Integration with Apple Photos on iPad?

[WildroverAndy]

My V1 of Affinity Photo is basically an expensive icon on my iPad Home Screen. Due to the poor integration with Apple Photos, I almost never use it.

I can’t find anything about this at all in any of the information for V2, can anyone confirm if this has been improved at all? My hope is that I’ve simply not found it yet, by fear is that nothing has changed at all.

Cheers.

Andy

[StudioJason]

Have no idea of what you are referring to, unless it is something with your own personal settings.

I’m on an iPad Pro and it seamlessly incorporates and transfers with Photos.

Mine did so after an initial prompt asking to access Photos at the beginning.

You can go into your iPad Settings > Affinity Photo (or Designer, Publisher) > Photos > Choose to Allow Photo either All access, Selected Photos, or None.

Can then either use Place to select and add or Drag and Drop, whichever your preference.

For simply Opening a Photo file image… Long Press the New icon…and a list will appear of several options (including From Photos).

[WildroverAndy]

There is some integration, as it is possible to open an image from my iCloud library, but it's not practical.

It's been discussed in these forums, but I guess not many users access their images from Photos. It looks like it's more common to open directly from Files.

If I try to navigate to an image in Photos, it presents me with a flat list of my albums. Which are in fact neatly organised inside folders in a sorted order. Affinity does not show this, it only shows a (seemingly) random flat list of all my albums (of which there are hundreds), so is impractical to navigate to any given album, or individual image.

It is possible to send an image from Photos, but this requires setting up a workaround Shortcut, which is not always reliable. Even when you do get an image into Affinity from Photos, it's then not saved back into the same Album, nor is it integrated into the original source image as an edited version. It just appears in the main library, so has to be located into the album again, but is also a separate image, unlinked to the the original.

We know all this is possible, as many other apps work fine in this fashion. It has also been confirmed that Affinity Photo does not work with Photos any better than that. I was hoping that V2 might have improved on this, but it seems not.

Cheers.

[KeithComposer]

The integration is still horrific. No way to share a photo directly from Apple Photos without creating a shortcut (which doesn’t work for many people due to unexplained permission issues and is frankly a janky work around for something all other creative apps just do).

I upgraded, but every time I try to import photos I get frustrated at how horrible it is. Given that this has been a complaint for at least 5 years it is fair to say Affinity doesn’t care and won’t be improving it. 

[StudioJason]

Typically, I use Photos as a source all the time with no issues. Use Files similarly as well.

‘When choosing from Photos…yes it does present you with shortcuts, favorites or albums created, usually that you made beforehand.

But if you simply choose the first RECENTS  it will simply open all images within your Photos, not just a few but all.

‘If you choose the other Recently Added then yes…it will show only the few 1-10+ images you recently added.

Right there with you on this being a confusing naming redundancy, but I use Recents when looking in Photos for all apps…not just Affinity…and all photos can be scrolled through, not just select ones. Works fluidly.

[KeithComposer]

You are taking about the import from affinity I think. This doesn't show full photos so comparing similar photos is limited. I (and based on the forums many others) want to work from apple photos. It is a much better interface for comparing photos but the fact that you can't share directly makes it useless. Compared to every other creative app I use it is a bad experience. 

[StudioJason]

Understandable. Preferences vary. A lot of people have a lot of different preferences.

[WildroverAndy]

Yes, I like to put my photos into folder/album sets, mainly based on the year/month/event kind of layout. This means I can work with small, and relevant sets of images, organised how I want to see them.

Affinity does not honour this layout (nor do a few others to be fair - it's one of the things that ever stopped me paying for Darkroom too). I'm not sure I understand how anyone would work with their library if they had more than a few hundred in there (57,000 in mine). Scrolling through all of my images to find the one I want to edit is not practical.

Paired with the fact that Affinity doesn't save/export the image back to the same location, and doesn't link it to the original photo, does give it limited use when used with Photos.

It's OK for the occasional creative edit (not my forte really, I dabble occasionally), but exporting, importing, and then exporting and reimporting seems the simplest way to get the image from Photos to Affinity and back to the right album again. Not something I want to do for a batch of a few hundred photos from a holiday.

Cheers.

[WildroverAndy]

Just following up on this, since there was a recent update in Photos v2 that includes some better integration with Photos.app with the iPad version (according to the release notes anyway).

Am I missing something here? I haven't really seen much improvement with this, that I can find out about! There seems to be very limited information, no user instructions, or tutorials that really cover using Affinity Photo with Apple Photos on the iPad.

I've just installed the demo of Photo v2, so I could try this out, and it's certainly an improvement for opening/importing an image from Photos, in that I can now browse my own folder/album layout. However, that only brings across a JPEG copy of any image I select, so doesn't seem possible to open any original Raws that way (it says Open or Place in the blurb, but it actually seems limited to 'import' only, not 'open').

I can only see that using the old Shortcut workaround to send the image from Photos is the only way to open a Raw from Photos into Affinity.

Then it's just back to the old Share method, which just saves a JPEG copy straight to the main Library, there's no option to even send it to the album it came from. My workaround for that is to create an Affinity Editing album, and use another shortcut to save it to that. That then involves manually putting the image into the album I wanted it to go into, but as a separate saved copy alongside the original.

Unfortunately, if this is all it can do, then it's still not a workable solution for me. It's a shame, as I do like Affinity Photo, it's tools are excellent, but this inability to properly integrate with Photos.app is just a deal breaker (I'd like to see it working in a similar fashion to Photomator, or Raw Power, for example, where I can browse and open an original image, and save it as though it had been edited in Photos itself).

 

[frogwillow]

Here's another user requesting better Affinity Photo / Apple Photos integration on the iPad. I'm trying to use Apple Photos as my organizational tool, while also using Affinity Photo's superior editing capabilities.

On the Mac, this works fine. In Photos, Edit With > Affinity Photo 2 creates a temporary file and opens it in AFPhoto. When this file is saved, it becomes the edited version in Photos, with all the context that the original had.

On the iPad, all I can do is "import" from Photos into AFPhoto. I can then export from AFPhoto to cloud or local storage, find the file in the Files app, and do Share > Save Photo. Now the edited copy is in Photos, but as a separate image, with no relation to its source.

My particular application is underwater photography. My hope is to work on photos on the iPad while I'm still on my dive trips. But as it is now, I'll have to wait until I get home to my computer, otherwise I'll have a disorganized mess, and need to duplicate a lot of work.

Thanks for listening...