Saved Photo files on iPad disappear (or they're never saved)

[Moonflight]

I've just installed Photo V2 on my iPad. I can create a new document and add content. But when I give it a name, save it and close it, I cannot retrieve the document. No reference to it exists.

The save dialogue does not offer any way to select a Save location. And once the document closes, it is gone.

Is this a bug, or have I missed something in the setup?

Thank you,

John

Edited December 24, 2024 by Moonflight

[Alfred]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @Moonflight.

5 hours ago, Moonflight said:

The save dialogue does not offer any way to select a Save location.

This indicates that you’ve previously selected a Save location, in which case the previously saved copy will be overwritten. If that’s not what you want, choose the ‘Save As’ option instead.

5 hours ago, Moonflight said:

And once the document closes, it is gone.

Documents that appear on the Home Screen in the iPad apps are stored in the app’s sandbox; unless you’ve previously saved them elsewhere, they will only be accessible within the app. If you choose to ‘Close’ a document, you will get a warning about losing any unsaved changes, and if you confirm that you want to proceed it will be removed from the Home Screen. Choose ‘Open > Open Document’ to browse to any previously saved document, including (if applicable!) the document that you just closed.

[Affinity Rat]

 The default save location is in the Affinity Photo folder on your iPad, that folder is viewable if you installed the Apple files app, or Readdle or Owl file managers.

In the app settings you can choose, the iPad or the iCloud either one, iCloud is generally recommended in either case they will be stored in the Affinity Photo folder unless upon save you choose an alternate location.

Screen shot from file manager app showing files located in myAffinity Photo folder on my iPad.

As you can see I dont store files here.

 

 

[Moonflight]

Thank you for your help, Alfred and Affinity Rat.

I think I'm getting the hang of this now. I've managed to save, close and reopen a Photo file on the iPad. That's progress 😀

[Affinity Rat]

@Moonflight Warning, be aware that files visible in the Affinity Gallery may only be saved in the Affinity Photo sandbox. This sandbox is an area reserved for Affinity Photo only. Affinity Photo has the nasty habit of filling the sandbox with corrupted files when the app crashes and can contain many gigabytes of unaccessible data that can fill your iPad. The only way to clear this data out of the sandbox is to reinstall the app, but doing so will delete everything in the sandbox including any files not explicitly saved somewhere else. I’ve had this happen to me and lost hours of work. When Affinity Photo is installed it creates the Affinity Photo folder and by default saves files there. The ipad option to reinstall without deleting data will not get rid of the corruption, only deleting completely and reinstalling will get rid of the corrupted data.

A long read, but remember this, if your iPad is running out of space. You can look in iPad settings to see how much space in gigabytes Affinity Photo is using.

good luck.

ps I really like Affinity Photo but saving files is the most clumsy and lacks transparency. Only the blind get burned.

[Mike Swartzbeck]

On 12/25/2024 at 3:12 AM, Affinity Rat said:

@Moonflight Warning, be aware that files visible in the Affinity Gallery may only be saved in the Affinity Photo sandbox. This sandbox is an area reserved for Affinity Photo only...

ps I really like Affinity Photo but saving files is the most clumsy and lacks transparency. Only the blind get burned.

Well said. I've been using AFphoto since I got my iPad in early '22, and it's been really sweet overall, but trying to save copies of my work and pick a folder to save to was like stepping into a Burmese Tiger Trap. It got better in v2 — despite having to save out my files from that Home screen gallery — but, yeah... before I learned The Drill, I had my ass horribly burned several times, having to fish around in that sandbox folder for stuff. ...Like, why?

[Affinity Rat]

@Mike Swartzbeck I dont really know, but I suspect Apple chose to create a device that was free of user intervention. By that I mean they wanted everything vanilla, this simplifies things and makes the device more reliable and easier to maintain. When the iPad was first produced users had no control over where anything was. Each app what given a space on disk and memory that couldnt be violated by another app, this mitigated potential conflicts, but also restricted users to that memory/disk space. This is good provided there is no software crash within that space which leaves maybe temporary data than doesnt get removed by the normal cleanup procedures. Once this happens there is no mechanism to clean it up and starts gathering space within the apps allocated space location. Initially there wasnt any file manager app on the iPad, so users had no ability to put files where they wanted. Once the file manager was released and allowed user created folders, this complicated things. Backups were more prone to problems not backing up files. While Apple released a file manager for iPad it is very buggy and often crashes or hangs the iPad. If you use the iPad to save files on a PC, about 60% of the time it works ( other times it fails with no idea what happened of what was completed) , and if the PC is turned off while the iPad is connected, the iPad would hang, until you restart the PC or restart the iPad.

Using the Apple file manager you cant see thumbnails on the PC, with Owlfiles or Readdle you can. Apple dont want users connecting to PC so quite happy with the long term bugs and limitations…just use our iCloud and increase your iCloud footprint.

These are my thots and what I experience hopefully your experience is better,😊

[Moonflight]

Thank you,  all of you, for your help. I discovered that files I thought I had saved, but hadn't, failed because there's a final 'Save' link virtually hidden at the top of the screen at the end of the whole save process. I thought I'd completed the process, but until I realised that 'Save' link was there, I couldn't save anything.

 

Now that I know it's there, it's all working