Plugin API.

[justexhale]

Look,

I get that Affinity is a small team, but prioritizing a plugin API offloads the work of adding features/formats that people want to the public for FREE. The amount of control we could have over affinity tools would make it worth wild to switch, both Photoshop & paint.net have huge community backed plugins that extend the tools well beyond their default capabilities.

Start small, file formats, expose the canvas, etc. Then eventually you can allow plugins to extend the UI beyond simple list items.

Affinity is a great product, but it could be amazing with a dedicated plugin system.

I can even offer to consult how to integrate it cross platform.

[LCamachoDesign]

I've suggested this more times than I can remember. I think it's coming, but who knows when.

[JoaCHIP]

That would be super cool indeed. And hopefully an API that allows for fast languages like C++ rather than Python.

See also: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/70840-affinity-plugin-creation-api-access/

 

[fde101]

This is already under development:

 

[chip2]

Personally I usually think of scripting and plugin API as two different things:

1) "Plugins" deal with calculation intensitive tasks like blur, sharpen, color manipulations and similar things that require pixel-by-pixel calculations. This is CPU intensitive and might even be able to utilize GPUs. Plugins are typically written in low level programming languages like C++ or GPU shader languages which are fairly difficult to learn. (Skill level: Expert)

2) "Scripting" means calling existing functionality from an easy-to-learn high level programming languages like javascript or LUA. Such scripts don't need to run very fast, as they're not doing heavy calculations. (Skill level: Mediocre)

I think Affinity Photo should offer both. But am I right in assuming that this thread is about point 1 (plugins) rather than 2 (scripting)?

[dvoth]

This was posted in the thread about scripting that they are working on both.

 

[Monica Schultz]

Where can I find the documentation for AD API, I would like to connect it with Chat GPT. 

[walt.farrell]

Designer does not support plugins.

Photo supports them, but the only documentation is supplied by Adobe for Photoshop, or by studying Open Source implementations like G'Mic.

[fde101]

7 hours ago, Monica Schultz said:

Where can I find the documentation for AD API,

The plugin API is still a work in progress and is not ready for customers to use yet.  Refer to the thread linked above, on Scripting, for various posts explaining this.

The plugin API and the scripting API are apparently being developed together, so it seems likely they will be available around the same time, whenever that happens to be.

[joker-b]

If you know the history of scripting in Photoshop, it initially seems to have been made purely for internal purposes, for quality review, and then a few motivate customers (iirc a newspaper chair, or maybe even Sports Illustrated) championed it even when it was very very not-customer-ready, because they needed a way to in the case of SI) pull together thousands of shots of the same Sunday football match and have it to the press Monday morning.

There are still things broken there, but many people get value. I'd think scripting of some sort would open a lot of markets, not just the usual print folks but markets for all kinds of online media that typically are very speed-driven, things like "take this directory of pictures and put the logo and a bunch of affiliated text on all of them, send to PDFs and be ready to send to the printer because they're wedding-album takeaways" etc. Bulk job, simple in concept but lots of clicking and dragging without a script.

[David Cake]

On 11/3/2023 at 9:37 AM, fde101 said:

The plugin API and the scripting API are apparently being developed together, so it seems likely they will be available around the same time, whenever that happens to be.

Internally, the way to develop a scripting API is to create a low level (most commonly C, as it is in this case) API, and then write bindings for that low level API for your scripting language. You can then release the low level API too if it is sufficiently robust and well documented. So yes, they are being developed together and makes a lot of sense - and hopefully the C API means it will be possible for other languages, both high level/scripting languages (I’d like to see Python), and other low level languages (I like the idea of a Rust crate).