what does it mean when System app shows Aphoto data shows files in storage that are not present in the gallery?

[Affinity Rat]

My Apho app in Apple system storage displays a large number of files not visible in the gallery. Can these files attributing to 24+ gb of space be safely deleted from the system storage app, or do these files link to a different location and are still actively in use?

Does the app maintain storage in the sandbox to files saved outside the Affinity Photo directory?, and deleting these files in system app will delete files stored somewhere outside the Affinity Photo app directory?

 

[Dan C]

3 hours ago, Affinity Rat said:

My Apho app in Apple system storage displays a large number of files not visible in the gallery. Can these files attributing to 24+ gb of space be safely deleted from the system storage app, or do these files link to a different location and are still actively in use?

It's hard to be certain without seeing the same information you are referring to, but these files may contain 'Live Docs' that have not yet been manually saved to your iPad, alongside application data, such as saved Presets, Assets, Brushes etc.

'Safely Deleted' is somewhat of a personal user choice in this regard - the app will likely continue to function correctly if you were to delete these files, but you may lose these documents and custom data, as outlined above. We don't directly recommend deleting these files unless absolutely necessary, as the data will be unrecoverable after deletion.

3 hours ago, Affinity Rat said:

Does the app maintain storage in the sandbox to files saved outside the Affinity Photo directory?, and deleting these files in system app will delete files stored somewhere outside the Affinity Photo app directory?

I'm unsure what you mean by 'Affinity Photo app directory' - if you are referring to the Affinity Photo folder created on your iPad by the app, then yes the app saves temporary documents, autosave files and user data outside of this 'Affinity Photo' folder, but this is still contained within the 'Sandbox' of the Affinity app.

These additional locations that the Affinity iPad apps can access/save to, outside of the 'Affinity Photo' folder within Files are not something that a user can typically access on iPad, as Apple choose to keep this section of the OS locked down. As above we don't recommend deleting or interfering with this data manually.

[walt.farrell]

If you are trying to reduce storage use, then once you have Saved a file that is in Live Docs, you should Close it so it is removed from Live Docs.Then you will have only the one copy of that file on your iPad.

[Affinity Rat]

1 hour ago, Dan C said:

I'm unsure what you mean by 'Affinity Photo app directory' - if you are referring to the Affinity Photo folder created on your iPad by the app, then yes the app saves temporary documents, autosave files and user data outside of this 'Affinity Photo' folder, but this is still contained within the 'Sandbox' of the Affinity app.

 

This is exactly what I wanted to know. 😊