How to Batch Export Files in Affinity Designer

Batch exporting is a very efficient way of saving your files. With Affinity Designer you can save individual objects in your project in various formats. This is especially useful where projects require color or design variation. In this tutorial we will show you how to batch export files in Affinity Designer.

Open Affinity Designer, select New document and adjust your settings as needed. As we will be using Artboards to export, the size of the page is not important.

For this tutorial we will be using the honey bee SVG bundle. There are tons of great bee SVGs available on Design Bundles.

Step 1 - Create individual Artboards

Artboards are great as independent areas for designing. We will be using the Artboards to save the individual objects of our project. Affinity Designer is set, by default, to open in Designer Persona. Drag and drop or click File and Open to import the images. Reposition and resize as needed.

Designs that will be saved together need to be grouped. Click + drag a selection box around the objects then right click and choose Group.

Once your designs are ready click on the Artboards Tool on the left side panel. The Artboard options will appear on the top left of the screen. Click on one of the designs and next to Size, choose Selection. This will create an Artboard the same size as the selected object. Next, click Insert Artboard. Repeat this for all of your objects.

If you find that one of your designs disappears when creating the Artboards, this is due to overlapping. The Artboard will cut off anything that overlaps on the selected object. To see this more clearly, click on Outline View Mode at the top. It will show everything as an outline, in this case the edges of the images. Move the designs a little further apart to fix this.

Step 2 - Rename the Artboards

As each grouped layer is given an Artboard, the groups are renamed. These grouped layers will be exported as documents. To make them easier to identify we will give each layer a new name.

To this, go the Layers Panel on the right and click on the layer name so it is highlighted in blue. Rename the layer and press Enter. This will also be the file name. Do this for all of the grouped layers.

Step 3 - Setup file format options

Affinity Designer has exporting options under Export Persona. This can be found at the top left of the screen. Here you will find a dedicated workspace for exporting Artboards, objects and more in various formats.

Click on the Export Persona. The export options will be on the right hand side. The designs we are exporting are referred to as Export Slices. These are found under the Slices panel. If not already open, click on Slices.

By default all of the layers or Slices are selected with a checked box. When all boxes are checked, those items will be exported to the same folder. You may want to save certain items together in another folder. To do this, only check the boxes of the items you want exported. For this tutorial all boxes have been left checked.

Click on the white arrow next to one of the Slices. It will open the File Format menu where PNG is usually selected. Clicking on PNG will open the options menu where you can select a different format. The PNG format offers different export sizes which can be added by clicking the first Plus sign, Click to add new export size. The PNG file options were left as is.

Add another file format by clicking on the second Plus sign icon, Click to add new export format. Select another file format and repeat for as many formats as required. We also want to save as an EPS (for export) and SVG (for export). To delete a format, click on the X next to the format name.

Step 4 - Copy export formats and export

Affinity Designer speeds up the exporting process by providing a copy and paste option. The option allows you to copy the file formats from one Export Slice to another. It's a great time saver when you want to use various formats across a large batch export.

With the item selected, click on Copy export setup to clipboard. The file formats will be copied.

Select another item where you want to paste the formats to. Next click on Replace export setup from clipboard. Copy and paste the export settings to the remaining items.

On the bottom right under the Slices Panel, click Export Slices. Choose your file location and click Export. All of the checked items will be exported as the file formats selected. Switching back to Designer Persona you are able to save the file for later editing.

Batch Exporting is a great tool for saving multiple items in larger projects. If you found this tutorial helpful you may also like our tutorials on using color palettes in Affinity Designer, adding fonts to Affinity Designer, and using the shape tool in Affinity Designer.