Affinity Photo iPad storage space problem

[skiphunt]

I already asked this question in my other ipad questions thread but haven't got an answer. Is this forum not the appropriate place to get tech support on this product? Seems most other questions are getting answered, but the only reply I've gotten to any of my questions was to watch the tutorial videos. Well, I've now watched all of them and have not got my Affinity Photo iPad questions answered. 

 

Look, although I'm fairly disappointed at how much this new app is freezing up and crashing... I'm also very excited about it. It appears to be able to do everything I'd hoped it could do. And, I know I'll have to cut it some slack since it's just now been released. I do think it should've been a lot more stable before it went live and Serif was charging for it. It's not a "budget" app and I expected it'd be fairly solid out of the gate. Maybe it was rushed to market to make that Apple Event. Somewhat understandable I suppose, but that doesn't take away from the aggravation of actually trying to use it. 

 

That being said, my main concern is about the fact the app doesn't appear to be freeing storage back up after it's been claimed. As mentioned before, it's footprint crept up to 6GB with only 3 low-medium resolution images I was editing. And after I deleted those edit files altogether, Affinity Photo iPad didn't give me the storage space back. I had to delete Affinity Photo iPad, and reinstall to get the footprint back down to 1.29GB.

Is this a known problem? 

 

Once I start actually trying to use this for real edits, I could easily have a couple dozen project files. At this rate it'd eat of every bit of the 12GB of free space I have currently. I plan on going up to at least the 256GB iPad pro, or possibly the 512Gb, but these work files shouldn't be taking up hundreds of megs of space just for simple edits on 4-11mb source files.

I thought maybe this app wasn't really even compatible with an Air 2 as is claimed in the description, but I've read some with iPad Pros reporting issues as well. 

Are these problems that will likely go away with iOS11? Or, and upgrade to the latest iPad Pros? I plan on upgrading, but I was hoping to wait until iOS11 is released. I've read that much of the new power of the iPad Pros won't really be fully realized until iOS11 drops anyway. 

So, if this is a known problem... will I be able to use Affinity Photo iPad on an iPad Air 2 in the foreseeable future, on full resolution RAW files, without the app freezing up, crashing, and filling up all of my available storage space?

If this is not a known problem, can the Serif support team make any suggestions or advise as to how I might be able to actually use this current build reliably on an Air 2? And, if this is not the appropriate place to ask for product tech support, please tell me where these questions should be directed. 

 

Thanks in advance.

[vintezis]

I totally agree with you skiphunt! I was waiting the app, and i love the whole pack, but many times the app is crashing after two simple taps. Add new layer - crash. Export - crash. Add filter - crash. Changing persona - crash. It seems some fundamental memory handling causes this. Or maybe we are just beta testers for a price drop at the launch.

 

(IOS 10.3, iPadPro 9,7" with 16GB free space)

[TonyB]

I totally agree with you skiphunt! I was waiting the app, and i love the whole pack, but many times the app is crashing after two simple taps. Add new layer - crash. Export - crash. Add filter - crash. Changing persona - crash. It seems some fundamental memory handling causes this. Or maybe we are just beta testers for a price drop at the launch.

 

(IOS 10.3, iPadPro 9,7" with 16GB free space)

 

I can't reproduce your issues on our iPadPro 9.7 in the office but if you gave us more information then that would help. What image do you start with? What colour format, size etc. When you say add a layer crashes then is that always or after the nth layer.

 

The great thing about closed systems like the iPad is that given the same actions they will all show the same issues so please work with us and we will get it sorted,

[TonyB]

I already asked this question in my other ipad questions thread but haven't got an answer. Is this forum not the appropriate place to get tech support on this product? Seems most other questions are getting answered, but the only reply I've gotten to any of my questions was to watch the tutorial videos. Well, I've now watched all of them and have not got my Affinity Photo iPad questions answered. 

