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Qs from former Photoshop user


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22 hours ago, Gary_F said:

... Time stamp of an exported file (jpeg, png, etc) isn't updated when saving

... I'm referring to the time stamp shown by Windows Explorer. You know, next to the file name and size there's "Date Modified". It never updates when I export a new version of a file from Affinity Photo.

... The date is still the original one, even a file I saved yesterday and just exported again now is still showing yesterday's date and time. It has to be a bug.

I am unable to reproduce this on Windows 10 either.  Exporting the file as a JPEG results in the 'Date Modified' timestamp being updated each time I export it.

There are multiple dates in Windows File Explorer (Date, Date Created, Date Modified, Date Accessed, Date Taken), which can be added by right-clicking on the column title bar.  The 'Date' field doesn't use 'Date Modified', but will instead use 'Date Taken' from the EXIF metadata if it's present (If it was created by the camera, image editing software, etc.).  If there is no 'Date Taken' info, then it will use 'Date Created'. 

Is it possible that the column you're looking at in Windows File Explorer is just labelled 'Date' and hence why it doesn't appear to be updating?

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I've previously made a feature request here for files created in Affinity software to include 'Date Taken' timestamps though, because Date File Created, Date File Modified and Date File Accessed fields, have always been a PITA when data is shifted around.

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12 minutes ago, owenr said:

 

See info in my request at:

 

 

OK I see.

 

Which, until implemented, would make this the best option for the OP.

 

Save the original. say File 1

go File > Save as  say  "File 2"

go File > Open  File 1

 

I don't know if that would work with a macro ?

 

That will do it, not perfect but far from the five or six steps he thought.

 

If he needs to flatten the image Layer > Merge Visible

 

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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@Sima, thanks for the explanation. Perhaps the issue with the displayed "Date" in Explorer is a Windows quirk, but as you've explained it's possible for Affinity to get around this by updating the EXIF metadata each time a file is saved. I always sort my file by date so the most recently worked on files are always at the top, which makes my life easier. Having to hunt through files looking for one by name creates unnecessary frustration. It's the small things that can make a big difference to a user. :-)

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34 minutes ago, owenr said:

No, Save As does not do "exactly that". I'm surprised that a Mac user doesn't know the difference between the Duplicate and Save As commands.

Aside from the exception I already mentioned, in Affinity what does "Save as" do differently?

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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17 minutes ago, Gary_F said:

@Sima, thanks for the explanation. Perhaps the issue with the displayed "Date" in Explorer is a Windows quirk, but as you've explained it's possible for Affinity to get around this by updating the EXIF metadata each time a file is saved. I always sort my file by date so the most recently worked on files are always at the top, which makes my life easier. Having to hunt through files looking for one by name creates unnecessary frustration. It's the small things that can make a big difference to a user. :-)

No the 'Date Taken' field in the EXIF metadata needs to be added when the file is first created and then remain unchanged, as it's the only constant date we have.

To overcome your issue you'll need to sort by the 'Date Modified' column as the 'Date' column won't do what you want it to do.

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17 minutes ago, toltec said:

Which, until implemented, would make this the best option for the OP.

 

Save the original. say File 1

go File > Save as  say  "File 2"

go File > Open  File 1

If you 'save as' to a different directory, you can use exactly the same file name for both copies & open them side by side or in tabs in Affinity. Both will have the same file name & can be edited & saved independently of each other. Since this can be confusing, it is usually best to name them differently, but that is not technically necessary & Affinity, like most other apps, will have no problems keeping them separate & independent of one another.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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4 minutes ago, Sima said:

No the 'Date Taken' field in the EXIF metadata needs to be added when the file is first created and then remain unchanged, as it's the only constant date we have.

To overcome your issue you'll need to sort by the 'Date Modified' column as the 'Date' column won't do what you want it to do.

Oh. :-( I don't think it's too much to ask from the universe to always show the date a file was last modified as the default "Date" shown by Explorer. If I update a Word doc or even a .txt file in Notepad the date in the Date column always changes. It's illogical that it doesn't do that for image files.

