Importing & Organising Brushes into Affinity Photo Desktop

[Colboy]

Hi,

I'm new to Affinity Photo for Desktop (also have iPad version, but barely used it yet). I imported file containing .abr brushes successfully,, but after importing the second & third batch, they didn't show up in AP. Why? Could it be that they are Vector brushes & not Pixel brushes, or is there another problem? After "Import> select> Open" 'AP' did said that they were "successfully imported", but they're not visible. 

Also, If I want to keep different brush packs separate, or have similar types of brushes grouped together, should i create a  new category first & then while that category is 'open', add new brushes to it?

 

Apologies if this has been asked and answered somewhere before. I did some searching, but didn't find what I was looking for.

[Callum]

Hi Colboy,

Welcome to the forums  

If possible could you provide one of the brush files in question that isn't appearing in the app? 

To group up your brushes create a new category then right click the brushes in the brushes tab you want added to it and hit Move To Category.

Thanks

Callum

[Colboy]

11 minutes ago, Callum said:

If possible could you provide one of the brush files in question that isn't appearing in the app

Here's one of the Brushes that aren't appearing. How is it possible to tell if the brush is Vector or Pixel? Is that possible without having it open ?

ALFA SIERRA 1.afbrushes

[Colboy]

I think, looking again, that the two brushes may both be Vector Brushes. The one that I didn't upload here, I just realised IS a Vector Brush. I don't think AP uses Vector Brushes??

I have Affinity Designer on my iPad Pro by the way.

[Callum]

These brushes are vector unfortunately so they can't be used in Photo there is no way to tell until they are imported. Once imported it should show up on the import message (see attached)

Thanks

C

[Colboy]

1 minute ago, Callum said:

These brushes are vector unfortunately so they can't be used in Photo there is no way to tell until they are imported. Once imported it should show up on the import message (see attached)

Thanks

C

Thanks Callum. Not knowing until they're imported means for the future, that I should organise them into separate folders on both my computer & iPad, so that I know which App they will/will not work with. For the computer, as I only have "Photo", I'll know that if , after importing, that they don't appear, they are Vectors & I can put them into separate folders.

 

Appreciate your help :-)

[R C-R]

It is really annoying that there is no way to tell if an .afbrushes file contains vector or raster brushes without installing it. 
Worse, Affinity Photo will install vector .afbrushes files it cannot access, unnecessarily using file space that could be used by other things. 

I can't find it right now, but over a year ago I posted (to?) a topic, asking if there was some way users could tell what type of brushes the file contained, perhaps by searching for some short binary code in the file with a text editor like BBEdit, but never got an answer for that. In the same topic, it was suggested that to reclaim the wasted file space, users could use Preferences > Miscellaneous > Reset Fonts, but of course that would delete all the brush categories except the factory defaults, so it is not a very acceptable solution.

An alternative 'try at your own risk' solution that works for me on my Mac is to quit Affinity Photo, dig down into the per user support files for Affinity Photo & delete the vector_brushes.propcol file. A new default one will be created on the next launch of Photo (less than 350 bytes on my Mac).

The file path to this file for the Mac retail version is ~/Library/Containers/com.seriflabs.affinityphoto/Data/Library/Application Support/user/

For the Mac 1.7 customer beta it is ~/Library/Application Support/Affinity Photo Beta/user/

Considering that Affinity Photo can't use vector brushes, I think it would make sense if it just refused to import them, maybe with a message explaining that it can't use them.