Different assets for different documents

[Helmut O.]

PUblisher: Is it possible, to have different assets in the sidebar for different documents? Right now, all my assets are there if I open up a new document. An that is sometimes a little bit confusing. Especially with customer projects?

[Komatös]

Hello @Helmut O. and welcome to the forum.

Yes, it is possible to embed assets in documents.

To do this, click on the "Hamburger" icon with the Studio Assets tab open and select 'Embed in current document'.

This is what the help say:

Embed in current document—embeds the assets in your Assets Panel into your current document so that they can be accessed when opening the document later on a different computer (or on the same computer if assets were deleted). On opening a document with embedded assets, you're prompted if you want to import assets to your Assets Panel, making them available to all documents.

 

[firstdefence]

There is an option called Embed in Document: https://affinity.help/publisher2/English.lproj/pages/Panels/assetsPanel.html

[walt.farrell]

But note that:

1. Assets must still start in the Assets panel.
2. Assets that are embedded in a document must be added to the Assets panel when you Open the document, in order for them to become usable as Assets, and then they become available in all documents. So, you would need to delete the Asset category when you're done if you want to avoid clutter. 

I wonder if it would suffice to simply keep each customer's assets in a separate category, and just switch to that category when working for that customer?

However, if you have a lot of customers and Assets, the assets file may grow too large and cause problems. So separating them may be a good idea.

[Helmut O.]

Thank you for your support.
@ Komatös & firstdefence: Embedding the assets sound like a solution to my problem. I#m gonna give it a try.
@ Walt: I already have all my assets in different categories (over 10). But sometimes, especially with external customers, it can get a little bit confusing.

[Old Bruce]

For myself I developed my own Best Practices for Assets years back, not just for the Affinity applications but others which offer this feature. That is to keep them on a separate hard drive in well named directories/folders, not in the Application. Yes it does take some time to navigate to the different locations but I don't bloat the Application with tens or hundreds of megabytes of files. Of which over ninety percent are not going to be used in any one working day. 

Having all/most of my Assets in Affinity's applications means I don't have access to them when working with other Graphics applications.

I often wonder how many of the complaints about "Affinity is very slow" are due to the practice of filling up the Assets panel with stuff you may not use for weeks or months, if ever.

[thomaso]

In addition to the hints of @Old Bruce, consider whether there is a real advantage at all when using the Affinity Assets in your layouts.

Assets have some limitations: they must not contain linked resources or container file types (as e.g. PDF, EPS and all Affinity document formats). Thus the Affinity assets are less than a kind of "library".

Especially if you want or need them saved with the document it can be more practical to have them placed on an extra page of that document (you can either scale the "asset"-objects or freely choose their page dimensions) – or just create one or more separate documents for the assets. The latter also has the advantage that its items could get used as linked objects and thus allow the use of auto-updates when an "asset" needs a change that should occur in all documents that use that item.

[Catshill]

14 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

I don't bloat the Application with tens or hundreds of megabytes of files.

Is this what actually happens? When assets are added are they increasing the size of the application and slowing it down?

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Catshill said:

Is this what actually happens? When assets are added are they increasing the size of the application and slowing it down?

They all end up in one file on disk, which can become very large (multiple GB) which certainly can impact startup, and updating of the Assets, and switching between categories. And when it gets big I think this monolithic file structure tends to make it more fragile, and subject to breaking during updates and loss of all the Assets.

 

[Helmut O.]

Thank you very much for all your tips. Looks like everybody is right – in his own way. Maybe I should give you more information about my business: I am writing manuals for smartphones, tablets and apps. Some books have more than 200 pages, with over 1.000 screenshots. And on every screenshot is a symbol that shows the customer what to do. That's why I need the assets in the sidebar.
My idea was to save the assets within each document, so when opening that document only the assets for that document will show up. Sending a document to an customer should display only his assets. My basic template is now 2 GB and still rising …
All you tips tell me that it will not work the way I planned. At least not out of the box.

[Catshill]

19 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

They all end up in one file on disk, which can become very large (multiple GB) which certainly can impact startup, and updating of the Assets, and switching between categories. And when it gets big I think this monolithic file structure tends to make it more fragile, and subject to breaking during updates and loss of all the Assets.

 

I’d welcome confirmation from Serif developers that this is the case and also recommended best practices. Implementing a feature that is so fragile doesn’t appear logical. Based on comments here, I may be offloading my assets from the application to regular folders.

[walt.farrell]

4 hours ago, Catshill said:

I'd welcome confirmation from Serif developers that this is the case

That what aspect of what I said is the case?

It's a fact that they are all in a single file named assets.propcol, and has been mentioned in the FAQs for where things are stored (V2) and what the Clear User Data options clear, and you can see that yourself. And you can see that it gets very big if you add a lot of Assets to it.

[thomaso]

4 hours ago, Catshill said:

Implementing a feature that is so fragile doesn’t appear logical. Based on comments here, I may be offloading my assets from the application to regular folders.

In addition to the various hints before, you can do a test like this:

Currently my V1 APub assets.propcol has 1.8 MB. As soon I add an image (JPG, 15 kB, RGB, no profile) to the Asset Panel its .propcol size increases to 4.1 MB respectively 1.9 MB – the difference seems to depend on the current colour space and profile of the Affinity document where from the image gets added to the Asset panel.

