Still prompted to save after total undo... why?

[lphilpot]

Photo 2.0.4 (and beta 2.1.1730, for that matter), Windows 11

If I load an image, make edits and then totally undo everything -- whether by Ctrl+Z or pulling the history slider all the way back -- Photo still prompts me to save my work... despite having no changes to save (other than the irrelevant history stack, maybe).

Does this make sense? Not to me. If I undo everything, the history is irrelevant and no other changes exist. So why prompt to save no changes?

[carl123]

Microsoft Paint and Photoshop Elements are the same

Maybe it's a metadata thing and any change to an image is considered an edit and even if you undo that edit, it's just considered as another change

You might get a more informed answer if you ask on a Microsoft or Photoshop forum where someone would have, presumably, asked this question previously.

Do let us know if you get an official answer

[MikeTO]

Ideally apps should remove the modified flag when you Undo back to the document's original state - Apple's apps work this way - but it's very common to leave the document in a modified state so Affinity is far from alone. Microsoft Office is the same.

[lphilpot]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

Ideally apps should remove the modified flag when you Undo back to the document's original state

Yep - I have other (non graphics) apps that work that way. For example, I use the PSpad text editor and if I just hold down Ctrl+Z for a second, all changes are undone and it closes without any prompt. I get the "metadata is change" argument to a small degree, but it's irrelevant for me. It would be nice to have an option to close without prompting if there are no unsaved actual edits.

[Pšenda]

42 minutes ago, lphilpot said:

For example, I use the PSpad text editor and if I just hold down Ctrl+Z for a second, all changes are undone and it closes without any prompt.

However, PSPad Editor works only with text files that do not contain any metadata. So it doesn't have to track and record information about when the file was printed, when it was exported, or when it was modified.

P.S. Some editors store information - how long work on a given file lasted. Even if in the end all the edits were deleted/not done, it doesn't change the fact that the file was "worked on".

Edited March 21, 2023 by Pšenda

[lphilpot]

5 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

However, PSPad Editor works only with text files that do not contain any metadata. So it doesn't have to track and record information about when the file was printed, when it was exported, or when it was modified.

P.S. Some editors store information - how long work on a given file lasted. Even if in the end all the edits were deleted/not done, it doesn't change the fact that the file was "worked on".

Well, yes... sorta. That's largely semantics, though IMO. By definition the file is the data on disk / storage. If it wasn't saved / altered in a permanent sense, then the file wasn't de facto changed. What you're describing is more akin to version control. There may be use cases for that, but it's far from universal and for those of us where it doesn't apply an option to ignore it would be useful

[Pšenda]

8 minutes ago, lphilpot said:

What you're describing is more akin to version control.

Tracking time worked on a document has nothing to do with version control. This is standard statistical data (such as the number of words, sentences, ...) that every document should contain.

[lphilpot]

13 minutes ago, Pšenda said:

Tracking time worked on a document has nothing to do with version control. This is standard statistical data (such as the number of words, sentences, ...) that every document should contain.

That depends on your use case. I can certainly see where it could matter, but it certainly doesn't matter everywhere. That's especially true in my case since I use Photo (only) to edit my personal photographs - All raster / adjustment data. There is never any textual data in them aside from metadata (which I don't edit) and the time doesn't matter. That's why I think it should be a user-configurable option. YMMV.