Affinity Photo tabs out of order when doing HDR merges

[John74]

When making HDR merges in Affinity Photo (File --> New HDR Merge...), the order of the created HDR photos in the tab bar gets out of order after making approximately 12 or 13 merges. As shown in the screenshot of my tab bar, the order of the tabs was fine for the first 12 HDR merges, but starting with the 13th merge, the resultant merge's tab was inserted before the 12th merge, instead of after it. Subsequent merges continue getting put in the tab bar in reverse order from there. Note that I did not move the tabs shown in the screenshot; they are in the order that the program put them there.

 

Re-creating the problem is fairly easy: just make 13 or more HDR merges. To speed things up, you can do an HDR "merge" of just a single low-res photo. For me it starts happening at the 13th merge no matter what: whether it's a "merge" of a single low-res photo or a merge of five 24MP photos. Whether or not edits are applied while in the Tone Mapping Persona do not affect the problem.

 

Affinity Photo version: 2.5.7

OS: Windows 10 22H2

[stokerg]

Hi @John74,

I've just carried out 20 HDR merges and my tabs are all in the correct order.

Just to make sure i'm following the same workflow, its just a case of File>HDR Merge, then File>Save to name the file

and then File>HDR Merge again?

[John74]

Yes, that should be the order, but just to be clear, here are all the steps:

1. File --> New HDR Merge...
2. Add one or more photos to the merge set
3. Click OK to start the HDR merge
4. Once the HDR merge process completes (and you're in the Tone Mapping Persona), press Apply at the top-left corner to bring the merge into the Photo Persona
5. File --> Save
6. Repeat the process

[John74]

This problem seems to be related to or is the same as this other bug I just submitted: 

 

What seems to be going on here is that when I'm in the Tone Mapping Persona my tab bar is narrower than when I'm in the Photo Persona due to a different configuration of window panels in each persona. When switching from Tone Mapping to Photo, the tab bar gets wider and the issue in the link happens.

As such, this issue seems to be dependent on the width of the tab bar.

@stokerg: when you tested with 20 HDR merges, what screen resolution were you using? Can you use a lower resolution screen? My tests in the original post were done with a 1920x1080 screen. I just tested it with a 1600x900 screen and the issue happened at the 10th photo, as opposed to the 13th photo with a 1920x1080 screen.

Also note that I have tested this both with my regular Affinity install on Windows 10, and by doing a fresh install of Affinity in a test VM of Windows 10. The issue happens in both.