 

Look, although I'm fairly disappointed at how much this new app is freezing up and crashing... I'm also very excited about it. It appears to be able to do everything I'd hoped it could do. And, I know I'll have to cut it some slack since it's just now been released. I do think it should've been a lot more stable before it went live and Serif was charging for it. It's not a "budget" app and I expected it'd be fairly solid out of the gate. Maybe it was rushed to market to make that Apple Event. Somewhat understandable I suppose, but that doesn't take away from the aggravation of actually trying to use it. 

 

That being said, my main concern is about the fact the app doesn't appear to be freeing storage back up after it's been claimed. As mentioned before, it's footprint crept up to 6GB with only 3 low-medium resolution images I was editing. And after I deleted those edit files altogether, Affinity Photo iPad didn't give me the storage space back. I had to delete Affinity Photo iPad, and reinstall to get the footprint back down to 1.29GB.

 

Is this a known problem? 

 

Once I start actually trying to use this for real edits, I could easily have a couple dozen project files. At this rate it'd eat of every bit of the 12GB of free space I have currently. I plan on going up to at least the 256GB iPad pro, or possibly the 512Gb, but these work files shouldn't be taking up hundreds of megs of space just for simple edits on 4-11mb source files.

 

I thought maybe this app wasn't really even compatible with an Air 2 as is claimed in the description, but I've read some with iPad Pros reporting issues as well. 

 

Are these problems that will likely go away with iOS11? Or, and upgrade to the latest iPad Pros? I plan on upgrading, but I was hoping to wait until iOS11 is released. I've read that much of the new power of the iPad Pros won't really be fully realized until iOS11 drops anyway. 

 

So, if this is a known problem... will I be able to use Affinity Photo iPad on an iPad Air 2 in the foreseeable future, on full resolution RAW files, without the app freezing up, crashing, and filling up all of my available storage space?

 

If this is not a known problem, can the Serif support team make any suggestions or advise as to how I might be able to actually use this current build reliably on an Air 2? And, if this is not the appropriate place to ask for product tech support, please tell me where these questions should be directed. 

 

Thanks in advance.

 

So we do have an issue with reclaiming disk space but only when you create an image from scratch and then only some of the data won't be reclaimed. Will are working on the issue for an update soon.

 

But for Photo to use 6GB on only 3 files then more information would be needed. What is the pixel sizes, colour format, number of layer etc. 

[vintezis]

I am glad about your answer TonyB! I will try again the same task and will report you the exact infos. As i remember i was trying with sample/tutorial images.

[skiphunt]

So we do have an issue with reclaiming disk space but only when you create an image from scratch and then only some of the data won't be reclaimed. Will are working on the issue for an update soon.

 

But for Photo to use 6GB on only 3 files then more information would be needed. What is the pixel sizes, colour format, number of layer etc. 

 

Hello TonyB, 

 

All of what I was doing was trying out several of the API (Affinity Photo iPad) features on 3 different types of file. I'll try to recall most of what I did.

 

All images used whatever the default color format is. I didn't change that for any of them.

 

1. First file was a RAW image from a compact Olympus TG-4. This most mostly standard highlight/shadow and color correction, but I also did a lot of cloning and inpainting. I straightened the image which left transparent areas about the corners. I painted these back in using the inpainting brunsh on a separate pixel layer... so, 2 layers.

 

File size 3456 × 4608 at 16.1MB - Color Profile of RAW file "Display P3"

 

2. Second image was a jpeg image from a Panasonic FZ1000. All I did with this one was add a second layer, duplicated the image to the second layer to try out the layer effects. I adjusted color, levels, bright/dark, and I might've tried a tone map on it too. 

 

File size 5472 × 3648 at 6.6MB - Color profile of source image Adobe RGB (1998)

 

3. Third image test was using a jpeg from an Insta360 Nano VR camera. It's native file format .insp isn't supported, so I exported that out of the insta360studio desktop application to a jpeg file. I imported this file into API to try out the 360 projection feature and applied various photo filters to it, before backing it out of projection mode.

File size 3040 × 1520 at 1.9MB - Color Space RGB

 

After I saw the near 6GB bloat, that remained even after a restart of the iPad, I deleted all 3 project files which didn't return the bloated storage hit. I then deleted and reinstalled API to get the footprint back down to 1.29GB. 

