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I work on a project now where there ie so many files to be created (about fifty) and the have to be in the right order.

To do so, my artboards are divided in 4 categories : A B C & D hence my artboards renamed A1 A2 A3.. B1 B2 B3 etc.....

Therefore I spend a lot of time renaming artborad. Is there any way to bach-rename? Or at least edit the convention 'Artboard {n}'?

On windows you can press F2 to rename (cannot find a way to set up short cut for renaming in affinity). So if you select 50files and you press F2 you type "NEW NAME" and all the files will automatically be renamed NEW NAME (n). Would be nice to be able to do the same thing with artboard.

At least when I'm renaming a artboard (or layer or any object), it would be nice to be able to rename the next one by pressing tab.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Nobody ever needed something similar? Lately I've been creating some animations (exporting up to hundred files, I'm actually limited as after that it become a pain to get around with the different layout) and I really had a hard time when I wanted to add a new artboard in the middle and keep continuity in the order of my exported files. I had three solutions:

- create a new "artboard 97" and then transfer the content of each board to the next one such as artboard(n) to artboard(n+1) in order to add me new content in "artboard 53"

- at the end of the project selecting and grouping all the contents on by one and then creat slices from these groups which will be numbered on the order of their position.

- otherwise, rename my artboard one by one with numbers

In any case, any of this solution is very laborious and that is why I would really like the be able the rename artboard or object by batch. Or at least when renaming an object, being able to rename the following one by pressing tab would already be amazing (as it works in windows explorer, sorry, not familiar with the finder of MAC OS). I put it in bold cause this simple thing would really save me time on all my project as I always spend so much time renaming objects.

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On 7/23/2018 at 4:45 AM, hujikoda said:

Nobody ever needed something similar?

According to my use of the renaming function in my file manager (outside of Affinity) I need this all the time. I can think of many situations this would come in handy in AD, too. Still, I think this is a rather exotic feature in comparison to many other 'much needed' features that are already on the roadmap.

So, I do support this feature request but I do have not high expectations to see this in the near future.

d.

Affinity Designer 1 & 2   |   Affinity Photo 1 & 2   |   Affinity Publisher 1 & 2
Affinity Designer 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Photo 2 for iPad   |   Affinity Publisher 2 for iPad

Windows 11 64-bit - Core i7 - 16GB - Intel HD Graphics 4600 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M
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On ‎7‎/‎2‎/‎2018 at 3:13 PM, hujikoda said:

…Therefore I spend a lot of time renaming artboard. Is there any way to batch-rename? Or at least edit the convention 'Artboard {n}'?

I think it would be a good feature too.

If you have Affinity Photo as well as Affinity Designer, you may be able to do something with Macros for the time being, but it will be a rather clunky solution.  By clunky, I mean you would have to manually record the renaming of Artboard 1, select next Artboard up, rename Artboard 2, select next Artboard up, etc. Then once it has been recorded you could save the macro and play it back on other documents. However, even then, it still won't be ideal because it'll be quite literal.  I.E.

1. The names you record in the macro will be the names the artboards will be.  Therefore, if you wanted to change the naming scheme from '001' to 'Page 001' you would need to record another macro from scratch

2. If you recorded the renaming of say 50 artboards, when you play it back on a document with only 5 artboards, the last artboard (top artboard) would need to be manually renamed as the name will be wrong (see below screenshot)

3. If you recorded the renaming of say 50 artboards, when you play it back on a document with 55 artboards, the last 5 won't be renamed

In case you do have Affinity Photo as well, I have attached an example macro that you can experiment with.  However I predominantly deal with photos, therefore I'm not sure how well the macro will work with a real-world project in Affinity Designer.  Therefore, try it out on a copy of a document—not an original document—so if it doesn't work as expected you will still have the original document intact.

To import the Macro into Affinity Photo, go to the Library Panel (not Macro Panel), click on the icon with the horizontal lines in the top-right and go to 'Import Macros'.

Affinity Photo Macro File (3KB):
Renaming Macros.afmacros

001.thumb.png.b2ae13e3fe64e11c8abe4879a510450e.png

 

On ‎7‎/‎23‎/‎2018 at 3:45 AM, hujikoda said:

…Lately I've been creating some animations (exporting up to hundred files, I'm actually limited as after that it become a pain to get around with the different layout) and I really had a hard time when I wanted to add a new artboard in the middle and keep continuity in the order of my exported files.

