and I expext the developers will not take kindly to Affinity passing the mess they created onto them to sort out.

[Transglobalist]

9 minutes ago, Wizaerd said:

Unfortunately, the batch hack will not work for everyone.  The app I'm trying to use to open the Affinity app looks specifically for an EXE and will not accept a batch file.

Well that definitely sucks, but it's not surprising. I mean, before yesterday I'd have found it surprising because I think Affinity has been pretty amazing with most of their roll-outs. But this one, sadly, is shoddy and amateurish, at least from the QA perspective; all the more disappointing since it's a major release and they know better!

(Also: changed my text to "MAY work for your situation." 😒)

[Grainger]

I'm afraid that if Serif doesn't fix this very quickly and delivers a conventional installer with a freely selectable path, they will lose a good part of professional users.

[Scrabo]

Just seems odd that this didn't give you a option to perform an in-situ install or fresh install - and allow you to select install location

 

Poorly rolled out.

 

[mb6391]

40 minutes ago, Scrabo said:

Just seems odd that this didn't give you a option to perform an in-situ install or fresh install - and allow you to select install location

 

Poorly rolled out.

 

It's not odd to me. In my book whoever signed V2 off - well the buck stops there. But there's no way you can expect folks to mess around registry hacking when you should be given the (where to) install option. There is no explanation from Serif/Affinity as to why they chose the install route they have. 

Obviously they monitor this forum and their silence is deafening regarding this. Anyway, back to V1 for me as I'm not going to mess around redirecting the paths of other programs.

[BigOldFixer]

22 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

You can do that. You just can't control the exact path.

You can Move the installed application to a different drive. Settings > Apps & Features, select app, Move.

Or you can tell Windows to install new applications on a different drive. Settings > System > Storage, then change the location (drive) for installing new content.

For me setting the new location for application installs failed - its set to my application drive but still insists on installing to my system drive.

Moving also fails for me - I just get a 0x80073cf6 error and a message to try later.

Happy to sit this out - software uninstalled while I wait for a more traditional installer.

[JimInFlorida]

6 minutes ago, BigOldFixer said:

For me setting the new location for application installs failed - its set to my application drive but still insists on installing to my system drive.

Moving also fails for me - I just get a 0x80073cf6 error and a message to try later.

Happy to sit this out - software uninstalled while I wait for a more traditional installer.

Going the refund and wait route for me also.  They will come out with the fix right after the promotional pricing expires.....

 

[Matterdor]

4 hours ago, Deschdy said:

Look here:

That means: The Affinity developers can't solve the problem. No good news!

 

I really hope they reevaluate the choice of installer or at least provide an alternative installer for users. I would like to support Serif by buying the new version but this makes it really difficult to do.

[Matterdor]

For anyone battling to get this working. You can find the real location of the exe file by starting Affinity Photo and then going to task manager. If you right click on "Affinity Photo" in the task manage and choose "Properties", a dialog window will pop up that gives the exe file location next to the "Location:" text. This should work with the other applications too. You may need permission to access this folder but in my case, it worked without any permission changes.

[filoplume]

On 11/9/2022 at 12:44 PM, Uwe367 said:

For me this works to create a shortcut icon on desktop.
Then a new Window opens where are all icons displayed.
OS is Win 11 Pro

But it would be nice in the future when I can choose by myself where the App would be installed, not the installation routine. Or is there a good reason why this is now so?

All three V2 applications that I purchased from the Affinity website installed and created shortcuts in the Start menu for me.  I just had to right-click on them to create a desktop shortcut and pin to the taskbar.  They even imported the plugins I had in the V1 ones.  All three load up fine and after rebooting they still load.

But what doesn't work is that I cannot drag a jpg from a folder into an open V2 Affinity photo to edit it!  There is an icon in the program with the circle and slash telling me that it does not work!

[filoplume]

1 hour ago, Matterdor said:

For anyone battling to get this working. You can find the real location of the exe file by starting Affinity Photo and then going to task manager. If you right click on "Affinity Photo" in the task manage and choose "Properties", a dialog window will pop up that gives the exe file location next to the "Location:" text. This should work with the other applications too. You may need permission to access this folder but in my case, it worked without any permission changes.

No.  Even if I select Run As Administrator (even though I only have one user and it is administrator), Properties and Open File Location are not accessible.  I am using the latest version of Windows 10.  This happens with all three V2 applications.

[filoplume]

3 hours ago, Matterdor said:

For anyone battling to get this working. You can find the real location of the exe file by starting Affinity Photo and then going to task manager. If you right click on "Affinity Photo" in the task manage and choose "Properties", a dialog window will pop up that gives the exe file location next to the "Location:" text. This should work with the other applications too. You may need permission to access this folder but in my case, it worked without any permission changes.

This does work.  Here is what I was doing wrong.  I had to open up the group by clicking the down arrow next to the program in the Task Manager and right-click the bottom one. 

Mine says: E:\WindowsApps\SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityPhoto2_2.0.0.1640_x64__3cqzy0nppv2rt\App

I used the technique that Walt mentioned to change the folder where apps are installed (I need to find it again and Snag-It and print it out to keep forever!).  My operation system drive is C, of course.  The installations went to drive E.

But we should not have to do things like this.  Reminds me of trying to get DOS games from the 80s and 90s to install and run in Windows!