Feature Suggestion: Studio Present Manager - Export + Load

[Basurah]

Team,

First, great work on v2 apps and the beta program. I am hoping to give you guys bug reporting and feature feedback more often. But one thing is keeping me from doing this, and its sooo consumer "laziness". That is, Application Preset set up. Take a look at the attached for clarification on the idea:

 

Goals

• Allow the "Studio Preset Manager" to export and load set presets to reduce the amount of time it takes to set up a custom working environment on Affinity apps.
• Reduce the amount of set up time it takes for pro user to be able to set up a working enviroment
• Provide the flexibility to user to be able to set up and save a working environment

The Current Idea

As noted on the sketch, the concept here is to allow presets to be exportable and loadable. This will allow someone the ability to save such presets for future use. In my personal use case, I have multiple laptops and working spaces where I have the same affinity apps, and every time I install one, I have to spend so much time setting up my environment from scratch. Like you allow users to download app keyboard shortcuts (which is a Godsend), allow the same for preset.

The Future

Build a profile that tracks user settings such as keyboard short cuts, interface presets, specific settings, etc... package them up in a tidy format that can saved and stored in the cloud to deploy upon request. 😉

[Hilltop]

16 hours ago, basurah said:

In my personal use case, I have multiple laptops and working spaces where I have the same affinity apps, and every time I install one, I have to spend so much time setting up my environment from scratch. Like you allow users to download app keyboard shortcuts (which is a Godsend), allow the same for preset.

I agree that the Export and Load options would be a welcome addition to the Preset Manager. I'm not sure how it works on a MAC but on a Windows machine it's quite easy to use customized workspaces on another PC or laptop. You only have to copy & paste the required preset files into the right folders. I just did this not too long ago when I migrated them to a new PC.

[walt.farrell]

11 minutes ago, Hilltop said:

I'm not sure how it works on a MAC

It seems harder to find them on a Mac as (I think) they're somewhat scattered, vs on a PC where they are all located in one set of folders.

[drkanukie]

Its a massive pain copying the windows files. I don't know why we can't store these in the cloud or in our affinity account like we can with brush packs. The only cloud support is dropbox and the use of it is obscure. Everytime I get a new version I have to tweak these presets.

[acsr]

On the Mac you find these files for Affinity 2 still here:

/Users/<USERNAME>/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinityphoto/Data/Library/Application Support/user/

you can open the location from the terminal using:

open ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinityphoto/Data/Library/Application\ Support/user/

The name 

com.seriflabs.affinityphoto

is translated to the actual Application name in the Finder UI!

There are more folders related to other Affinity Programs in this area!
 

[MikeTO]

I don't believe you can copy studio presets between installations on macOS like you apparently can on Windows. 

[acsr]

@MikeTO believing is not knowing Did you test it?

I did this before successfully, but I am not sure if it was only with versions 1 or later, and did not proof it with current versions, just the locations.
What I want to share is in fact the location of presets (lacking in the post), which is useful anyway if you want to backup / restore. 

The most annoying thing with these presets is the undocumented binary format. Plain text with structured formatting would be enough. I did not test yet if these files are actually only compressed sets.

Any hints how to deal with these files for structured workflows managed outside of the apps are welcome.

[MikeTO]

4 hours ago, acsr said:

@MikeTO believing is not knowing Did you test it?

Yes, that was just a figure of speech. I tried it a couple of years ago and then again a couple of months ago.

[acsr]

@Basurah can you please fix the typo in the title of the post from present to preset!

It may help to discover the Topic

[acsr]

On the format of the presets:
If the files cannot be saved in a plain text format, I would at least vote for an option to export/import selected presets as set in the YAML Format.

YAML is from my point one of the best solution for humans to easy read and to some point edit those files without programming skills.

References to XMP files or other affintity files as Templates are also a good way to help semi-professionals to manage metadata. Using a proven Template language like Jinja2 (used e.g. Python) or eta (popular in the JavaScript world) is also recommended.

Preferred should be the management and editing in a dedicated preset manager covering all applications at once.

Example for UI and preset export/import

One Example could be the open source Actions & Tags plugin for Zotero, that can be found and explored here at github:
https://github.com/windingwind/zotero-actions-tags

The also have a github repository where they share and discuss user provided presets and scripts.

Outlook on Automation and Script sharing and API in this context.

This could be also a developer example for an upcoming Automation / Scripting feature in Affinity products.
If you think this is too complicated: Even Scripting the Adobe Creative Suite in Javascript is not a snap. But to allow all users to benefit from existing scripts, developers need a nice way to develop and share them. Installable compiled Plugins can stay for paying customers with no automation skills. But for experienced users we definitely need a scripting environment in one of the two leading interpreted languages Python (which I prefer) and Javascript (that is more common for Graphic Artists to to its dominance in the Web). Other may work, but are odd due to lacking resources to learn and maybe missing support.

One other solution is to open a local API Server with REST API to users and agents for automation. Then you can offer e.g. Python Bindings to work with the API or go directlöy there even with AI Tools.

The API should then be able to create, read and write the presets (and Metadata!) as well