As you mentioned animation, whilst experimenting with the above I think it would also be good to be able to reverse the layer/artboard export order in the Export Persona too.

At the moment, if you export five artboards/layers, Artboard 005 (the top artboard in the layers panel) is exported first and Artboard 001 (the bottom artboard in the layers panel) is exported last.  This means the file timestamps are in the wrong order.  If the exported images are organised by file name it isn't such an issue, however if organised by date they are backwards.  I'm not sure why it's like this, as exporting to PDF exports correctly (I.E. The bottom artboard is page 1).

002.thumb.png.4d2aab67f13048e6808c97eae836b890.png

003.thumb.png.2e86175857408f93e9f0d9972f7c1b38.png

004.thumb.png.93ac8dad149183ef22a635d48cc6e5a5.png

 

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Thank you so much - S - !!! This is a very complete answer :)

7 hours ago, - S - said:

To import the Macro into Affinity Photo, go to the Library Panel (not Macro Panel), click on the icon with the horizontal lines in the top-right and go to 'Import Macros'.

Affinity Photo Macro File (3KB):
Renaming Macros.afmacros

Thanks for sharing the hard work. Unfortunately I use AD way more than AP but I'll save this for further use :)

 

7 hours ago, - S - said:

As you mentioned animation, whilst experimenting with the above I think it would also be good to be able to reverse the layer/artboard export order in the Export Persona too.

Agreed on that.

 

7 hours ago, - S - said:

At the moment, if you export five artboards/layers, Artboard 005 (the top artboard in the layers panel) is exported first and Artboard 001 (the bottom artboard in the layers panel) is exported last.  This means the file timestamps are in the wrong order.  If the exported images are organised by file name it isn't such an issue, however if organised by date they are backwards.  I'm not sure why it's like this, as exporting to PDF exports correctly (I.E. The bottom artboard is page 1).

Yes, this is a strange way to work... To me it would actually make more sense that the bottom page would be the last one of the document actually (but everyone might not think the same). However the way it works now is not very consistent. Maybe to be able to chose in wich order could be nice (but another very specific feature that 99% of people will probably not see the point^^)

 

7 hours ago, - S - said:

004.thumb.png.93ac8dad149183ef22a635d48cc6e5a5.png

 

Since I see that you work on Windows, there is actually a fast way to do so in your file explorer:

On 7/2/2018 at 10:13 PM, hujikoda said:

On windows you can press F2 to rename (cannot find a way to set up short cut for renaming in affinity). So if you select 50files and you press F2 you type "NEW NAME" and all the files will automatically be renamed NEW NAME (n). Would be nice to be able to do the same thing with artboard.

So in your exemple you would first click on 001, then CTRL+A then F2, then enter "new name", press enter, and all your file will be renamed "new name (N)".

And since you gave me this info about the timestams that I didn't think of, I found a new way to rename file easily :) by using what I said, ordering them by date in Windows :)

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  • 3 years later...

What Affinity needs in similar to the batch file ability found in the RAW handler of Photoshop. I retain Photoshop just to be able to serialize and save RAW files with added info. IE: 2021-08-01-(2 digit exposure number)-(subject name). Great time saver and easy to use. I can hope to someday totally get rid of Photoshop.......

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  • 5 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I'm on a trial for affinity designer.

How come renaming layers is so hard? (Mac Big Sur)

It has these problems and more:

  • Names get unselected.
  • If you are using a font with symbol glyphs, that symbol sometimes gets put into the layer name (bad if you want to use the layer name to name files. Operating systems do not support these obscure glyphs.)
  • Sometimes when I'm about to change part of the layer name only, affinity selects the entire layer name.
  • Typing layer name and affinity pushes enter. Because I'm still typing, I start flying through all the tools rapidly.

It's the worst renaming experience I've ever had.

Honestly, most of my time spent in program is renaming layers.

I'm not sure if I want to keep putting up with this. What is going on???

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Here I'm going to add a GIF to show just how annoying this is to try to rename this black square layer to something else like Black square 2:

HhR9nLuFEi.gif.cd905c0ff7d3d9275ba74f5129a3f767.gif

it inserts the square into the layer name, then it keeps closing out of the rename while I still try to modify it.

There's a little gremlin 🤡 smacking the enter key.

No matter if I try my gaming mouse or my "magic" mouse, it does the same stuff!

Edited by DaveLawrence
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