No EXIF Thumbnail?

[BC15]

After processing a number of 16 bit images in Affinity Photo, I exported them as 8 bit tifs. I have the Embed ICC profile and Embed metadata boxes ticked. When I viewed the 8 bit images in BreezeBrowser Pro they were very slow to display. I've contacted BreezeBrowser support and they have suggested that the issue is probably that Affinity Photo does not produce an EXIF thumbnail and this is why the display is so slow. Is this the case or is there an option somewhere that I need to switch on?

[IanSG]

37 minutes ago, BC15 said:

Is this the case or is there an option somewhere that I need to switch on?

Try Edit / Preferences / General and make sure that "Save thumbnails with documents" is checked.

[BC15]

Thanks for your response. I have just tried that and found that "Save thumbnails with documents"  is already checked. I assume this must be a default as I haven't checked this myself in the past.

[Move Along People]

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[BC15]

Hi Haakoo. I'm not familiar with xnview but how do you know that the thumbnails you are seeing are the embedded EXIF thumbnails and not from the actual image?

[Move Along People]

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[BC15]

I have installed xnview and looked at my images, however many software products do show a thumbnail of the image, but this could well be generated from the actual image, rather than the imbedded EXIF thumbnail. So my original question still applies - how do you know that the thumbnail being displayed by xnview is the EXIF thumbnail and not a from the actual image? I have searched the xnview documentation, but I can't find an answer to this.

[IanSG]

17 minutes ago, BC15 said:

how do you know that the thumbnail being displayed by xnview is the EXIF thumbnail and not a from the actual image?

There are options under Tools / Settings / Thumbnails - it looks like you can disable both the creation of thumbnails and the use of internal ones.  If you post an example image or 2 we can see if we have the same problem.

[BC15]

I set the Thumbnail setting to 'Use Embedded Thumbnail' as you suggested and the result was quite interesting as all the images took a long time to display in Xnview! When complete however both the Photoshop created images and the Affinity Photo created images displayed thumbnails, so it looks like they are there.

One thing I did notice when I was viewing the folder in Explorer, was that the Photoshop images were described as 'Microsoft Office Document Imaging File' and have the extension .tif whereas the Affinity Photo Images were described as 'Affinity Photo File' and have the extension .tiff. I don't know whether this is at all relevant, but as it is a difference between the 2 sets of images I thought it worth mentioning.

 

The tifs in question are around 60mb so are a bit big to post.....

[Dan C]

Hi BC15

I've logged this with our developers as I'm not certain if our choice to not embed an EXIF thumbnail was intended to keep file sizes as small as possible. If this was intentional I've requested an option be added at export to embed an EXIF thumbnail if required. I hope this helps!

[BC15]

Thanks for that Dan. This is really important as it will make Affinity Photo more compatible with other imaging software. At the moment I have to run an action in photoshop to open each image and then save it to another folder which regenerates the EXIF thumbnail. As I'm looking to completely replace Photoshop with Affinity Photo this is a bit of a drawback!

Also this means that XnView does not show the embedded thumbnail as it seems to indicate.

[walt.farrell]

Are the EXIF thumbnail and the normal thumbnail two different things? And if so, is there some specific reason you need the EXIF thumbnail rather than the thumbnail that the Affinity applications provide today, @BC15?

20 minutes ago, BC15 said:

Also this means that XnView does not show the embedded thumbnail as it seems to indicate.

I'm not sure that's true. Given that when you tell Affinity to embed a thumbnail, XnView shows it, and when you don't, it doesn't, I would say it's showing it. The difference in speed you noticed may be due to the time it takes XnView to manipulate the thumbnail provided by Affinity to the size you've requested in XnView.

[BC15]

Hi Walt. Sorry, I'm not sure I follow what your saying. Firstly the problem occurs with BreezeBrowser which is very slow to display the Affinity Photo precessed 8 bit tiffs because (according to BeezeBrowser support) they don't have an embedded thumbnail. Without this thumbnail, one has to be temporariliy generated each time for every image - hence the slow display. I am assuming that there is only one imbedded thumbnail and that this is in the EXIF as no mention of another thumbnail has been mentioned. Doesn't mean this isn't the case however!

I am intrigued by your comment ' when you tell Affinity to embed a thumbnail' . How do you tell Affinity to do this? If this is possible, this would answer my original question and potentially resolve the issue....by the way the speed problem is not with XnView, but BreezeBrowser. I've never used XnView before and only downloaded it in an attempt to see whether an EXIF thumbnail was present (as suggested in this forum), but according to Dan C (Staff), Affinity does not imbed a thumbnail. If there is no thumbnail, the only conclusion I can draw is when XnView is set to display only the imbedded thumbnail it does not work as a thumbnail is displayed.

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, BC15 said:

I am intrigued by your comment ' when you tell Affinity to embed a thumbnail' . How do you tell Affinity to do this? If this is possible, this would answer my original question and potentially resolve the issue

You mentioned it above: Save Thumbnails with Documents.

In my experience, if that option is chosen then the thumbnails are embedded, and shown by other applications. If not, they aren't. But I've never heard them referred to as "EXIF thumbnails", merely "thumbnails", so I was curious if there are two different thumbnail standards, and perhaps Affinity is using one and you're wanting it to use another.

[BC15]

Oh yes - I see where you are coming from.... The term EXIF thumbnail I got from BreezeBrowser support  as follows: ' It sounds as though Affinity Photo is not saving an EXIF thumbnail image'.

Dan - can you throw any light on this?

Edited July 29, 2019 by BC15
add additional info

[IanSG]

I've just tried exporting jpeg and tiff images from AP with the embed thumbnail option off - both included a thumbnail!  It looks like that option only applies to the .afphoto files.  Did you supply example images to Breezebrowser?

