Designer: Choose an artboard as file thumbnail

[D.VE]

Is there a way to handpick a certain artboard that is used as a thumbnail for the templates?

I work with artboards... a lot. And the previews in the File=>New dialogue are really small..

-thx, Dave

[GarryP]

I’m pretty sure that there isn’t (I’d be happy to be proven wrong as I might want to do this too), so this sounds like a good feature request to me.

Might be nice to have this for other things too, like the Open Recent panel, and to specify what’s shown in file browsers (e.g. File Explorer, Finder, etc.)

One question: Do you mean just the thumbnails seen within the Affinity applications, or the thumbnails generated to be shown in file browsers (as I suggested), or both?

[Callum]

Garry is correct here I'd recommend making a post about this in our feature requests and feedback section.

[thomaso]

Workaround: since the file preview includes the entire artboard area you could place a screenshot (low res) of a desired area (or any content) on top in the Layers panel before saving as template.

… if wanted with reduced opacity to still get the artboards indicated in the preview.

[D.VE]

35 minutes ago, GarryP said:

or both?

Both... I assume that the thumbnail is the same anyway...

[GarryP]

That’s what I thought, just wanted to make sure.

It might also be handy for Publisher documents if the user can specify which page is used as the thumbnail.
That would help in cases where the first page is blank, as can sometimes happen.

[D.VE]

2 minutes ago, GarryP said:

which page is used as the thumbnail

Or ma be just make it possible to manually add an image as thumbnail (if that's easier to implement)

 

37 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Workaround

Thanks a lot... Not perfect but it works...

 

[GarryP]

Do you mean an image that’s in the document as an image layer or pixel layer, or a user-specified portion of the document (like a screen-grab), or an image which is external to the document, or something else?

The developers already have a way to get the thumbnails of the pages so I would guess that those would be easier to use.

[D.VE]

3 minutes ago, GarryP said:

Do you mean an image that’s in the document as an image layer or pixel layer, or a user-specified portion of the document (like a screen-grab), or an image which is external to the document, or something else?

The developers already have a way to get the thumbnails of the pages so I would guess that those would be easier to use.

Doesn't matter... Whatever is easier to implement for the DEV team... 

[thomaso]

1 hour ago, GarryP said:

The developers already have a way to get the thumbnails of the pages so I would guess that those would be easier to use.

55 minutes ago, D.VE said:

Whatever is easier to implement for the DEV team... 

Apart from the existing previews in the Layers & Pages panel: On mac it could be possible to get all pages as previews in a Finder window via QuickLook (space key), like it works for PDF files where you can scroll through all pages in this Finder's pop-up preview.

Interestingly, Affinity apps contain an according file "QuickLook.qlgenerator".
< /Applications/Affinity Publisher.app/Contents/Library/QuickLook/QuickLook.qlgenerator >
... whereby the < /System/Library/QuickLook/PDF.qlgenerator > has a file size of 44 kB, while the Affinity version is 168 kB in size.