Affinity Photo Batch Export to PDF

[X-Raym]

Hi,

 

Affinity Photo v2.6.2

 

We don't have PDF options in Batch Export

 

 

 

I only saw one thread mentioned this:

Would be nice if we could do that with the regular Batch export functions, as it is lower in memory than other alternative (loading all document into one and create slices).

 

Many thanks! 🙏

 

 

Use Case:

Making an illustration book. 30+ Affinity Photo pages. The printer is asking for a single PDF embedding al the images. TIFF export require to embed images into a master document, more or less manually. Affinity PDF export is good, it has special rules for compression and scaling which is nice. PDF merging can be made with free tools. But we would need to be able to export in PDF in batch in a first place for convenience.

Workarround:

After hours of search I found a pretty good workarround for my use case, using Affinity Designer Artboard.

The idea is to use artboards (an Affinity Designer Photo) to embed Affinity Photo Document, and do a single PDF file export from there.

It did require to manually import all the pages and create artboard for them, so this workflow is a bit more prone to errors than working just affinity photo, but it will be good enough for my case.

[GarryP]

One thing which hasn't yet been mentioned, in this thread or the linked thread, is why someone might want to batch-export images into PDFs.

If you can explain why this would be a good feature to have - what the benefits can be and/or where the results could be used - then that might help Serif to decide whether it is something they might want to implement or, at least, you could get some support for the idea from other forum members.

[X-Raym]

Edited, added Use case and Workarround

[GarryP]

Thanks for the extra information.

I don't think the Batch Processing is the correct place to do what you want to do as it's currently a 'many-to-many' process rather than a 'many-to-one' process, which is what you seem to want (if I've understood the requirements properly).

I'm still curious as to why the printshop wants a single PDF with just the images in, rather than a PDF which contains the whole book (images, text etc.). Can you explain a bit more about what the process involves and why it's done that way?

[X-Raym]

The printer want a singe PDF for the whole book (images, text etc), but it doesnt have any text (text is drawn as illustration), all is images and prepared in Affinity Photo.

Sure a way to batch process several affinity photo files to PDF directly would be nice, but it is more a stretch than adding PDF export to batch IMHO. SO I try to keep my request reasonable. But maybe I should open a thread about multiple Afphotos into one single PDF.

Also, for speed and efficiency reason, having individual PDF is handy cause you can just take a few ones and upload it to collaborators (for feedback) more quickly that if you need to upload the whole book (more than 1.5gigas on a 90 kbits upload connection, take several hours).

I did go to a local printers for prototyping and only had 4 chosen pages as individual PDF export, which was more handy than navigating into a big PDF long to open and process.

Note: The Affinity Designer artboard workaround do allow to export PDF individually but not in batch (you can only export all in one PDF, or one by one - but not in one shot).

Anyway, you may find my use case is irrelevant, maybe someone will come with a better use case. I can go without it, the artboard solution is good enough (for those who have Affinity Designer at least).

I dont know, maybe if you want to export all your images as PDF but only send one to different people, because it is online RPG character sheet ?

[GarryP]

Thanks for the extra information.

It sounds like you could be better-off using Publisher which was designed to produce multi-page PDFs (amongst other things).