"Select Same Name" today working differently than a week ago on same document

[General Disarray]

I bought the full suite about a week or two ago and I love it. I worked mostly on the Photo app and today I saw the Designer one, but almost everything I needed to do so far was very intuitive and if I couldn't figure it out, it was a quick search online. So to between these apps, and Apple's FCPX, Motion and Logic Pro X, I'm really happy to have an Adobe free Mac, for such an affordable price. These apps feel fresh and new, Photoshop and Illustrator are ancient apps that keep being patched and some things added to them, but feel old and slow.

Now, this is puzzling to me, and now I'm beginning to doubt that it was the way I thought. Last weekend I started a simple project that consists of a lot of rectangles with a text box inside. The rectangles are exactly the same in size, stroke color, opacity, etc. The text box is also the same size, the only thing that is different is the text itself. 

So the first thing I did was to create a rectangle of the size I needed, then the text box inside, and once I was happy with how it looked, I grouped them and started duplicating them until I had as many as I needed, and then I started editing the text in each of them.

This would've been a project more for Designer, but I had hear about the Photo app, and I'm more familiar with Photoshop than Illustrator, so I got the trial for Photo, and I started this project in it. When I saw how good the software was, I bought the full suite and today I opened this in Designer, but the same problem happens in both.

Last weekend, working in the Photo app, when I selected all the groups in the layers panel, then right clicked and selected Expand Selection, it showed me each group, containing the text layer and the rectangle layer, called Rectangle. So since there were a lot of rectangles and I needed to edit the size of several to the same dimensions, I eventually found the "select same name" command, which as far as I remember, selected all the layers called "Rectangle".

So, today I loaded that project again after a week or so, and I want to change the size of the rectangles. But, today when I expand all the groups and click on the Rectangle layer in any group, then right click and choose "select same name", it selects the groups, not the rectangle layers. So if I change the size in the transform panel, it also changes the size of the text layer, basically making it fatter because I only need to change the width.

I thought it was a glitch, so I closed Affinity Photo, reopened it, same thing. I saw a menu command to open the document in Designer, so I did that too, saved it as a Designer document, but the same behavior happens in it. In fact, Designer has that extra thing where you can do a Select Same and it has tons of options, super useful, but no matter what I choose there, like shape, stroke, color, etc, it always ends up selecting the group, and not the "Rectangle" layers. 

So, this is not a sarcastic question, because I really have memory issues. But, am I going crazy and remembering the "select same name" behavior wrong from just one week ago? Or is there a toggle somewhere that I accidentally enabled or disabled? I've been looking for over an hour, and I can select all the rectangles manually, but this is more to learn than anything.

[Komatös]

Hi @General Disarray and welcome!

Maybe you had not grouped the layers in your first attempt and "Select same name" worked as desired.

I was able to reproduce this behavior in a test file I created. With grouped objects it does not work, because then all groups are marked, which contain objects with the same name. Whereas with ungrouped objects it works perfectly.

I therefore assume that this behavior is intended.

[carl123]

10 hours ago, General Disarray said:

Designer has that extra thing where you can do a Select Same and it has tons of options, super useful, but no matter what I choose there, like shape, stroke, color, etc, it always ends up selecting the group, and not the "Rectangle" layers. 

In Designer, Select > Same > Shape should work even in a group

[General Disarray]

15 hours ago, Komatös said:

Maybe you had not grouped the layers in your first attempt and "Select same name" worked as desired.

No, I'm sure of that. Because the first thing I did after creating the rectangle and text box was to group those two, then duplicate the group several times, then duplicate groups of groups until I got to the quantity I needed. So it was like that when I expanded them all, selected one rectangle, right clicked, chose "Select same name" and it only selected the rectangles.

 

8 hours ago, carl123 said:

In Designer, Select > Same > Shape should work even in a group

No, that's one of the things I had already tried. Also selects groups.

[Komatös]

Hi @General Disarray

Version 2.0.3 is out now. With these version you should be able to select layers with same name correctly.

[General Disarray]

11 hours ago, Komatös said:

Version 2.0.3 is out now. With these version you should be able to select layers with same name correctly.

I thought I had already replied to this post. I started typing it, but then something probably caught my attention. That's life with ADHD.

