#Affinity designer on linux how to#
#Affinity designer on linux install#

That would work, since PSD seems tro have a better support than native xcf.

Find a way to force Gimp to use PSD as its default file format.

I’d like to, but I have no idea the work it represents, no idea what competences to look for, and I’m not that rich.

Hire a dev to do it, and share it with the world under GPL.

See previous solution, only more complex? Just to do a basic thing that I’d expect the app, if not the OS itself, to take care of. I’m not too keen on that solution since it means I would have to learn a lot of new stuff I’m not that interested in. I could then launch the script on any folder and force Gimp to make all the thumbnails.

Learning to script Gimp, to compensate for the lack of a thumbnailer.

I could do that, but it’s a pain to browse pictures without their thumbnails and imo, using Gimp under Linux, thumbnails should not be an issue.

Even if I manage to have all my thumbnails generated, they can disappear in a snap of the fingers.

#Affinity designer on linux how to#

Not only is it a poor solution compared to a dedicated thumbnailer, it also means I’d have to put a lot of efforts and time into learning how to do it instead of, you know, actually editing images. Or maybe I could automate that using Gimp’s scripting engine.

I can have thumbnails, but one file at a time.

If anyhow I managed to create all thumbnails (Gimp can be scripted, so that could be an option even if it is out of my reach) there is still the risk of losing all thumbnails - simply by copying all files on another computer, or if the cache folder was corrupted, and so on - with no easy way to automaticaly recreate them.Īnd that’s as far as I went. Save for Gimp: since its thumbnailer is not compatible anymore, it has do it all by itself, one image a time. When the file explorer calls it, the thumbnailer will automaticaly read each file in a folder, build its thumbnail and save it in ~/.cache/thumbnails for later (and faster) use. They are created by the various thumbnailers. So, I searched how thumbnails are dealt with under Linux, to see if I could find a solution. Even the one file I had just saved with a thumbnail.

As soon as I opened the folder containing my files, thumbnails were recreated. To complete my test ‘procedure’, before looking further for solutions, I deleted ~/.cache/thumbnail, deleting all thumbnails at once to see what woudl happen. But I could only get it one image at a time, opening it and saving it back. I wouldn’t mind bigger than that, but 256 is already much better than the default 128. You just need to change the Size of thumbnails to Large (256x256). It’s in Preferences -> System Resources, scroll to access the Image thumbnails section. I looked in Gimp’s settings and found an option to force it to make bigger thumbnails. A realy small one for sure, but that was something at least. Out of curiosity, I opened an xcf file in Gimp and saved it back under the same name. Long story short: this thumbnailer is not updated anymore, it can’t read the latest versions of xcf. But not the xcf even though I have installed its dedicated thumbnailer, gnome-xcf-thumbnailer. Now, even my PSD files have their thumbnails. They are small utilities that take care of automaticaly generating thumbnails for various file formats.

#Affinity designer on linux install#

And, as far as thumbnails go, almost everything was quickly dealt with, save xcf (Gimp).Ī quick search led me to install a couple thumbnailers. Everything went fine, save for thumbnails. What’s not fine, is that Gimp doesn’t deal very well with its own xcf in regards to their thumbnails: they are too small, and way too hard to generate.Ī few weeks ago, like I always do with a new machine/OS, I copied a few test files in my freshly installed Manjaro in order to see how everything was working, and what needed to be adjusted before starting any real work. This is how they preserve all the info (layers and stuff) you may need to continue working on the picture when you reopen it, later on. All serious apps do the same: Photoshop uses. Like most complex image editing programs, Gimp uses its own file format (.xcf) when saving an image, and it lets you export to any of the more common file formats when you need it.