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Photo Batch processing does not save


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Hi serif,

I use the batch processing quite often and today I  have again the big problem that Affinity Photo just does not save the processed files on my mac (10.12). In a project's folder, I use to have different subfolders for the different saving formats, such as "srcTIF", "processAFPHOTO", "exportJPG". So quite often I use the "save in" option. Sometimes it works as expected. Sometimes not. In the last case I tried to restart the application and even the computer, tried it without multicore-processing - No change: As long as I fire the same batch on the same files, it seems to work, but there is no output, just no files appearing in the target folder. The only way out, that I know until now, is saving the files to another folder and then collect them and move them manually to the correct folder.

Do you know this problem? I encounter it quite often, but still don't understand the problem, since sometimes it just works as expected... might I be doing something wrong? Is there any place where AffinityPhoto might report problems to (I don't find anything related in the console).

Thanks for your help!

Waldbaer

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Hi Waldbaer :)

Does the process appear to complete, yet no files are written? Are you trying to save to a network drive, or a drive that my be protected by password etc?

When saving to another folder and this process works, whereabouts is this folder on your Mac? Are they simply separate folders within your Documents? 

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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Hi Dan,

thanks for your support! All folders in my user's documents (sub/sub/sub... but the same folders sometimes work and sometimes not; path length alone does not seem to be the problem) and the "other folder" was just a folder directly beside the lowest or the parent folder. No protection, not case-sensitive, just a MacOSExtended (Journaled) volume (a fusion drive now, but the problem also occured sometimes on my old system with just a simple HD as far as I can remember). Sometimes even the "original folder" option does not work, it does not even overwrite the source files. The process might run slightly faster than with saving, but it just goes through the list and even says "saving [file format]". It seems to edit the files but the result is to be found nowhere.

...and the next time it works as it should, only change is a (slightly) other target folder (exactly same settings don't work repeatedly, they always result in the same kind of fail). I just have no idea where a systematic problem could be other than that affinity sometimes might not get the target folder from the dialogue (no idea why this should be the case). Is there any kind of log I could activate/have a look into? Is there even any possibility to stop the batch process other than (force) quitting the application?

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No problem at all, thanks for the info. This isn't something we've heard of before, I've spoken with our QA team and they recommend trying disabling Parallel Processing. You may find the batch jobs take slightly longer to complete but it may negate the files not completing correctly. Could you try this with a few jobs and see if it helps please?

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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That's what I already tried and referred to as "multicore-processing" in the first post... sorry, did not help in this case, too.

Hm, interesting that it seems that I'm the only one encountering the problem. So there is no kind of log or something like that to get more information from the app itself, is it?

I'll continue observing this issue and if I get new information I'll report them here.

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There are app logs and crash logs for Affinity but these require our devs to look at, as they are not openly understandable in their current format. 

Please do, I've asked a QA member to look into this also but the multiple tests I've run with pre-existing macros and new macros have all completed successfully on Mac and Windows.

You might find that a reset of Affinity solves the inconsistencies. You can reset your app back to its default settings by holding down the CTRL key while launching the app. When the Clear User Data window appears, click Select All and then Clear. The app will now open.

Be aware that resetting your app back to its default settings will lose any custom settings such as keyboard shortcuts and brushes etc. To backup such settings before resetting the app, please watch our Affinity - Exporting User Settings and Keyboard Shortcuts video.

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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Thanks for your continued support! I tried your reset and was quite shocked when I realized that it deleted all my macros. Well, I should have read what was selected and resetted, but I was lucky having a time machine backup and figured out which file to replace to get my macros back (~/Library/Containers/com.serflabs.affinityphoto/Data/Library/Application Support/user/macros.propcol). After that, I started again with a completely reset app, rebuilt my macro (simply turn 180°, so two times 90 and that's it) and retried the batch with the same files and folders that did not work before. Things I noticed while doing that:

  • saving the macro only worked in a new, but not in the "Default" category. If I try to save in the default, after clicking "save" it shows me the category, but without my macro being added and without further notice. Is that the way it should be?
  • still no saving of target files without further notice
  • I tried the same batch but without any macros at all but it still won't save the files

Since the problem seems to be not connected to the macros, I tried some other things:

  1. I took the other files (no corresponding names, so no overwrites anyway!) out of the target folder and started the same batch as before - hooray! - it worked.
  2. I repeated the batch with other files from the same source and target folders (did not work before, too) - no problem, too.
  3. I deleted the files resulting from 1 and 2, put the previous files back into the target folder, tried again and it did not work again.

What is going on here, is there maybe some kind of security mechanism that the batch does not write to folders containing more than x files?

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12 hours ago, Waldbaer said:

Hm, interesting that it seems that I'm the only one encountering the problem.

