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Finding Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo files on the computer?


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Introduction
There is no point in creating files unless you can find them later! I'd like input please in all the different methods of finding desired Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo files. I am considering using Affinity Publisher for most of my documents but also for a type of Zettelkasten note taking system because it combines text, vector, and raster images so well but this could generate 1000s of files, but finding Affinity Designer files is also important for artists who produce 1000s of illustrations, and finding Affinity Photo files is also important for photographers who create 1000s of altered images. Similar questions have been posed in previous messages: No file preview in Windows File Explorer preview pane or Thumbnails not appearing in Windows Explorer, only icons but the details of what people are talking about are missing. I was running Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo V2.40 Windows for the 7 day trial with Windows 10 Professional 64 bit for my own research into these methods but macOS might be similar. 

1. Windows Explorer Icons or file Extensions
If a computer file directory has a mixture of different file extensions, it doesn't make that much sense to find for example Affinity Publisher files by looking at the icons or logos of the program. This is because it is better to display the Type in the Windows Explorer Details view and then sort by Type. But when looking at individual files seeing the icons might be some help. Method 1 then is to sort by file Type.

2. File date
The computer will generate the Date modified and Date created but these dates keep changing so many professional photographers will start the file name with the date in Year/Month/Day format at the start of the filename. For photographs this is generally the date the picture was shot but in documents this could be the date when it was first written or in the case of revisions a particular version.  Method 2 then is to sort by file name Date.

3. File name
Windows allows for long total file names. In the ideal computer filing system for user files created, each file on the computer would be unique and so files could be moved between temporary project folders and then put back in the collection. Even in the paper file card based Zettelkasten system each card had a unique code and so if it was taken out of the file box for writing a paper it could be put back in a certain spot in the box later. Really long file names are difficult to work with however but short files names are less descriptive. Camel mode is considered the best type of file name format as there are no spaces and makes searching filenames easier. An example is 2024Mar18BenWiensFindingFilesAffinity.pdf. Method 3 then is to find or search by File Name.

4. File Index
A database could be used to index all the user files on the computer. There are some 3rd party programs that do this but it's a lot of work to create a unique file name and then enter it in the database along with other metadata. Changing the file name requires changing it in the database. Method 4 then is to create a file Index with metadata.

5. Windows Explorer Icons or thumbnails
When I ticked the box in Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo to save a thumbnail then I see that thumbnail in Windows Explorer when I select to display Icons. If a thumbnail was saved then I find this is displayed vs an icon for the program type. Even displaying the Extra Large Icons doesn't result in that big an image. And the image file size is quite small. For certain vector and raster images there is likely enough detail to identify the right file but for documents done in 10 pt text the thumbnail is not that valuable. Method 5 then it to visually search by thumbnails.

6. Windows Explorer Preview window
In File Manager a Preview can be chosen to be shown. If Windows Explorer has a Preview Handler for the file type then the document, illustration, or image will appear with the same resolution as if it was opened in the actual program. There is for example a Preview Handler for Microsoft Word, NotePad in Windows Explorer and this means that the entire document can be read and text copied from it in the Preview. In the Xara desktop publishing program the thumbnail for the first page is displayed in the Preview but the thumbnail in Affinity programs doesn't display in the Preview in my experiments. My conclusion is that there is no Preview Handler available for Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo files in Windows Explorer or any other 3rd party or from Sarif. That puts Affinity Publisher at a disadvantage compared to Microsoft Word. Method 6 would be to select files using Windows Explorer Preview but my conclusion is that there is no Preview Handler available for Affinity Publisher, Designer, Photo files. 

7. Search by Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo Metadata
Affinity programs allow for the addition of metadata and tags but this doesn't display in Windows Explorer in my experiments. Method 7 would be to search by Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo metadata but this doesn't display in Windows Explorer.

8. Search by Windows Explorer metadata
When I selected Details in Windows Explorer I could see column listings of tags, title etc. For a Microsoft Word 2016 docx file I could enter tags, titles, and other metadata right in Windows Explorer. This might be the same metadata that is entered in Affinity programs but not sure as it is not displaying in Windows Explorer. Method 8 would be to enter metadata right in Windows Explorer and search for keywords there without having to use a separate database, but I could not do this for Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo files.

9. Search using Windows "findstr" command
I used the program Winbrowse to see the contents of computer code in the files and whether there was any user searchable text in the file. Also Using the command "findstr" at the command line in Windows I was able to search for keywords. No text was searchable in Microsoft Word docx, Xara Designer Pro+, Sarif Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo, CorelDRAW, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Access. Text however was searchable in Adobe Indesign uncompressed, Word doc, OneNote, WordPad, Adobe Illustrator uncompressed, svg, and NotePad and makes finding files a lot easier, and the reason so many note taking and organizing programs use uncompressed text in their files. Method 9 would be to use the "findstr" command but Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo files are entirely compressed and so it is not possible to find the text in the file without opening it. 

