What does Assets > Embed in current document do?

[R C-R]

I read the Affinity Designer help pages for Using assets & Assets panel but could not find anything about that. Choosing that option on a new AD document, with or without an existing layer did not seem to do anything.

[DWright]

The Assets panel is hidden by default.  to switch on goto  View>Studio when working in Draw or Pixel Persona and click on Assets and the panel will appear on the left of the screen next to the tool bar as shown in the attached image.

[v_kyr]

See: https://vimeo.com/182383667

 

For me when accessed from View->Studio->Assets it opens the usual way on a new document, with or without a layer doesn't play any role here. Further "embed in current document" should usually do what it naming implies here, aka placing/saving the used assets together within the document.

[DWright]

I have looking further into this and if it is the Embed in current document option that is not showing after you import the assets when you open the document to see these you will need to click on the drop down icon next to iOS 10 and you will see a new one called Assets and this will contain the imported document assets. I will speak to our do documentation team about update the Assets help regarding this.

[R C-R]

@DWright: maybe I was not clear but I was not asking how to display the Assets panel but specifically what the Embed in current document menu option does.

 

@v_kyr: Thanks for the link to the Video tutorial. I had watched it before but I did not remember (or did not absorb) the info about that option's function (starting at about 8:17).

 

As I understand it now, it is used to share an asset category between different machines via a document, avoiding the need to export the asset category from one machine & importing it into another one. It would not be of much use if just one machine is involved (or so I think) but would be very useful for collaboration on a project where different users are working on different computers. But (if I have this right) it is just a way to share assets for use in a single document across different machines, unlike the export/import approach that makes those assets available for all documents.

 

If I have any of this wrong, someone please correct me!

 

Thanks!

[MEB]

It does exactly what it says: it embeds the assets in the current document so they can be accessed when opening the document later on a different computer for example (or in the same in case the original assets are not available anymore). You can also remove them from an existing document if needed. See this post for more info.

[R C-R]

Thanks for all the info about this, but I have one more question about how the assets are embedded:

 

I periodically export an asset category I created (unoriginally named "My Assets") whenever I add something to it or its subcategories. The first time I did this back in November of 2016, when it had a single subcategory & a single asset in it, the .afassets file was 594 KB. Today, when I exported the same "My Assets" category, by now containing two subcategories & 6 items, including the single asset from the first export in the same subcategory, the file size was only 34 KB.

 

That is odd enough, but when I created a new, empty .afdesign file & embedded the current "My Assets" category in it, the file size was only 16KB. All these files are on the same partition of the same drive, so the file sizes are directly comparable without having to consider block sizes or anything like that.

 

I do not understand why the file sizes are so dramatically different, or in particular why an otherwise empty .afdesign file, containing only embedded assets is the smallest of the lot.

[R C-R]

<bump>

 

Any chance of getting any explanation for why the size of my exported .afassets file with just a few assets is so much larger than the one containing the same assets plus several more, or why an otherwise empty (one layer with nothing in it) AD file I saved with the same asset category embedded in it is the smallest of all?

 

This is part of why I was asking what 'embed in current document' does. Saving an identical empty file without embedding the asset category results in a 5 KB file, so somehow all the category assets use only about 11 KB in the .afdesign file, while the same assets exported as an .afassets file use 32 KB. Even allowing for overhead or 'housekeeping' stuff in the exported .afassets file, it makes it a bit hard to trust that the 'embed in current document' option is working correctly & saving all the assets.

[DWright]

I have raised this with our documentation team to include this into the AD help.

[R C-R]

I have raised this with our documentation team to include this into the AD help.

I am not sure what you are going to talk to them about, but at the moment I am most interested in some explanation for why the file size oddities I have mentioned occur, like how the assets in 32KB .afassets file are somehow embedded in a 16 KB .afdesign file.

[The Titi]

On 12/05/2017 at 4:45 PM, MEB said:

It does exactly what it says: it embeds the assets in the current document so they can be accessed when opening the document later on a different computer for example (or in the same in case the original assets are not available anymore). You can also remove them from an existing document if needed. See this post for more info.

Thank you for all info but I do not understand how it works...

• I created a new document

• add a new assets (without embed in current document)

• save my document

• delete the asset

• re-open the document and my asset is well in my document... So I have a big doubt regarding this function

[R C-R]

@thierryteyssier As I understand it, if you add an asset to a document's canvas or artboard, it is like anything else you add to it -- it retains no special status as an asset nor is it associated with any asset category or subcategory. That's why deleting an asset has no effect on a saved document.

 

Embedding an asset category in a document adds all that category's assets to that document, but does not add any of them to the document's canvas or artboards. If you delete an asset category after embedding it into a document & saving it, when you open the document you get this message:

If you click "Yes" the asset category is added to your collections list, with the same category name it had before it was deleted.

 

So for example, I created a test.afdesign document, added a few assets from the iOS 10 category to it, created a new asset category named "test" & added them to it. (For reference, I exported that new category to the included test.afassets file.) I then deleted those items from the test Affinity Designer document, enabled "Embed in current document" & saved it. I then deleted the "test" category.

 

The resultant afdesign document canvas is blank -- it has no layers, shapes, or anything else -- but because the "test" assets are embedded in it, when I open it I get the option to import that previously deleted category back into Affinity Designer if I want.