Wacom tablet: moving pictures from Affinity Photo over to it (macOS) using BetterTouchTool

[nickbatz]

Here's my process for working on pictures on a Wacom tablet, hope it helps someone - or alternatively maybe someone has better ideas!

1. Just buy BetterTouchTool (BTT), an indispensable utility from https://folivora.ai.

Be sure to turn off its clipboard manager for Affinity programs - it is incompatible and will cause hangs.

There may be other macro-ish programs that work just as well, but I've been using BTT for years and would be perpetually irritable without it.

2. In Affinity Photo: View-> New view, tear it off the menu bar.

2. Create an "action" in BTT: Move Window to Next Monitor. I use ctrl/option/command right arrow. That puts the new view of your picture on the Wacom, where you can size it and navigate to your heart's content.

3. Create actions to move the cursor to your main screen #1 (in my case command/option F1) and to your Wacom screen #2. That saves a lot of mousing around to move from one monitor to the other.

Now, I still use the regular keyboard and mouse most of the time, and the Wacom for fine details. That affects how I work. But I wouldn't want to use the Wacom pen to navigate all the commands on the tablet, and especially not to navigate the picture.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, nickbatz said:

Here's my process for workin on pictures on a Wacom tablet, hope it helps someone...

Just a suggestion but you might want to post this to the Tutorials forum, maybe with a few tags to make it easier to find.

[nickbatz]

My thinking was that it doesn't seem to fit anywhere else, and this seems like the main forum.

The thing is, it's not a really a tutorial, it's a discussion. There's no section here just for that as far as I can see?

[markw]

7 hours ago, nickbatz said:

Be sure to turn off its clipboard manager for Affinity programs - it is incompatible and will cause hangs.

That’s interesting 🤔, I'm also a longtime user of BTT, (and can’t imagine using my Mac without it now!) but none of BTT's functionality has ever impacted on the Affinity apps for me.
Are you actively using BTT’s clipboard manager within APhoto in text operations or dose APhoto hang for you just because the BTT's clipboard manager is running in the background?

[nickbatz]

9 hours ago, markw said:

That’s interesting 🤔, I'm also a longtime user of BTT, (and can’t imagine using my Mac without it now!) but none of BTT's functionality has ever impacted on the Affinity apps for me.
Are you actively using BTT’s clipboard manager within APhoto in text operations or dose APhoto hang for you just because the BTT's clipboard manager is running in the background?

The latter.

I was getting hangs (very long delays) every time I copy/pasted, and the very first question Affinity's tech support person emailed back was whether I was using a clipboard manager.

He nailed it. I'd forgotten that BTT has a clipboard manager, and disabling it for Affinity Photo solved the problem.

[markw]

Thanks for the extra info🙂
Out of curiosity which macOS version are you on?
I’m still on Catalina and as I say BTT’s clipboard manager has never interfered with any of my Affinity apps, so I’m wondering if it could be related to which OS version one is running🤔. Could be yet another reason for me not to upgrade my OS beyond Catalina!

[nickbatz]

Now I'm using the latest Ventura 13.4, the one that just came out this week, on a Mac Studio Max. But this was happening on Monterey, I believe.

It's also possible that you have different versions of Affinity Photo and/or BTT.

And if I were ambitious I'd re-test it now. But that would require finding where the clipboard manager setting is in BTT again, and I'm extremely lazy.