 

I then tried just the one FZ1000 jpeg file that's only 6.6MB. I did a tone map and a few level, sharpness adjustments. That took my 1.29GB footprint up to 1.39GB without doing anything else. After I deleted the file and nothing in API, and restarted... the footprint was still 1.39GB, ie. it didn't return my unused storage space. 

 

Something else I found... is that I tried to export a jpeg file to my camera roll after reducing it's size to 1800px on the long side. It wouldn't ever save. The "meta data analysis" would never complete, and thus would never save. I tried not reducing the size and that wouldn't save/export either. The ONLY thing that works, is if I turn off the "embed metadata" feature. If I don't, it perpetually reads "Generating Report" without ever completing and saving.

 

I just tried again after typing this, and it appears to save fine if the source image is a jpeg. It only has the Embed Metadata problem is my source image is a RAW image.

 

 

[TonyB]

Thanks for the information but I will give some calculations based on one of your examples;

 

3456x4608 RAW file will gives;

 

16 MP with each pixel being 16bit x 3 channels 

 

=  100 MB per layer

 

So 2 layers with some editing history could approach a few hundred MB without too much effort.

 

The bug not reclaiming disk space could be magnifying your usage but we will look again after the next patch.

[skiphunt]

Thanks for the information but I will give some calculations based on one of your examples;

 

3456x4608 RAW file will gives;

 

16 MP with each pixel being 16bit x 3 channels 

 

=  100 MB per layer

 

So 2 layers with some editing history could approach a few hundred MB without too much effort.

 

The bug not reclaiming disk space could be magnifying your usage but we will look again after the next patch.

 

TonyB, here's my main concern at the moment regarding this. Let's say you're using an iPad Air2 with 12GB of free space left on it. And lets say you want to work on a dozen RAW images with a 2-3 layers each and various edits. With your calculations... 12GB would likely be completely eaten up. Correct? 

 

And lets say that you only work on 2-3 RAW images at at time with 2-3 layers each, then export those native Affinity files out to external cloud storage like Dropbox. Are you saying I'd be constantly uploading native edit files for storage that are several hundred MB each?! I typically shoot thousands of images while traveling, and have edited several hundred from the road using mostly Snapseed. I'd like to begin using Affinity Photo and save my edit file for further adjustments later on the desktop if needed, but if I'm reading your reply correctly, that's simply not going to be feasible without massive amounts of storage space and/or uploading very large files weighing in the hundreds of MB for each file to cloud services. Do I understand you correctly?

[TonyB]

TonyB, here's my main concern at the moment regarding this. Let's say you're using an iPad Air2 with 12GB of free space left on it. And lets say you want to work on a dozen RAW images with a 2-3 layers each and various edits. With your calculations... 12GB would likely be completely eaten up. Correct? 

 

And lets say that you only work on 2-3 RAW images at at time with 2-3 layers each, then export those native Affinity files out to external cloud storage like Dropbox. Are you saying I'd be constantly uploading native edit files for storage that are several hundred MB each?! I typically shoot thousands of images while traveling, and have edited several hundred from the road using mostly Snapseed. I'd like to begin using Affinity Photo and save my edit file for further adjustments later on the desktop if needed, but if I'm reading your reply correctly, that's simply not going to be feasible without massive amounts of storage space and/or uploading very large files weighing in the hundreds of MB for each file to cloud services. Do I understand you correctly?

 

If you store 16bit developed RAW files then there isn't anyway around it using lots of space. This isn't an Affinity only issue as anything that stores 16/32bt data will also use that amount of space.

 

The only way around these issues is to save lossy compressed 8bit images as JPEG or similar. This is something we may look at in the future.

[skiphunt]

If you store 16bit developed RAW files then there isn't anyway around it using lots of space. This isn't an Affinity only issue as anything that stores 16/32bt data will also use that amount of space.

 

The only way around these issues is to save lossy compressed 8bit images as JPEG or similar. This is something we may look at in the future.