If it's any consolation I recall seeing similar behaviour ( some time ago) to what you are seeing with some files not being processed by the batch function

I abandoned my efforts in Affinity and used FastStone instead to do all my batch processing work.

Cant suggest a way to recreate what I experienced (too long ago) but if you can come up with a recreatable scenario that the Devs can reproduce they may be able to see what is occurring.

Hang on in there.

 

To save time I am currently using an automated AI to reply to some posts on this forum. If any of "my" posts are wrong or appear to be total b*ll*cks they are the ones generated by the AI. If correct they were probably mine. I apologise for any mistakes made by my AI - I'm sure it will improve with time.

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Thanks for that, could you please try using the default macros that are supplied with the software, rather than your own custom ones? Does this change anything?

A copy of your exported macro that you're running would be very helpful, along with a screen recording of what happens when you run a batch process. I'd like to see the new batch job panel, and the process list that appears to the left of this when a job is running. 

Apologies for so many requests, it's simply that we aren't currently able to replicate the issue so we'd like to remove as many variants as possible :)

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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OK, I'll take a screenrecording showing the process. I don't like to post it to the public though, so I'll send you a download link as private message, same with my macros.

Default macro does not work, too; even no macro at all (just conversion) does not work (as described above).

Thanks for you support, I know that these questions are not to bother me but to find the problem. I really appreciate that you take so much time for my problem and hope that we might tackle it soon! :)

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Hm, I have another idea where the problem might be: I use the third-party app Default Folder X to help my file managing tasks. I swear I have deactivated it once before and the batch did not work anyways, but now I've quit it for the video and everything works fine. As soon as I launch and use it, the batch goes to nowhere as described in this whole thread. :$

The Batch dialogue does show all files and also the output path the same way with and without DFX, though, so I still wonder why this might be a problem. Maybe you know how you handle the path data during the process and could contact StClairSoft about their handling so you might find the problem? I'm sorry that this is so complicated, but I'd really appreciate using both apps simultaneoulsly (works great most of the time already, just the described "sometimes" not).

I'll send you the videos in a minute, I'm just compressing them right now.

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Thank you for taking the time to do that, it's much appreciated.

It certainly does appear to be this app, I'll be downloading a trial version to test on my machine and I'll use your screen recordings to log this issue with our devs, although I can't guarantee future compatibility as I'm not certain how the Default Folder X software directly affects handling of path data, and whether this is something that can be changed to be compatible with Affinity.

I understand the frustration, for the time being I'd recommend closing the app whilst running batch jobs, and if I receive any update from our developers I'll be sure to post it here!

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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Thank you again for checking this out! The interesting thing for me is still that it works sometimes and sometimes not and the path is always entered into the dialogue. I'll send this thread to stclairsoft, too; as far as I experienced, they have a really nice and responsive customer support, too, and this is really the first time I have an issue with it although I'm using its enhanced dialogues nearly all the time and everywhere.

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@Waldbaer, are you running the most recent version of Default Folder X (5.2.5) or at least a 5.x version? I do not use this app but from what I have read about it here, the 4.x versions had to inject code into apps to work properly, & that can cause several kinds of hard to troubleshoot problems.

Also, from what I have read on page 21 in the v5 online user guide, it is possible to exclude apps in preferences > options, which might be something you can use to exclude the Affinity apps so you can still use it with other apps.

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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Hi R C-R,

thanks for jumping in! I'm using the most recent version (currently 5.2.5). Thanks for the heads-up concerning the app exclusions! I really appreciate DFX's services at other parts of Affinity though, e.g. it intelligently recalls my recent folders or even files for open/save/export and facilitates access on different places using Finder windows or shortcuts (e.g. if I work with different applications on the same project and folders). Probably I'll just leave everything as it is for the moment and just doublecheck if the batches really do what they should and deactivate it as soon as I notice there is a problem...

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49 minutes ago, Waldbaer said:

Probably I'll just leave everything as it is for the moment and just doublecheck if the batches really do what they should and deactivate it as soon as I notice there is a problem...

Sounds like a good plan to me. :)

FWIW, I just scanned through the user guide pretty quickly so I don't remember the details (& I'm to lazy to go back & search for the relevant part!) but I think I saw something about setting a per app default folder. If you have set that for AP it may be that somehow conflicts with AP's built-in batch process option to choose a folder for the batch job Output to save into.

I have no idea if that would explain why no files appear in that folder but maybe it is something you could check?

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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I did not set any application folders manually. I think it takes some automatically, though. I found two checkbox options maybe connected to this: "Select most recently used file in open dialogues" (checked) and "use current folder of the file in save dialogues" (unchecked)...

I still do not understand why it seems to return the save path correctly but then it is not used. O.o I thought DFX only is active with the standard macOS file dialogues and does nothing else, but maybe I'm wrong...

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  • 2 years later...

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