Conclusions
It is only possible to use 5 of the 9 methods for finding files with the Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo programs. Am I right? Affinity Publisher/Designer/Photo files are entirely compressed and most new file formats are and so are not searchable. But being able to add metadata to the files and search these in Windows Explorer and also having a Previewer would be a big help in finding files but I can't see that this is available presently. 

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If you want to see previews of Affinity files in the Windows File Explorer preview pane, install the Affinity apps with the MSI/EXE installers rather than the MSIX installers. I haven’t experienced any file preview issues with the MSI/EXE apps.

Windows 10 22H2, 32GB RAM | Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 (MSI/EXE)

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7 hours ago, Brian_J said:

If you want to see previews of Affinity files in the Windows File Explorer preview pane, install the Affinity apps with the MSI/EXE installers rather than the MSIX installers. I haven’t experienced any file preview issues with the MSI/EXE apps.

Serif didn't provide me with the MSI/EXE installers, I just got the MSIX ones for the trial. With an actual purchase are both types available? Your explanation still leaves me puzzled. You make it sound like all files listed in Windows Explorer have file Preview Handlers and that if I don't see a Preview for Affinity programs there is something wrong. Actually Windows Explorer has very few Preview Handlers for text oriented documents, I only see Previews for Word, Wordpad, Notepad, and Acrobat files which are the main document formats that Microsoft supports. So the question is, what are you seeing? The Preview you mentioned, can you read every word of the document and see every page just like in the regular program? If so then Serif must have written a Preview Handler for their programs which would be installed in Windows Explorer as an add on. Can this Preview Handler read files for all three of the Affinity programs? I guess they are the same type of file? If Serif wrote a Preview Handler for Affinity programs that would indeed be a miracle because as of 2016 Adobe had still not written one for Indesign. Or is the Preview you are seeing the thumbnail bitmap created by Affinity and now shown bigger in size but still where you can barely make out 10 pt text and only see the first page of the document? It's a lot of work to create a Preview Handler and if Serif did create one, why would they not make it available with the MSIX installer and why is there so little information on this?

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10 minutes ago, Ben Wiens said:

Serif didn't provide me with the MSI/EXE installers, I just got the MSIX ones for the trial. With an actual purchase are both types available?

Both are available (even for the Trial, I believe) but they require a separate download. They are not the default or Serif-preferred versions.

You should be able to find them at the bottom of the page at https://affinity.store/update/universal-licence

 

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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When you download the installation files, the default is to use the MSIX version. You are given the option of an MSI version, but it offers it (unnhelpfully) as an EXE file - it does have an .exe suffix. Just read down few lines to find it.

 

John

Windows 11, Affinity Photo 2.4.2 Designer 2.4.2 and Publisher 2.4.2 (mainly Photo).

CPU: Intel Core i5 8500 @ 3.00GHz. RAM: 32.0GB  DDR4 @ 1063MHz, Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050

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3 hours ago, Ben Wiens said:

Or is the Preview you are seeing the thumbnail bitmap created by Affinity

Yes, the Windows File Explorer preview pane displays a thumbnail of Affinity files.

There’s a bug effecting the MSIX apps that prevents the thumbnail from displaying in the File Explorer preview pane (AF-1585). I don’t know if the bug affects all Windows users.

Windows 10 22H2, 32GB RAM | Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 (MSI/EXE)

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  • 3 weeks later...

10. Windows Explorer indexing
I found a new possible method of finding text in multiple afpub files on the hard drive using Windows Explorer indexing. Has anyone tried this? I tried indexing several afpub files but nothing came out of the search after I ran the indexing and did a search. the afpub file is compressed so how would Windows index it, yet it is on the list.

11. Adobe Acrobat indexing and search
Another and perhaps better method of finding text in multiple afpub files is using Adobe Acrobat indexing. Would need to export Affinity Publisher files to Acrobat pdf on all the files for this to work. Has anyone tried this? Must have a paid version of Adobe Reader to index. I indexed several large pdf files in a directory using my 20 year old Adobe Acrobat 7.0 paid version from Creative Suite 2 and the index was 14% of the size of the pdf documents in total and the pdfs on average were about 33% as large as Indesign documents of almost entirely text. I think that is acceptable for index size. I was able to do a search of multiple documents in the Adobe Reader 2024 version in Windows 7 based on the index I had done with Adobe Acrobat 7 and found that searching was 126 times faster than without the index at 0.027 seconds per search word instance. The search produces a long expandable list of documents the text is found in and after expanding a single document reference there is a long list of sentences where the text appears with the text highlighted both in the search window and in the document. Clicking on an instance opens the document but the list remains This might be the next best thing to a proper Affinity Document Asset Management module that the Affinity team have been talking about for 7 years already. 

