Saving Affinity Photo documents to iCloud or iPad internal storage cause Files app and OS-wide file saving sheet to freeze

[Supat]

I have been dealing with this issue for the past couple of days.

The Issue

Saving Affinity Photo (V2, iPad, latest update) documents, either with the newly created document or an old one, to storage such as iCloud drive or iPad internal storage, somehow make the file system on iPad unresponsive. Files app will open just fine, but doesn't response to any interaction, as well as with file saving sheet, in which hitting 'Save' button won't do anything.

 

The issue can be resolved by just restarting the iPad, however, as soon as I try to save any Affinity Photo documents, the problem reoccured consistently. 

 

I have tried:

• Re-sync iCloud drive (turn the iCloud drive sync option in iPad settings to off, wait for it to clear up, restart the iPad, then turn the sync option back on.
• Delete and re-install Files app
• Delete and re-install Affinity Photo app
• I thought it was the problem with iCloud drive uploading/downloading process, so I tried to save the documents on iPad internal storage.
• I thought it was cause by some corrupted file, so I deleted all the Affinity Photo documents from my iCloud drive, empty all of the trash including clearing out iCloud drive files recovery option on the iCloud web.

to no avail.

 

Use the 'Reset Storage' function in Affinity Photo seems to have partial affect but not completely solve the issue, namely, it makes the Files app, from completely unresponsive to be able to open simple photo files again, but still the save file sheet will still be unresponsive. 

At this point, to somewhat temporarily resolve the issue, is to restart the iPad every time I save Affinity Photo documents.

Edit

It might have something to do with PNG export as I have noticed that recently exported PNG all have incorrect metadata. Since I need the correct metadata for proper organization, I tried exporting the images in TIFF instead, in which they came out with correct metadata. I have removed all the PNGs and now haven't encountered the issue since while using Affinity Photo, saving files as usual, for about half a day.

Edited April 18 by Supat
Add additional observation.

[NathanC]

Hi @Supat welcome to the forums,

Quite an unusual issue, thanks for sharing the workaround/end solution. When you reference that the PNG files have 'Incorrect Metadata' could you perhaps expand on the definition of 'Incorrect' in this context? For example, are there issues with EXIF fields having the wrong data set, or something else entirely?

If you could also share one of these PNG files (if any are still available) where you encountered these issues when saving and in the 'Files' app as well as confirming your iPad model and iOS version we can see if the original problem can be replicated.

Many thanks