Can I change the default DPI setting for imported images?

[Samiul]

Hello! I just bought Affinity Photo recently and have run into a big issue. Whenever I open a new image the document DPI is always 300 for the images I am importing. Unfortunately for my use case this means that adding text is way too large. I can of course manually lower the text size below 5 pt, but that just seems like bad practice. I can also manually change the DPI to around 72, but with all of the images I will be editing and putting text onto this can get really. really annoying. Is there any way to change the default DPI setting for imported images? I don't need to resize or resample the document, I just need to change the DPI so that 5 pt font doesn't look huge. I am importing 650x1000px images if that matters.

[Ron P.]

Welcome to the forums,

What image format are you opening, JPEG, PNG, TIFF ? DPI has really no meaning for images being displayed on a screen. DPI is for physical devices such as printers. I'm curious to how are you determining the image that you just open has a 300 DPI setting? I think most of the presets for creating New files have that as a default, again that's for printing. The default for images is 72 DPI, (European), or could be 96 DPI for US. Any image from a website will have one of those two DPI, rather PPI settings.

[Komatös]

 

[Samiul]

4 hours ago, Ron P. said:

Welcome to the forums,

What image format are you opening, JPEG, PNG, TIFF ? DPI has really no meaning for images being displayed on a screen. DPI is for physical devices such as printers. I'm curious to how are you determining the image that you just open has a 300 DPI setting? I think most of the presets for creating New files have that as a default, again that's for printing. The default for images is 72 DPI, (European), or could be 96 DPI for US. Any image from a website will have one of those two DPI, rather PPI settings.

Thank you!

The file is a png. I am getting the DPI setting from "Document->Resize Document" in Affinity. In there it says the DPI for the image I imported is 300. The image itself is 650x924px so it's pretty small. As such with 300 DPI the text is huge. When I manually lower it to 72 DPI the text is as I would expect from GIMP. I imported the same photo into both, for some reason GIMP displays the text as "normal" size.

If the default is supposed to be 72 or 96, does that mean that the image itself is reporting as a higher DPI? I don't see any DPI or PPI settings in the windows properties menu. I will post an image of that as well.

[Samiul]

Well I got my own answer so

ANSWER

First something I already knew.

The reason the fonts were way larger in Affinity Photo in comparison to GIMP was because the DPI in affinity photo was set to 300. To confirm this, in Affinity Photo 2 go to `Document->Resize Document->DPI`. Here you can see the DPI and you can also manually change the DPI. Make sure to also disable `Resample` before pressing `Resize`. I imported the same images into Affiniy and GIMP so I'm not sure why GIMP's fonts didn't appear large.

 

Second, the solution to this particular question. I couldn't find a way to set a default DPI that ignores the image meta data, so if you have a batch of images that are the wrong DPI/PPI then what I did was

• Get `FastPhotoTagger` which also requires `ExifTools`. This is just an image metadata editor, so you could use something else.
• Then select the folder with your images, or drag the folder in.
• Then select one image and click on the 6th icon (an upright single tag) from the top which says `View All Metadata for...`.
• Now look for DPI or PPI or XResolution and YResolution, or look for the number that the DPI was set to in Affinity photo. Note the Tag name.
• Now click on `Program Settings` (which is the gear) then click on `Metadata`.
• Now right click and `Insert Row`. Set the Metadata Tags to the name(s) from before and click the check mark under `DB`.
• Now finally go back to the main menu and select all images with `ctrl+a`. Edit the metadata values on the right (I changed it to 72), click save, then click apply on the left menu and you're done.

[thomaso]

On 11/30/2022 at 4:35 AM, Samiul said:

Whenever I open a new image the document DPI is always 300 for the images I am importing.

If you import an image (e.g. "place") into an existing document then it has the DPI of this document.
If you open an image (as its own document) then it has the DPI with that the image was saved.

To avoid certain font sizes respectively varying Point values when changing the DPI you could set Pixels as unit for text. This will be independent of the currently set document resolution and not change if you just alter the DPI (without resampling the image). It's in Preferences > Interface.

This means you can ignore the DPI as long you don't have a specific output use in mind. But even then you still can decide in what size the image should appear and how its DPI get handled. Often the saved DPI value is simply ignored on output and just the desired output size is respected. As mentioned in the video above, the amount of pixels is decisive.

On 11/30/2022 at 9:44 AM, Ron P. said:

how are you determining the image that you just open has a 300 DPI setting?

The DPI is displayed in the "Resize Document…" dialog and in the Exif > Detail metadata.

[RichardMH]

Best thing might be to create a macro that resizes to 72 dpi. If you have your library open then its just one click to resize.

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, RichardMH said:

Best thing might be to create a macro that resizes to 72 dpi. If you have your library open then its just one click to resize.

I'm not sure one can create that macro today, given the bug that has existed since 1.7. But @John Rostron's created some macros back in 1.6. I'm not sure if they would work for the situation you're discussing, though.

 

[loukash]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

@John Rostron's created some macros back in 1.6

Nice! This bug has annoyed me all the time.

[Samiul]

12 hours ago, thomaso said:

If you import an image (e.g. "place") into an existing document then it has the DPI of this document.
If you open an image (as its own document) then it has the DPI with that the image was saved.

To avoid certain font sizes respectively varying Point values when changing the DPI you could set Pixels as unit for text. This will be independent of the currently set document resolution and not change if you just alter the DPI (without resampling the image). It's in Preferences > Interface.

This means you can ignore the DPI as long you don't have a specific output use in mind. But even then you still can decide in what size the image should appear and how its DPI get handled. Often the saved DPI value is simply ignored on output and just the desired output size is respected. As mentioned in the video above, the amount of pixels is decisive.

The DPI is displayed in the "Resize Document…" dialog and in the Exif > Detail metadata.

I have resolved the issue now. Not sure how to pin a comment as an "answer", but I did post my solution above your comment. I had meant to say "Opened" not "import". I had dragged the images in both by clicking "File->Open" and by dragging into an empty window for my testing.