"Assets" need a "Max Size" Setting Option

[David in Mississippi]

When dragging an asset onto the canvas, particularly when that asset is furnished by an outside source, those assets always import at the pixel size of that asset.  This often results in the asset being 8 to 12 times larger than the canvas, and the only way to see it is to zoom out on the canvas until you can see the borders of the asset, often to a point where the canvas appears smaller than a small fingernail.

We need an "Assets Import Setting" choice where we can select to have all assets dragged onto our canvas appear at either (a) the smaller of either CANVASE size or asset size (which would always allow the entire asset to appear on the canvas) or (b) Actual Size.

The DEFAULT should be (a), where the maximum import size is the canvas size.

As it is, importing a large-size asset always means we have to waste several minutes manipulating the size of it so we can see the thing.

If this setting is already available, I apologize, but after several hours of searching on the internet, in the documentation, and online, I cannot find it.

[James Ritson]

Hey @David in Mississippi, this is more of a workaround than a solution, but you can double-click an asset in the Assets panel to 'load' it into the Place Image tool—you can then click-drag and place it at any size you want, using modifiers such as CMD/Ctrl to use a centre origin and Shift to toggle aspect-correct scaling.

Assets are just pointers to layer content (if you drag images directly onto the Assets panel, they are instanced as Image layers)—I don't think the asset creation process should necessarily manipulate these in any way, such as resampling them to a resolution based on the current document, but you raise a good point that perhaps the asset could be optionally constrained to the current document bounds. Hope the above solution helps for now!

[v_kyr]

The Layers panel together with the Transform panel are your friends here, just quickly reposition and if needed rescale an Asset via the help of the Transform panel!

[David in Mississippi]

1 hour ago, James Ritson said:

you can double-click an asset in the Assets panel to 'load' it into the Place Image tool

This is an EXCELLENT work-around, James, and thank you for sharing it! Although it's not ideal, it is definitely better than having to zoom out, resize the asset, then zoom back in. Even so, we can rarely get the exact size we want using the place-image tool, so that will also require post-placement adjustment.

But I'm happy to know this, and thank you so much!

[David in Mississippi]

1 hour ago, v_kyr said:

The Layers panel together with the Transform panel are your friends here, just quickly reposition and if needed rescale an Asset via the help of the Transform panel!

Thanks for this suggestion v_kyr, but I just tried it and it is very awkward. First it requires you to know the dimensions of your canvas, which if you opened an image from another source or from your clipboard, is not apparent in either panel. Second, It seems in the transform panel, there should be a button "Fit long edge to canvas size" but no such button exists. We have to figure that out and manipulate the edges for ourselves.

Yes, that's a workaround also, but it requires us the user to be doing work the computer ought to be doing for us.

For example, I dragged a "bokeh snow storm onto an image generated by MidJourney, and the asset was at least eight times bigger than the image it was on top of. I used the transform panel to resize the asset, and I had to zoom out to discover that the resized asset was WAAAAYYY off to the northeast of the image. Who in their right mind would think that anyone resizing an image would WANT it to be located far away from the image? This is, to my view, an area in which Affinity could be greatly improved by fixing the issue.

Thanks for the suggestion - it's something I hadn't thought of (I'm still learning Affinity), and hopefully, through these discussions, the Affinity development team will get some guidance about how to make their excellent software even better. Take care.

[v_kyr]

11 minutes ago, David in Mississippi said:

For example, I dragged a "bokeh snow storm onto an image generated by MidJourney, and the asset was at least eight times bigger than the image it was on top of. I used the transform panel to resize the asset, and I had to zoom out to discover that the resized asset was WAAAAYYY off to the northeast of the image. ...

If you set for a selected asset "x/y=0" in the Transform panel it should reposition the top-left of an assets bounding box to the top left of your actual doc canvas, so you don't have to scroll/move endless with the mouse etc. to find the assets top-left corner node handle etc. If you also scale down "w/h=xxx  proportional with enabled/clicked ]") less than your doc/canvas w/h size, then it will also be shrinked accordingly and it's full bounding box handles should be visable afterwards.

Note that there are also situations where you explicitely may want something from an asset to go size wise beyond the doc/canvas size, so that those parts which do extend beyond the canvas size are cut off when exported.