Detailed history output

[Snoopy17]

Feature request and suggestion for an additional function to Affinity Photo:

Basic function:
Output of the history data (to a local file or a new windows to enable copy/paste) which is already available in the program internally and which is partially displayed in the history window

Content of the output:
Complete output of all history items with function name, attributes and all parameters entered or influenced by the user. The completeness of this data should enable a third party user to reproduce exactly what has been done with the image

Format of the output:
Plain text, text with some structure, csv, json or any other format that can be printed and, if needed, post-processed with own developed programs. Feasibility and ease of implementation and maintenance should drive the format decision

User interface:
No special requirement: context menu, button or right click to the history window

Need and usefulness:
For sharing the way a picture has been developed with others, it would be very helpful to have a detailed list of steps from the history with all parameter data. So a third party user could reproduce exactly the way an image has been developed, could precisely improve the development and analyze steps, which fail to improve the image. Currently this is only possible by a series of screenshots (tedious, incomplete, error-prone)
 

[GarryP]

The Document History, as far as I know, doesn’t contain every user action, rather it only saves ‘snapshots’ of the layers affected by user actions.

Because of this, the history doesn’t contain the information that would be required to fully reproduce a document and so being able to save the history externally to the document would be fairly useless.

To be able to see the history of a document in such detail as you require would mean than the software would need to save every single ‘deterministic’ user mouse and keyboard action (like a macro), and that’s probably not practical, or wanted by many users because of the extra memory overhead.

If you want to show a user how to recreate a document you can use the existing Save History with Document functionality and share the document. If you want to, you can add ‘on-screen notes’ to the document as you create it so the users can follow along – create a text layer; add your instructions to the text layer; delete the text layer; continue with the process.