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3 hours ago, Ben Wiens said:

10. Windows Explorer indexing
I found a new possible method of finding text in multiple afpub files on the hard drive using Windows Explorer indexing. Has anyone tried this? I tried indexing several afpub files but nothing came out of the search after I ran the indexing and did a search. the afpub file is compressed so how would Windows index it, yet it is on the list.

Windows doesn't know anything about whether files contain usable text or not, so it will probably offer to index anything. As you've found, that won't work for the Affinity files.

 

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

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Depending on how many files you have to deal with and how often you need to search for  something, I would recommend a DAM software.

I'm using one. It reads all related folders with any kind of file, shows previews of all files associated with an exe file. I can add any kind of metadata, categorize, search and much more:

2024-04-0814_48.24000.thumb.png.a031cb50970e7b9d2e7eb43059054831.png

The software I'm using is extremly powerfull. Main purpose in the beginning was to manage my picture database (~100.000 files). But meanwhile I use it for other things too.

Regards,
Otto

Affinity Suite v2.5.x - Windows 11 Pro

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14 hours ago, mopperle said:

Depending on how many files you have to deal with and how often you need to search for  something, I would recommend a DAM software. I'm using one. It reads all related folders with any kind of file, shows previews of all files associated with an exe file. I can add any kind of metadata, categorize, search and much more: The software I'm using is extremely powerful. Main purpose in the beginning was to manage my picture database (~100.000 files). But meanwhile I use it for other things too.


Sure I would love to buy or get a DAM for Affinity Suite but understood that one is not available presently. But it depends on how you define a DAM. A proper DAM for Affinity would be able to (1) search for keywords in multiple files and (2) index multiple afpub, afdesign, and afphoto files (actually they should be the same file format), (3) show a preview, (4) list metadata,  (5) list filename, (6) list size of file, (7) show extension, (8) list date saved, (9) sort data of fields. Which is these things can your DAM do and who makes it?

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10 hours ago, Ben Wiens said:


Sure I would love to buy or get a DAM for Affinity Suite but understood that one is not available presently. But it depends on how you define a DAM. A proper DAM for Affinity would be able to (1) search for keywords in multiple files and (2) index multiple afpub, afdesign, and afphoto files (actually they should be the same file format), (3) show a preview, (4) list metadata,  (5) list filename, (6) list size of file, (7) show extension, (8) list date saved, (9) sort data of fields. Which is these things can your DAM do and who makes it?

The software I'm using (IMatch) is a "proper" DAM. 😉

(2) should be done before (1). And this is a major problem for any kind of DAM. "Index" can have different meaning. In this case I assume we are talking about something you can find on the last pages of a book, which is a collection of keywords.
Adobe Acrobat creates an index automatically, but it is a "locked" system, as this index can not be seen/read from outside Adobe. In Microsoft Word you can create an index, but you have to add every keyword manually. And thats what you also do with any kind of DAM.

What can be done with IMatch (or maybe similar) products:

(1) after you have applied keywords
(3) it shows a preview of the 1st page and let you open the file in Affinity (see my Screenshot). Anything else wouldnt make much sense.
(4) of course it can show metadata as long as they follow standards (XMP/IPTCCore). Affinity allows you to add metadata, but they do not follow any standard and therefore they will not be displayed.
(5) yes
(6) yes
(7) yes
(8) yes
(9) not sure what you mean here

Regards,
Otto

Affinity Suite v2.5.x - Windows 11 Pro

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/19/2024 at 6:50 AM, Ben Wiens said:

Camel mode is considered the best type of file name format as there are no spaces and makes searching filenames easier. An example is 2024Mar18BenWiensFindingFilesAffinity.pdf.

Camel case is good, but it’s better to use a completely numeric format for the date. If you have three PDF files named

  2024Mar18BenWiensFindingFilesAffinity.pdf

  2024Feb17BenWiensFindingFilesAffinity.pdf

and

  2024Jan16BenWiensFindingFilesAffinity.pdf

then an ascending alphabetic sort will put the Jan file last instead of first. Expressing the dates as 20240318, 20240217 and 20240116 solves this problem.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.5.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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