Affinity Photo: Ability to work with variables like PS?

[SirWillibald]

Hi everybody,

just stumbled over Affinity looking for an alternative to Adobe Illustrator (really loathe the subscription model) without any real hope of finding something useful. What can I say, I couldn't have been proven more wrong, Affinity Designer is absolutely awesome so far!

I had no intention to look for a Photoshop alternative at first, but after being blown away by the Designer, I thinks it's at least worth a try.

One question: Is Affinity Photo able to work with variables and data sets like PS? If you don't know what I'm talking about: https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/creating-data-driven-graphics.html

I really use this a lot(!), this would be the killer feature for me, if Affinity Photo isn't able to do this, I have to pass.

Or perhaps the upcoming Affinity Publisher will have such a feature (InDesing has it, as well)?

Thanks for any infos, and congratulations on the great programm, I suppose it's only a matter of days before I buy Affinity Designer, really great!

[stokerg]

Hi SirWillibald,

 

This isn't possible at the moment and i'm not sure if the Dev team have any plans to add this feature.  It would certainly make for a good feature request

[SirWillibald]

Alright, thanks for the feedback, done! :-)

[MikeW]

Affinity Publisher will eventually support merging. Key word is eventually.

 

Whether that ever is then ported to AD only time will tell. But don't expect merging in anything for years.

 

AI & PS's use of variables would be the clunkiest means of doing this task.

[SirWillibald]

54 minutes ago, MikeW said:

AI & PS's use of variables would be the clunkiest means of doing this task.

This. It works, and it helps a great deal, but handling is awful.

[MikeW]

Yes, it does work. My main experience is in AI. And like its charting, I would rather never use either function. Not when there is ID or QXP to use. Even at that, I use a commercial plug-in or two, depending on what I am doing or need to accomplish. 

 

Affinity Publisher will be the same for me. When merging is ever rolled in that is. If Serif implements a similar merge function like it did in its PagePlus product, I doubt I would ever use it (sort of similar to ID's). My hope is they take a good hard look at what commercial plug-ins do for ID/QXP as regards merging and make something as good.

[Ortwin Gentz]

I'd love to see some automation help in Designer (or Photo or Publisher). My use case is this:

I have a complex, page-based marketing document with pixel art and some text layers that needs to be localized in many languages. I used to use Photoshop with the "Define Variables" feature. It allowed me to select a language and it automatically disabled and enabled the visibility of the language-specific layers. Each language has roughly 30 layers, so enabling and disabling manually to switch the language is not a good option.

Of course, I could create separate documents for each language. But then I'd have to make language-independent changes in all separate documents.

I also thought about extracting all language-independent layers into a "template" document. However, I couldn't find an option to place a document into another maintaining the link. So that it automatically updates the language-specific document when I make changes in my template document. In PS this feature is called Smart Objects.

What's the best way to achieve my use case using Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher?

Edited January 28, 2021 by Ortwin Gentz

[Old Bruce]

6 hours ago, Ortwin Gentz said:

What's the best way to achieve my use case using Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher?

Based on your description I would use Publisher's upcoming Data Merge feature.

[Ortwin Gentz]

Thanks for the tipp, I played with it.

As far as I understand the Data Merge feature, it lets you import texts and image paths from an Excel sheet to generate a new page for each row in the spreadsheet. As soon as the import is done, the link to the Excel sheet is destroyed and the placeholders are replaced by the spreadsheet content.

It would be nice if I could keep the link to the spreadsheet so that I can refine the texts in Excel and see how they look in the .afpub document. For my use case, it means I have to delete the imported pages each time I make a text modification and merge them again.

Or did I miss something?

[Old Bruce]

53 minutes ago, Ortwin Gentz said:

As far as I understand the Data Merge feature, it lets you import texts and image paths from an Excel sheet to generate a new page for each row in the spreadsheet. As soon as the import is done, the link to the Excel sheet is destroyed and the placeholders are replaced by the spreadsheet content.

 

That is a new, unsaved document you are looking at. The original Publisher document  is still open with the placeholders.

[v_kyr]

13 hours ago, Ortwin Gentz said:

I have a complex, page-based marketing document with pixel art and some text layers that needs to be localized in many languages. I used to use Photoshop with the "Define Variables" feature. It allowed me to select a language and it automatically disabled and enabled the visibility of the language-specific layers. Each language has roughly 30 layers, so enabling and disabling manually to switch the language is not a good option.

Depends on how you structure localization language layers here. If all are inside their own language group (aka EN, DE, FR ... etc.) you can toggle on/off (show/hide) the coresponding wanted to be active localization group.

13 hours ago, Ortwin Gentz said:

I also thought about extracting all language-independent layers into a "template" document. However, I couldn't find an option to place a document into another maintaining the link. So that it automatically updates the language-specific document when I make changes in my template document. In PS this feature is called Smart Objects.

In Affinity that would be embedding a doc into another doc here, though as links then would actually not be supported by APh/ADe and probably just by APub so far.

[Ortwin Gentz]

9 hours ago, v_kyr said:

If all are inside their own language group (aka EN, DE, FR ... etc.) you can toggle on/off (show/hide) the coresponding wanted to be active localization group.

Unfortunately that doesn't work in my case because some layers (screenshots) are stacked on top of each other. Grouping them into one layer per language would destroy the z index.

9 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

That is a new, unsaved document you are looking at. The original Publisher document  is still open with the placeholders.

Thanks, I actually missed that it creates a new document for each merge.

Still, it's unfortunate, that the merge basically is a copy operation. When I change the font size of a text field for one language (for example if that localization is very long), that change isn't persisted in the master document.

Looks like the feature is more designed for typical catalogue production workflows where the layout follows strict rules and an ongoing sync from the data document isn't needed.