[BC15]

Hi Ian - I think the problem here is that I'm not sure how it can be confirmed that the EXIF thumbnail has actually been created. Given that Dan, who is a member of staff, has confirmed that the EXIF thumbnail is not created by Affinity, I am loathe to trust 3rd party software that contradicts this. The fact that I take an 8 bit affinity produced tif and simply open and save it to another folder in photoshop with no processing at all and this solves the problem, would seem to indicate that Photoshop creates the EXIF thumbnail when it writes the file and Affinity doesn't. Also, It does make sense that the lack of the EXIF thumbnail causes a delay in displaying the image as a thumbnail as one would have to be created. As suggested by Walt Farrell above, it may well be that there is more than one thumbnail involved, but I can only wait for Affinity to respond to let us know what is actually happening......

[Dan C]

19 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Are the EXIF thumbnail and the normal thumbnail two different things?

Technically speaking, yes, they are slightly different but practically you will never 'see' the difference. Proprietary Affinity files (.afphoto, .afdesign etc) have embedded thumbnail files, these are image files stored as part of the document to provide a thumbnail in a folder. EXIF thumbnails are stored specifically in the EXIF data, and these usually only apply to image formats. 

A thumbnail in a TIFF would be accurately described as an EXIF thumbnail because it’s the EXIF part of a TIFF that describes/stores it, whereas a thumbnail for an .afphoto file (for example) wouldn't technically be an 'EXIF' thumbnail, but an embedded one.

19 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I was curious if there are two different thumbnail standards, and perhaps Affinity is using one and you're wanting it to use another.

There isn't 2 standards for an image file, as all of an images data is stored in EXIF any thumbnail for a TIFF (or other image) will be an 'EXIF thumbnail', Affinity simply doesn't generate a thumbnail currently, so it's not the 'type' which is the issue here.

17 hours ago, IanSG said:

I've just tried exporting jpeg and tiff images from AP with the embed thumbnail option off - both included a thumbnail!

Where are you viewing these exported images/thumbnails please?

17 hours ago, IanSG said:

It looks like that option only applies to the .afphoto files. 

That's correct, this option only applies to native Affinity files currently.

 

I hope this clears things up  

[walt.farrell]

Thanks, Dan.

[Wumpus]

Just a <1% chance thing to point out when I was burned by mysterious behaviour with Tiff's. It turned out that Microsoft changed the compression format that the tiff was using with something Microsoft preferred. It did this while it was carrying out its thumbnailing service (updating the Windows OS thumbnails for the concerned folder: nothing to do with the tiff format, except that the Tiffs were all recompressed). Because some files were fine for a while, then suddenly seemed 'broken' to other apps (yet behaved 'better' in Windows), I discovered what was happening and confirmed it with Microsoft. Probably unlikely, but just want to suggest that it could also be something unrelated that you don't even expect, messing with your files. Some apps will take liberties with your files. There's a few utilities that let you look at the full file structure, including EXIF and other metadata, and identify what each set of data signifies.

[IanSG]

1 hour ago, Dan C said:

Where are you viewing these exported images/thumbnails please?

It's an old utility called PhotoME, which ( I thought) displays only the EXIF data. 

[BC15]

 

1 hour ago, Dan C said:

Technically speaking, yes, they are slightly different but practically you will never 'see' the difference. Proprietary Affinity files (.afphoto, .afdesign etc) have embedded thumbnail files, these are image files stored as part of the document to provide a thumbnail in a folder. EXIF thumbnails are stored specifically in the EXIF data, and these usually only apply to image formats. 

A thumbnail in a TIFF would be accurately described as an EXIF thumbnail because it’s the EXIF part of a TIFF that describes/stores it, whereas a thumbnail for an .afphoto file (for example) wouldn't technically be an 'EXIF' thumbnail, but an embedded one. 

There isn't 2 standards for an image file, as all of an images data is stored in EXIF any thumbnail for a TIFF (or other image) will be an 'EXIF thumbnail', Affinity simply doesn't generate a thumbnail currently, so it's not the 'type' which is the issue here.

 

I hope this clears things up  

Thanks Dan for your clarification. Looks like the 2 thumbnail theory has been proved to be correct!

Is there a good chance that the EXIF thumbnail could be produced in a future release of Affinity?

Just to add some information about this in other software, I have found that Canon's own DPP 4 RAW conversion software does create an EXIF thumbnail when it outputs a tif file. I have also used this as a workaround as I can run a batch process within it to read all the Affinity 8 bit images and write them to another folder. As it does this it creates the missing EXIF thumbnail so BreezeBrowser is happy.

[Dan C]

16 minutes ago, IanSG said:

It's an old utility called PhotoME, which ( I thought) displays only the EXIF data. 

Thanks for that, it's likely the app is creating its own thumbnails, as can be seen from the following it certainly has the ability to in-app

9 minutes ago, BC15 said:

Is there a good chance that the EXIF thumbnail could be produced in a future release of Affinity?

One of our developers is already looking into this as an option when exporting - provided it doesn't clash with the export architecture - we certainly hope to add this into a future update, but I can't offer any guarantees currently, my apologies!

[IanSG]

Just now, Dan C said:

Thanks for that, it's likely the app is creating its own thumbnails, as can be seen from the following it certainly has the ability to in-app

Damn, I missed that bit!

[walt.farrell]

I just exported a .jpg image from Affinity Photo, then opened it in GIMP and exported it again from GIMP.

Exiftool confirms that the image from GIMP contains a thumbnail, but the image from Affinity Photo doesn't.