Products · Product
Affinity apps
Raised as a usability problem by 68 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2014–2026), in 44 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Saving edits to the original PNG needs a multi-step Export dialogUnreviewed
20142026- Saving edits back to JPG requires tedious export workflow, unlike Photoshop's quick save2020-05-15
- Saving edits back to the original PNG requires a multi-step Export dialog flow2019-10-08
- Saving an SVG edit requires several clicks and export settings; plain save uses a proprietary format2017-08-16
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Constantly shows upsells for cloud subscription inside the interface2026-10-12
- Hard to find guides on how to do things in the app2026-10-12
- Some annoyances and unintuitive limitations, though workable2026-10-08
- JXL export is glitchy and yields poor compression for the quality2026-10-07
- Batch editing many photos is tedious, taking far longer than in Lightroom2026-04-19
- Registration blocked, and login handover between app and browser keeps failing2025-11-01
- Icons without text labels make users hover and read tooltips to find tools2025-10-31
- Couldn't find a way to set a custom light gray background color2025-10-31
- Dark designs blend into the pitch-black artboard background, making boundaries hard to see2025-10-31
- Claims the app's UX is horrible, shared by all Qt apps2025-10-31
- Sign-in opens Safari, and after login the app keeps waiting and never proceeds2025-10-30
- Previous Affinity suite had a terrible, hard-to-use interface2025-10-30
- Two-second lag between clicking and seeing selection; panning is unusable2025-10-30
- Switching from Photoshop is hard because Affinity's buttons are rearranged and behave differently2025-03-06
- UI elements not working or unusable, with recurring UI regressions2025-02-20
- Clunky to use; user must look up how to do simple things2024-11-02
- Merging layers repeatedly blurs the base layer, degrading the image2024-11-01
- Every action lags and the app is slow to start up2024-07-09
- Commenter found the software unusable after coming from Lightroom2024-07-09
- Switching tools, exiting text editing, and changing tool properties via keyboard is frustrating2024-07-09
- No automated export, so each piece takes about 15 minutes of manual work2024-07-08
- Printed documents look wrong and some visible objects silently fail to print2024-07-08
- Confusing RAW layer choices; edits become destructive, and tools silently convert RAW layers2024-07-08
- Poor workflow choices made editing 200+ files take hours longer2024-06-18
- Glitchy with occasional inconsistent UI behaviour2024-06-07
- Finicky and bug-prone, costing much more time and frustration than Adobe tools2024-03-27
- Designer v1 felt so frustrating the commenter stopped using v2 much2024-03-26
- Removing objects produces garbled results unless the area is simple2024-01-20
- Many workflow interruptions, hidden scaling options, and missing keyboard navigation slow users down2023-12-19
- Can't enter exact sizes for multiple objects at once, so simple tasks take obscure workarounds2023-10-11
- Applications are buggy and sometimes unusable for the user2023-07-28
- Finds the app clunky and often has to look up the manual2023-05-18
- Cannot save files in the background, wasting time with large images2023-05-18
- Layers and effects work counterintuitively for a longtime Photoshop user2023-05-18
- Keyboard shortcuts often fail unless the image has focus, so users must click first2022-11-11
- Essential tools are hidden in obsolete UI, requiring hours of tweaking to find2022-11-09
- Keeps asking to manually download and install updates each time it opens2022-11-09
- Common actions require needless extra steps or convoluted workarounds2022-11-09
- Complex tasks that were simple in Illustrator take a lot of thinking and fiddling2022-11-09
- Merging layers repeatedly blurs images, degrading work as you go2022-11-09
- Photoshop users must search the web to find equivalent Affinity workflows2022-11-09
- Bad UI that makes the design app hobbled and hard to use2022-07-16
- Many similar brush icons with no clear way to tell which to use2022-05-18
- Basic tasks like moving the canvas are hard to find; nothing works as expected2022-02-06
- Confusing to use on the iPad2022-02-05
- User can't understand the UI and it feels slow and laggy2021-11-23
- Cropping works differently than Photoshop and took a long time to figure out2021-10-26
- Photoshop user finds Affinity Photo's hotkeys and UI confusing and unusable2021-08-05
- Hotkeys differ from Photoshop and the UI makes no sense to a long-time user2021-08-05
- App takes about 15 seconds to start, slow to become usable2021-05-17