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3 minutes ago, owenr said:

See this request for a Duplicate command that is different to Save As:

That doesn't really answer my question about what is different. In Affinity "Save as" already has a keyboard shortcut & as I mentioned above it is not hard to save as to a different directory & work on both copies side by side, independently of each other. It is, in the language of your feature request, an alternate branch.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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5 minutes ago, owenr said:

Please accept my apologies for being so inept at educating you. Hopefully, someone else will have the required talent.

My preference would be an apology for an uncalled for personal attack, but I do not really expect that. :(

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
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1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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2 hours ago, R C-R said:

"Save as" does exactly that, but of course in Affinity (as well some other apps) it also closes the original so you are then editing/viewing the duplicate instead of the original.

 

Some applications address this issue by offering a "Save a Copy As" option in addition to "Save As".

 

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Using "Save as" to create a new file and then opening up the original file to work with both doesn't provide a solution that's as simple as a "duplicate image" function from the menu. I don't want folders full of unwanted files because Photo doesn't have a quick in-memory option to duplicate an image. The snapshot solution is better than saving a new file, but still more of an effort than picking "duplicate" from the menu. Hopefully the feature request from @owenr will get a positive response from Serif.

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24 minutes ago, Gary_F said:

I don't want folders full of unwanted files because Photo doesn't have a quick in-memory option to duplicate an image.

If it did, it would most likely significantly increase the amount of memory the app needed, causing a lot of paging to VM on systems without lots of RAM installed, which in turn would adversely affect performance. I do not know if this is why such a feature has not been implemented but it is something to consider.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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16 minutes ago, R C-R said:

If it did, it would most likely significantly increase the amount of memory the app needed, causing a lot of paging to VM on systems without lots of RAM installed, which in turn would adversely affect performance. I do not know if this is why such a feature has not been implemented but it is something to consider.

Not quite. Photoshop has had a duplicate function for 20 years and back then desktops had a tiny fraction of the memory they have today. If a computer has sufficient memory then Photo(shop) loads the entire image into RAM. For example, an image for a magazine DPS with many layers might require 0.4GB of RAM. This is small considering today's basic home computer has 4GB of RAM and a designer's computer is likely to have 16GB. So duplicating even a very high resolution image in memory is a very trivial task and requires no paging - unlike 20 years ago when I remember waiting 10 minutes to load magazine covers into Photoshop while the hard disk thrashed away.

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1 hour ago, Alfred said:

Some applications address this issue by offering a "Save a Copy As" option in addition to "Save As".

I have one Mac app (GraphicConverter) that takes this to extremes, with all these File menu options, among many others:

59c5616922981_toomanysaveoptions.png.8103418d66b8864eef5dc0e6a252c77a.png

That is unusual, but what is not (at least on the Mac side) is the trailing ellipsis (...) indicating Save as, Duplicate, & similar save functions all open dialog boxes that allow users to choose a file name & destination for the copy, with the usual warning about overwriting an original if saved to the same destination with the same filename.

 

Some apps have a separate "Export" file menu item; others include that in the Save as item, usually by adding popups or buttons to the dialog box that often open one or other dialog boxes, depending on the available export options. Apple's bundled apps like TextEdit & Preview currently have both export & Duplicate file menu items, plus a hidden save as one that changes "Duplicate..."  to "Save As..." if you hold down the alt/option key.

 

In addition to that, Apple has sort of attempted to make manually saving changes to already saved document more or less obsolete, through a default option in System Preferences explained in this article.

 

These days, what once were basic functions & menu choices that worked the same way on all Mac apps are just a distant memory.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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6 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I have one Mac app (GraphicConverter) that takes this to extremes, with all these File menu options, among many others:

59c5616922981_toomanysaveoptions.png.8103418d66b8864eef5dc0e6a252c77a.png

That is unusual, but what is not (at least on the Mac side) is the trailing ellipsis (...) indicating Save as, Duplicate, & similar save functions all open dialog boxes that allow users to choose a file name & destination for the copy, with the usual warning about overwriting an original if saved to the same destination with the same filename.

 

The ellipsis is standard on Windows, too. I usually quote it when posting, but it gets a bit messy at the end of a sentence!

