macOS doesn't recognize .afphoto as an image when sorting files

[Lon]

As the subject says, when sorting my files, macOS categorizes the .afphoto file as "OTHER".  My understanding is that the software (Affinity Photo) application bundle needs to contain information about what file types (file extensions) the application can handle.  I also read that a system known as Uniform Type Identifiers that categorizes files needs to be part of the application.  Is this a bug, oversight or done intentionally?  It's a minor issue, but when I sort my files by type, my .afphoto files don't sort with all the other image types.  It's at the bottom of the list.....OTHER.

Thanks

Lon Stratton

[loukash]

2 hours ago, Lon said:

when I sort my files by type, my .afphoto files don't sort with all the other image types

That's because they are technically not images.
At best, they contain embedded images similar to e.g. PDF files. Those embedded images can be extracted by some means (the FileJuicer app, for instance) but MacOS doesn't have much clue about that except for displaying the also embedded QuickLook preview.

[Dan C]

Hi @Lon,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums

To expand on the above, as the Affinity apps use a shared document format between Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher - although each app uses a different file extension (.afphoto, .afdesign & .afpub respectively) these are completely interchangeable - meaning you can open and Affinity document in any Affinity app, even if it doesn't 'match' it's namesake, or you can actually rename an '.afphoto' file to '.afdesign' and it would retain all of it's data and still be openable within any Affinity app.

For this reason we're unable to categorise the file format as an 'Image', as this would then also affect .afpub or .afdesign files that don't necessarily contain any images, and this would cause confusion for part of our userbase.
Therefore any of the Affinity file formats are simply sorted under 'Other'. 

I hope this clears things up!

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, Dan C said:

For this reason we're unable to categorise the file format as an 'Image', as this would then also affect .afpub or .afdesign files that don't necessarily contain any images, and this would cause confusion for part of our userbase.

In fact, users can also create files using only Affinity Photo that have no images, like in this No images.afphoto example that has only a single artistic text object, or this Nothing.afphoto file that is entirely empty, with no layers at all.

[Lon]

Thank you everyone for explaining this.