Potential customer looking for advice

[Anatol]

My granddaughter has been using Adobe Creative Cloud for the past six years and it's been costing me a fortune and we would like to seek an alternative solution and she thinks affinity 2 might be the answer.

The problem is, all her work is stored in Adobe cloud and she has a huge amount. Will she be able to download all her work to a hard drive and will it be compatible with Affinity 2.

Help would be much appreciated.

[Komatös]

Hi @Anatol and welcome to the forum.

Unfortunately, the question cannot be answered with a yes or no. The chance that the native Adobe file formats can also be open in the Affinity programs without any problems is unfortunately 40/60. Adobe uses a proprietary data area in their files that cannot be read by third-party providers. Adobe does this to ensure its market control.

[v_kyr]

Welcome!

34 minutes ago, Anatol said:

The problem is, all her work is stored in Adobe cloud and she has a huge amount. Will she be able to download all her work to a hard drive

That should be possible (downloading to some local disk storage from there), as far as she has still access to the Adobe cloud.

35 minutes ago, Anatol said:

and will it be compatible with Affinity 2.

No probably not entirely, as I assume she holds everything in Adobe specific file formats and several of these Adobe file formats aren't fully parsable and thus not 1:1 automaticly reproducable by Affinity software. - The best (but also not fully compatible)  exchange format here is still PDF between the suites.

[walt.farrell]

She can install a 30-day free Trial of the Affinity suite, @Anatol.

And then she can try a selection of her existing CC files and see how they work. Some applications and file formats will probably work well, some less so, and some (perhaps) not at all, but we don't know what mix of applications and which application functions she's using.

[Anatol]

Thanks for the quick responses.

I know she uses Photoshop, Indesign and illustrator. She graduated from university a couple of years ago with an honours in Graphic Design. The job market is not great at the moment especially as she is autistic but she copes well and does some small amount of projects which keeps her active.

 

I may get her to give the trial version a go.

Edited May 23, 2023 by Anatol
spelling correction

[walt.farrell]

She is likely to have (as many of us have had) a fairly large learning curve while getting used to the differences in how things are done between the Adobe applications and the Affinity applications, even if the files prove compatible. Some functions are done quite similarly, some quite differently, and some are (I think) close to the same but with subtle differences.

[Anatol]

Can I come back on this with another question.

Can any non-compatible files be converted to a useable format just as one can convert video files.

[dominik]

4 hours ago, Anatol said:

Can any non-compatible files be converted to a useable format just as one can convert video files.

Hello @Anatol,

as mentioned above PDF is an option as an exchange format. It certainly will not translate every detail in a file but it should work as a starting point. Another file format may be IDML as an exchange format with InDesign.

As with any migration of software there are problems involved. It also is important to know what your granddaughter wants to do with the existing collection of Adobe format files. If it's only for archival purpous she can download and backup them. If she wants to reuse some of them in new designs there will be some extra work to be done, it's just a matter of patience and training. New designs will be created in Affinity's format if you decide to switch applications.

Only if she needs 100% Adobe compatibility it's better to stick with their software (and pay the price).
There is always the option to pay for only one month subscription in the future if some really important work needs this compatibility.

d.