[CharlesW]

> (No, Affinity Designer does not open AIs properly... It does funky things with lines.)

I hope you'll report that! They seem to be pretty on top of fixing interop issues.

> Can any of you suggest a GOOD alternative?

If you need traditional DAM you'll want to look elsewhere, but if you're macOS-based I finally landed on Apple Photos with its extensions ecosystem (which includes software from Affinity, ON1, etc.). It also works great with RAW Power¹ — by Nik Bhatt, who previously led Aperture and iPhoto development at Apple — which is itself looking more and more like a complete Lightroom replacement.

¹ https://www.gentlemencoders.com/raw-power-for-macos/index.ht...

[Tagbert]

AI is a closed proprietary format that is not published. What Affinity had said in the past is that they don’t read AI but do read the PDF portion of Illustrator files

[c0nsumer]

...and that's exactly the problem. The result in Affinity Designer is akin to opening an unoptimized PDF. Decent, but not great.

[c0nsumer]

Huh... I am on macOS and I never even considered Apple Photos. Thank you, I'll give that a look. This could work out very well. Thanks!