Can't connect Affinity Photo 2 with any other Software on Windows 10 Home

[Roland Rick]

Hi Affinity Developers 

How can I connect Affinity Photo 2 with e.g. Bridge as external editor?

This is a mega serious issue on Windows 10 Home. On a Mac no problem, I tried to help a friend being on Windows 10 Home.

For normal users having no clue of %ProgramData% etc. it's literally impossible go find the Exe File.

Even I had serious problem until I found it, but I could not connect it to any other softwere, there were always strange error messages.

Even the solution provided in 

does not help. It just does not work.

The local windows user is a Standard user and has no admin right. And this is good like so. %ProgramData% has some hardcore access restrictions and that is also good like so. Changing here anything may ugly mess up the Windows 10 system.

The provided solutions also expect Windows system admin skills and admin rights of the user, please forget solutions like that. It is a total design flaw in Affinity Photo 2. Please change that immediately, thanks.

Q: Is it really necessary to mess with customers like so? Why the heck is the exe not located on the same place like Affinity Photo 1 is?

That's really bad.

Best regards,
Roland

[rvst]

1 hour ago, Roland Rick said:

How can I connect Affinity Photo 2 with e.g. Bridge as external editor?

See the latest post in that thread from Patrick

[Roland Rick]

18 hours ago, rvst said:

See the latest post in that thread from Patrick

Hi @rvst thanks for your reply.

CC to @MEB, I address also you, because we already were often in contact, each time successfully, maybe you can forward my hints and thoughts below to the those who are responsible decision makers at Serif.

For your convenience: I myself am a Mac user, but I am also experienced Windows user (and Solaris, AIX and Linux) helping a friend of mine. My first Affinity purchases (Photo, Designer and Publisher) were from the Mac AppStore, which acquires to run apps sandboxed. The trade-off: none of 3rd party plugins, usually for Photoshop, such as Topaz DeNoise AI, do NOT run with the sandbox Mac AppStore versions and for that I purchased all of the Affinity apps (V1) from the Serif store additionally (1).

Now, Serif/Affinity comes up with that sandboxed BS thing for Windows, making everything worse. I can't understand it.

(1) Totally OK to me, the price of Affinity products is in comparison to Adobe definitely no deal breaker, and it's purchase instead of subscription (what a nice word for "you will never own it"). I am often offline, so the subscription model is totally no go, Murphy's law works fine, they always want to check the Adobe servers if you are a valid customer when you are offline and for that you can't use them as long as you're offline. That's why I immediately purchased also the Universal License for the V2 versions.

Affinity has yet unfortunately no own DAM (Digital Asset Managment) solution, Lr and LrC can't be used without valid Adobe subscription but you can use Bridge as DAM (without being able to use ACR), it even shows there are .afphoto files (without displaying the content). Lr, LrC and also C1 does not, they natively support only .PSD. TIFF is no solution, because you get rid of all advantages of the .afphoto file format, it is definitelty the best available, lightyears ahead of everything else. That's why I can't understand, it is still not supported by Capture One. C1 has in comparison to LrC, Lr and Bridge a superb development engine but a horrible content managment, however the possibility to purchase it would outweigh that - if it only would support .afphoto, but it does not and that's the deal breaker for C1. DxO's PhotoLab 6 also is not aware of .afphoto files and it is sloooooow.

If someone can recommend a fast DAM solution flipping as fast throughout raw files like Photo Mechanics (what has unfortunately no developing engine) does, please feel free to recommend.

Let's home Serif comes up with an own DAM solution soon.

All the best,
Roland

 

[walt.farrell]

On 12/6/2022 at 6:47 AM, Roland Rick said:

It just does not work.

The aflaunch.exe approach mentioned in the 2nd post of that FAQ should work for you, Roland. When you tried it, what happened?