 

First of all, at this point I'm not bring critical of the app. Affinity Photo iPad does pretty much everything I need/want it to do and more. I might even go as far to say I find it potentially even more enjoyable to use than the desktop version. When the occasional freezes/crashes are cleared up, and the storage space issues fixed, this has potential to be everything I've been looking for in an iPad photo editing solution... where I don't have to do a quicky edit in Snapseed, only to have to start over from scratch at the desktop when I return from the road. 

 

So, my questions at this point are more "just the facts" about how viable this will be. To be honest, I'm not quite the RAW evangelist that some seem to be. For 90% of what I'll do, I don't think I'd even bother with RAW files at all. I shoot RAW+high quality jpegs. And most of the time the jpegs are just fine IMO. I only use the RAW files if there's critical highlight/shadow data that got tossed in the compression. 

 

I'm also asking these questions not so much critically about Affinity Photo iPad, but more in terms regarding what hardware I'm going to have to get, and travel workflow. Most of the time I don't have fast wifi internet connections from the road, especially in 3rd world countries. Using cloud storage isn't going to be feasible. I do have external wifi storage devices I can use, but that gets very tedious very quickly.

 

Let's say I'm using the highest quality jpeg image from a higher end compact "all in one" camera. Something modest like the Panasonic FZ1000 referenced in my storage issue details. "File size 5472 × 3648 at 6.6MB - Color profile of source image Adobe RGB (1998)"

 

And, let's say I'm only using these files for my edits, and just keeping the RAW versions saved in case I need that little bit of extra data. If I just stick to using only the highest quality jpegs as source images on 2-3 multiple layers ALSO yield bloated native .afphoto edit files in the several hundred megabyte range?

[skiphunt]

Just did another test. This time I didn't use any 360vr stills or RAW files. ONLY jpeg images. My API footprint prior to loading images was 1.29GB. I loaded 4 of the 6.6MB 5472 × 3648 jpeg images into API. I did edits on all of them and 2 of them had 2-3 layers added. These weren't 16bit raw files, but best quality jpegs. 

My API footprint jumped from 1.29GB to a whopping 2.62GB. Not as bad as the 6GB bloat, but still very significant increase. 

I then deleted all of the project files and relaunched the app, then also restarted. The app still has almost 500MB of data beyond the app's 1.29GB footprint. So, there's definitely a problem here. And although editing RAW is possible... I don't think I'd want to suffer the aggravation and giant file sizes until there are API updates to iron out the bugs, and probably only if you've got a Pro iPad with LOTS of extra storage available.

Will likely be ok for me to not store images on the ipad. I'll use an external RAVPower wifi storage device I have, bring in just the files I want to work on, export a flattened jpg to my camera roll, then save a copy of the edit file to my external storage or cloud storage if I have the bandwidth. 

However, I was not able to select my Affinity Photo Folder save out an .afphoto "Save a Copy" file to my iCloud drive. The Affinity folder is greyed out, as well as the other folders except for Goodreader. I was able to save in the iCloud Goodreader folder, but my attempts to save to just the iCloud drive root level, did end up saving the files and placing them into the Affinity folder. 

One of my 1.9MB files, saved as "Save a Copy" with no editing on it at all, ballooned up to 12MB. 

Another edit file with layers saved out to .afphoto format to a whopping 270MB file size. Though, the PSD version of the same file came down to 85MB. 

I think I'm done testing all of this. It's useable, but an iPad Air2 is just barely going to cut it. And much more extra storage space is going to be imperative. And a Pro iPad is going to be the only pleasant way to use this app unless the next update or two dials this in to be more efficient. 

Got 2 crashes in this testing. One was after spending nearly half and hour doing an intricate selection of one image to paste into another. The app crashed and didn't even save the unedited file I'd loaded in. It looks like you need to actually back out of the edit mode, let the app do it's autosave, then go back into editing mode if you want to preserve the image when there's a crash. I'd just loaded the image and got right to editing without backing out of edit mode first. Evidently merely loading an image doesn't save it automatically until you actually back out first.

 

I bet some of these issues have a lot to do with the current iOS10.3.2 and iCloud Drive not really being that swell either. Maybe after iOS11 drops, this will all be much better. 