There may be the same reason that got mentioned by Serif a few times for other 'issues' by design: Working speed. Thus pixel resources as assets are not linked but embedded in the .propcol, and possibly saved uncompressed. The fact that container file formats (Affinity documents, PDF, EPS) are excluded from being used as assets my indicate that the developers were aware of the possible affect on the .propcol file size if those would get embedded, too.

[Circulus]

affinity files can be assets even with linked files.

[walt.farrell]

2 minutes ago, Return said:

affinity files can be assets even with linked files.

Are you saying they can be added to the Assets panel? I've never been able to do that.

[Circulus]

drag/drop directly from explorer or dam to the assetspanel also works for svg not for pdf,eps I don't use so can't tell.

[thomaso]

Ah, that is good to know, thanks! – Such an assets even does not seem to increase the .propcol file size that massively as when dragged from a document page to the Asset panel – even if the resource Affinity document contains a layer of type image embedded, not linked.

Odd: such an asset gets named "Group" according to its resulting layer type and it doesn't contain the page of its Affinity source document but its contents only, which appears not to be cropped by the page and thus can result in a different look (ie. contents, margin, aspect ratio).

Kind of magic, and confusing that the method matters that much and that dragging from a page causes an Affinity error message "by design".

[Old Bruce]

8 hours ago, Helmut O. said:

And on every screenshot is a symbol that shows the customer what to do. That's why I need the assets in the sidebar.

In your situation I would do exactly as you have done. I think you have presented a perfect example (the "Wischfinger") of why and how to use Assets.

[walt.farrell]

9 hours ago, Helmut O. said:

My idea was to save the assets within each document, so when opening that document only the assets for that document will show up. Sending a document to an customer should display only his assets. My basic template is now 2 GB and still rising …

You can get the Assets from the document added to your Assets panel automatically, but all the other Assets will also be there. You would have to delete those Asset categories if you want to have only one set there. And that's probably more trouble than it's worth.

You could, perhaps, consider using Symbols, as those are document-specific and the Symbols panel shows only the Symbols within the document.

As for sending the document to a customer, and the customer seeing only their assets: Are you really sending an Affinity document to a customer? That would only work if they also have a license for one of the Affinity products. More likely wouldn't you just Export a PDF to send to them? The customer will just see the pages you used to produce the PDF document, and PDFs don't have Assets at all.

[thomaso]

8 hours ago, Helmut O. said:

My basic template is now 2 GB and still rising …

Can you tell how much of this is caused by the content in the Asset Panel and what by the layout document itself?

2 GB appears a lot for these tiny assets respectively the ca. 250 pages with mainly screenshots. Are the images embedded or linked? Do identical objects ("copies") appear in the Resource Manager as separate objects or are they collected in folders?

[Catshill]

On 6/3/2023 at 5:44 PM, thomaso said:

consider whether there is a real advantage at all when using the Affinity Assets in your layouts.

I use assets to store frequently used images, configured picture frames and text frames. The advantage is that they are then quickly available.

As far as I can see, the disadvantage of using assets is that like eggs in one basket, they are susceptible to loss due to being stored in a single file - assets.propcol. This could be mitigated by backing this file up every once in a while.  In addition, that file is going to increase in size. However, it seems unclear whether there will actually affect the speed (I'm assuming it doesn't affect the size (other than the assets.propcol)) of the application itself.

[PaulEC]

I like the convenience of the Asset Panel, but it does worry me how large the file gets if you have too many assets. It would be useful if there was some simple way to save a collection of assets, then load and remove them as required. IOW, have several smaller propcol files rather than one huge one.

[thomaso]

On 6/5/2023 at 3:03 PM, thomaso said:

Such an assets even does not seem to increase the .propcol file size that massively as when dragged from a document page to the Asset panel – even if the resource Affinity document contains a layer of type image embedded, not linked.

I was wrong in my impression that an image dragged from the finder/explorer would not increase the .propcol file size. I just realized that the change in file size can take some time to be reflected in the macOS finder, for instance by an app relaunch (while deleting an asset seems to reduce the file size immediately).

Accordingly, regardless of whether added to the Asset panel from an Affinity document or from outside Affinity, an image resource gets rasterized and becomes a layer of type "Pixel" and thus does not appear in the Resource Manager (at least in V1, can't tell about V2).

[Circulus]

Anything added to the program like brushes/assets/palettes will also add up to it's .propcol file.
I think there should be a system that could flush out unused items when closing a document.
And/or make it save those items as to be embedded into the current document.
By those items I mean any/all brush/asset/style/palette etc.
This could mean if one doesn't embed, one needs to reload those items which is simple now with the import content option or by drag/drop any of the mentioned items to the canvas and it will auto install.
I make a habit of creating the assets in an af~file and save that file with embedded assets and drag/drop it to the canvas aka placing and the program asks if I want to import the assets to the current file.
I'm using a dam that can show af~file thumbnails and this I use as my library from which I drag/drop to import the assets containing af~files.
I could also use this dam to apply any other file I like to import, text/images/svg/pdf and even activates fonts.
I simply delete all assets on closing the program and use my dam when needed.
This keeps my assets.propcol file lean.
If only it would work for brushes/palettes/styles etc.

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, Return said:

I think there should be a system that could flush out unused items when closing a document.

But any of those things might be used in multiple documents other than the one being closed so how would that work? Would it somehow check each document to see if any of them used one or more of them? If so, what about documents stored somewhere offline?

Besides, isn't the whole point of adding brush presets, assets, & so on is so they are easily available for use in the future?