Anyway, I installed 2.0.3 as soon as it saw it popup when I open Photo and then Designer. So both updated, and opening its own version of the document, "select same name" still doesn't work in either. It behaves differently however; in 2.0.0 it would select all groups, but in 2.0.3 it deselects everything as soon as I right click on the layer Rectangle and choose Select same name.

Any ideas? I'm going to post the two files here since they are very small. This is a simple set of stickers I created for my MIDI keyboard because I'm trying to learn music, and the system of letters and groups of numbers that don't match the order of the letters is confusing to me, so to make my life easier, I made these to print on vinyl adhesive paper. Feel free to use them as you please, share with whoever you want, as long as they're not sold.

One change that the 2.0.3 versions brought and messed up these, was that under 2.0.0 in both Photo and Designer, I had made the ♭ symbol a different size and leading than the rest, so it was inside the rectangle. But as soon as the 2.0.3 versions came out, as you will see if you download these files, part of it is out of the frame. Not the end of the world, just time consuming to fix.

Also, with the 2.0.0 versions, if I right clicked on the icons in the dock, I could see the list of recent files and open them. But after 2.0.3, they behave like the MS Office ones, where you don't have a recents list in there. And while the recent files section works fine in Designer, it never has anything in the Photo app, neither when it was 2.0.0, nor in 2.0.3. Weird.

Piano labels glossy colors AD.afdesign Piano labels glossy colors AP.afphoto

[R C-R]

19 minutes ago, General Disarray said:

but in 2.0.3 it deselects everything as soon as I right click on the layer Rectangle and choose Select same name.

I think the problem is "Rectangle" is not a layer name, it is just the type of quick shape of the layer. So try giving that (& maybe any other) layer(s) a custion name & see it it works....

23 minutes ago, General Disarray said:

Also, with the 2.0.0 versions, if I right clicked on the icons in the dock, I could see the list of recent files and open them. But after 2.0.3, they behave like the MS Office ones, where you don't have a recents list in there. And while the recent files section works fine in Designer, it never has anything in the Photo app, neither when it was 2.0.0, nor in 2.0.3. Weird.

I am seeing the same thing about no recents in the Dock icon for any of the V2 apps, including the new betas. They still show for the V1 apps, so something seems amiss about this in V2.

However, for me in all V2 apps the File > Open Recent menu works fine.

[General Disarray]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

I think the problem is "Rectangle" is not a layer name, it is just the type of quick shape of the layer. So try giving that (& maybe any other) layer(s) a custion name & see it it works....

Right, I didn't give it a name, but then why did it work about a week ago and not now?

[walt.farrell]

14 minutes ago, General Disarray said:

Right, I didn't give it a name, but then why did it work about a week ago and not now?

Because a week ago it was not working correctly, and now (2.0.3) it is. From the Designer 2.0.3 Release Notes (Windows): 

Quote

• Select Same Name should only select objects with user supplied names

So, previously, it was selecting things it shouldn't select.

[General Disarray]

4 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Because a week ago it was not working correctly, and now (2.0.3) it is.

Right, but maybe I didn't explain this in perfect detail, but a week ago, in 2.0.0, I was able to select one Rectangle, then do a select same name, and all the layers called "Rectangle" would be selected (as long as I had expanded all the groups first). Then two days ago, still in 2.0.0, I opened the same document, and this behavior was different. Now it was selecting all groups when following the same process. When I posted this that day (it shows as yesterday but it was late on 12/18), I was still working in 2.0.0.

Then yesterday the new versions came out, I installed them, and now instead of selecting all groups, it deselects everything. So the mystery to me is why did it work differently between two sessions of the same version. And I would say if they introduced "Select Same Name should only select objects with user supplied names" as a new change, it's not a good one. It's a good thing that the app assigns a name based on the shape, like in this case, a rectangle. Why wouldn't it select all the layers called Rectangle whether I entered the name manually or not?

 

[R C-R]

7 minutes ago, General Disarray said:

And I would say if they introduced "Select Same Name should only select objects with user supplied names" as a new change, it's not a good one.

Maybe, but keep in mind that the automatically applied default layer identifiers like "Rectangle" or "Ellipse" are not actually layer names, any more that "Pixel" is.

[walt.farrell]

20 minutes ago, General Disarray said:

It's a good thing that the app assigns a name based on the shape, like in this case, a rectangle.

That "Rectangle" is not a name, though. It is simply a kind of tag to help identify the layer content. Names are things you type.