 

I'm going to put this on the backburner for now and wait for the next update. I also loved all of the in-app tutorial videos. Hope there's more coming. Very helpful, clear, relevant, and to the point. 

[ginaadrson]

 

I have downloaded iOS 11 before the native release on my iPad. and I also having trouble of after installing iOS 11 iPad storage space problem - on my iPad. But on Google I found a solution to solve the problem via new feature share iCloud storage with your family on my iPad and got rid of the problem easily.

[Krist]

I did not know I have the same issue until I read this thread.  I am on iOS 11 beta 5, and the latest AP update.  I have processed maybe 200 raw files using AP and exporting to my iPad storage.

Here is my storage situation:

App size 976 MB

Documents and Data 15.4 GB.

I have deleted all processed photos that is shown on the front page of AP. So there should not be any Documents and data.  I do have a few save a copy files,  I do not know where they are and how to delete them, but it should not be 15GB.

so, yes there is a storage problem with AP.  I also noticed that when I was processing the photos, the documents and date show over 40 GB.  I do not encounter any crashes while developing my 200 photos.  Maybe it is because I have 256GB of storage.

 

[Niels Schooneman]

I have the same issue. 1 photo and already 2.5 gb storage. Removing the photos does not make any space free.

 

is the normal app 1 gb or is this with all the instruction movies? Maybe an option to download them seperate?

[ric67]

I was quite excited in switching to the ipad and infinity to develop my images but this storage problem is quite worrying. Is there any fix to this being done? im certainly not using this app if its going to cause issues with my storage space.

if only i read about this issue before ordering my 128gb ipad mainly after watching videos on being able to finally use a full blown editor on a tablet!!!! 

[Krist]

19 hours ago, ric67 said:

I was quite excited in switching to the ipad and infinity to develop my images but this storage problem is quite worrying. Is there any fix to this being done? im certainly not using this app if its going to cause issues with my storage space.

if only i read about this issue before ordering my 128gb ipad mainly after watching videos on being able to finally use a full blown editor on a tablet!!!! 

 I have 256 GB on my ipad pro, and imported over 300 photos to camera roll.  Processed about 200 raw photos using AP.  After pp, I deleted all the raw imports, and just kept 200 processed jpeg photo.  My ipad storage shows that App Size is 975.6 MB and Documents & Data shows 15.51 GB, which is the main problem here. This will increase as you process photos and I think I saw it grew to 40 GB (not 100% sure since I did not pay attention to it) while I was processing, but I think 128 GB will do, as long as you do not store everything.

[ric67]

Krist, i think the problem, that concerns me is the fact the app takes up space and doesn't release the full space back even after work is finished and the photos are transferred off the iPad. 

[Krist]

ric67, as I mentioned, it took 15GB of my 256GB.  Yes, it is a problem, and hope they will correct it. Maybe the 15 GB relates to all the samples and tutorials.

[ric67]

Ah ok, so you didn't find it constantly gobbled up more and more space then? If it stays at 15gb I can live with that if they plan to enable removal of tutorials and samples.

[Girlvsworld]

Same problem here - 6GB of documents data, removed all the files but had to delete and reinstall Affinity photo to regain that space.

[Julioruiz]

Después de lo referido en el post del enlace, he tenido que desinstalar e instalar 2 ó 3 veces. 

 

 

 

[Fotoloco]

As mentioned in the other thread this does seem to remain an issue. 

[Dash]

I concur, right now I lost about 2 hours of work on a 5K image as I ran out of storage without being notified of it. I noticed that after months of usage and only one open project, the application sits at 60GB of claimed space. After moving everything off of the iPad, it just doesn't clear it. This essentially has made my iPad unusable. Reinstalling will have to be done, I guess.

[Fotoloco]

What happens to project files if you uninstall Affinity Photo? Are they deleted?

 

Basically I'm wondering if I could uninstall and reinstall Affinity Photo to regain storage space without having to backup all my files.

[MEB]

Hi Fotoloco,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

Yes, if you uninstall Affinity Photo for iPad the project files stored inside the app will be deleted. You have to save/backup them first.