 

There are, of course, some odd instances such as the one that arises with the 'Rasterize...' command in the Affinity apps, where the ellipsis is there to cover the few situations where there is actually a need for a dialog.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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1 hour ago, Gary_F said:

Photoshop has had a duplicate function for 20 years and back then desktops had a tiny fraction of the memory they have today. If a computer has sufficient memory then Photo(shop) loads the entire image into RAM.

And if it does not, it pages to the scratch disk(s), significantly slowing performance. In the worst case scenarios, out-of-RAM or out-of-memory errors occur. If that happens, Adobe recommends the following:

Quote

 

If you experience out-of-RAM or out-of-memory errors in Photoshop, try increasing the amount of RAM allocated to Photoshop. However, setting the RAM allocation for Photoshop too high (>85%) could affect the performance of other running applications, making your system unstable.

 

The best solution to this issue is to add more RAM to your computer.

 

Note that last "best solution" recommendation.

 

I do not know what it is like on Windows, but on Macs Affinity Photo is remarkably memory efficient. (That should not be a big surprise since extreme memory efficiency was the goal of the research project at Serif run on older iPads with very little available application memory that eventually resulted in the development of the Affinity apps.) I don't have a very powerful Mac, & it only has 8 GB of RAM, but even if I open half a dozen or more very complex, multilayer Affinity documents, the app never uses more than about 4 GB for everything, & there is very little change in performance. That is not to say it is always lightning fast -- my somewhat anemic CPU & GPU limit what the apps can do quickly -- but it never hits the disk(s) like Photoshop would.

 

In fact, some of the heavy Photoshop users I know find this feature of Affinity amazing.:)

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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3 hours ago, Alfred said:

 

The ellipsis is standard on Windows, too. I usually quote it when posting, but it gets a bit messy at the end of a sentence!

 

There are, of course, some odd instances such as the one that arises with the 'Rasterize...' command in the Affinity apps, where the ellipsis is there to cover the few situations where there is actually a need for a dialog.

 

It seems Serif are a bit hit or miss with the use of ellipsis.

 

The Windows User Interface Guidelines say that “[Ellipses] indicate that a command needs additional information. Don’t use an ellipsis whenever an action displays another window—only when additional information is required.”

 

File > New for example, does not have ellipsis, and it needs a lot of "additional information"

File > Print, which is a similar sort of choices menu, does have ellipses.

 

File > Open does have ellipsis but only requires clicking on a file.

File > Place too,.

 

So, New probably should, Open and Place perhaps shouldn't ?

 

in the Help menu, About... does, and there is nothing to do. So that definitely shouldn't.

Windows PCs. Photo and Designer, latest non-beta versions.

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1 minute ago, owenr said:

The developers haven't prevented us from having multiple documents open simultaneously, so it seems highly unlikely that they haven't implemented a Duplicate command because it would result in an additional open document.

I probably was not as clear about that as I could have been. What I am suggesting they may be considering is the potential implications for memory use & overall system performance. Preserving high memory efficiency (which PS is not know for) results in less paging & better performance, not just for Affinity, but for all the processes running on the OS. This is why Adobe recommends closing other apps to improve the performance of PS but that is not much of a consideration for the Affinity or other apps that optimize memory efficiency.

 

4 minutes ago, owenr said:

In Apple's apps, Duplicate does not have an ellipsis, and it does not invoke a dialog.

You are correct about no ellipsis for the Duplicate command in TextEdit & Preview (but Save As does have it, as do some third party apps like GC). However, in the Apple apps, if you try to close a duplicate, whether or not you have edited it, you get a dialog box asking if you want to save or discard it.

 

All I am trying to say here is there are "under the hood" considerations that might make a duplicate in memory feature less desirable than one might think. Although I appreciate the corrections to what I said, please do not make more of it than that.

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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Just now, toltec said:

So, New probably should, Open and Place perhaps shouldn't ?

If historic presidents were ignored, New definitely should but both Open & Place also require 'additional information" (the location of the file to open or place) so they should too.

 

Of course, ignoring historic presidents is not easily done. Consider for instance one of the worst possible, least descriptive names for a graphics tool ever devised, the "magic wand" that from a modern 21st century perspective is a ridiculous, childish name. But how often do you see anybody refer to the Affinity tool as the "Flood Select Tool," a far more descriptive name? xD

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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