Easy Catalog/External Editor with Affinity

[Razzle]

I'm not sure how many people might be interested in this, but I was rummaging around trying to see how best to get around the lack of a catalog/DAM feature in Affinity.  Apparently such as feature is coming, but so far no news of when, just news that we'll have news sometime this year. Sadly that's not clear that we'll actually have the new feature this year.

 

Anyway, the Photoapps website, which once specialised in Aperture, has news of a small app that makes Photos work better with Affinity or any other program as an external editor, using Photos as a catalog hub.

 

 https://photoapps.expert/tips/2016/4/6/external-editors-photos-affinity-and-beyond#.VyBQNWOaeSM

 

 

[MEB]

Hi Razzle,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Thanks for the heads up. There was already some discussion around this extension here in the forums. It is able to send RAW files directly to Affinity Photo however then there wasn't a way for it to track the file since Affinity Photo either saves the file as an .afphoto file (which it looses track and you cannot open back in Apple Photos anyway) or exports it in a format of your choice - but in this case the extension looses track of the file. 

 

Today the External Editors extension was updated (v1.1) to include the ability to convert the files to TIFF or JPG before sending them to an external editor which solves the second issue described above if you select Save Flattened in the dialog that will appear when saving the file in Affinity Photo (File ▸ Save). Note that Affinity Photo doesn't support layered TIFF files, so you have to select Save Flattened for TIFF's too.

 

However there's still no way to send an image from Photos as a RAW file (which gives you the most flexibility to develop your images) to be edited in Affinity Photo in Develop Persona, then move on to Photo Persona and export/save it in your preferred format and get it sent back automatically to Apple Photos. You still have to import back to Apple Photos manually.