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I'm opening a freepik.com vector file in Affinity Designer and the layers show ungrouped. There a millions of layers for a single drawing. How to deal with this?
Do I really need to my hands get on Adobe Illustrator? How to move from there so that I can continue on Affinty Designer?
PS: I'm not at all a fan of Adobe and currently don't own a subscription...so it would be quite a pain. Alternative workarounds would be very appreciated!
Affinity Designer can work with groups. Even on imported *.AI and *.EPS files.
So I guess in your case the uploader of the image is to blame. When there are no groups in the file, Affinity Designer will not give you groups.
If you import - for example - this freepik.com image (take the EPS!) into Affinity Designer: http://www.freepik.com/free-vector/set-of-hand-drawn-christmas-and-new-year-cards_989017.htm
You can clearly see that there are many hierarchical groups!
To answer your question: In the case where the uploader did not preseve structuring groups in the image, unfortunately you have to do the job. But its simple. Just drag over some elements, press Cmd+G (Ctrl+G on Windows) - repeat until you are happy.
Hope, this helps.
I've faced the same problem several times and I've concluded that it's more an Affinity problem reading EPS and AI files, specially when there's a lot of styling going on (gradients, shadows, complex highlightings, etc).
Sadly, my only workaround has been opening the file in AI, and then copy/paste the groups to Affinity.
Edit: and as someone previously said, there's also a chance that the freepik author didn't care about grouping the design assets, I've even seen some without expanding strokes and it's a mess :)
