New Affinity version, with new file format

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lphilpot
Posts: 100
Joined: Wed Oct 05, 2016 2:49 am

New Affinity version, with new file format

Post by lphilpot »

In March of last year Canva acquired Serif and their products: Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher. XnView supports the embedded preview thumbnail images in .afphoto files (from Affinity Photo 2), but now Canva has released Affinity 3 which replaces all three Serif Affinity apps. The new file format has an "af" extension and we only get icons in XnView with no metadata:

Affinity_thumbnail.jpg
Affinity_thumbnail.jpg (13.71 KiB) Viewed 54 times

Those are the new and old versions of the same file.

I understand it'll take a while to support the new format, I just wanted to mention it. I have no idea how / where to get enough specs to implement reading these files enough for XnView's uses.
Len Philpot
M1000
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Joined: Sat Nov 01, 2025 11:16 pm

Re: New Affinity version, with new file format

Post by M1000 »

I don't think there has changed a lot under the hood, since if you rename the .af file to .afphoto, XnView is still able to show the embedded preview thumbnail.
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lphilpot
Posts: 100
Joined: Wed Oct 05, 2016 2:49 am

Re: New Affinity version, with new file format

Post by lphilpot »

Well, that should hopefully make it simpler to implement thumbnail support. I've added 'af' to my custom extensions list, but it doesn't change preview or not.

Camva claimed the new format was not backward compatible. Renaming *.af *.afphoto has no impact on loading the file in Affinity, either. Apparently the app must be reading the internal file header to determine its format, not relying on the extension.
Len Philpot
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