Skip to main content
P
Philipp27039834jf6q
Participating Frequently
May 28, 2026
Open for Voting

SVG support for Affinity Studio

  • May 28, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 9 views

I just finished a session with one of Adobe’s help desk officers, trying to find a way to import SVGs from Affinity Studio into After Effects in a way that would generate a composition of individual shape layers for each vector layer. Unfortunately all I get is one shape layer with a bunch of groups nested inside. 

Apparently this is due to the way in which Affinity exports SVGs, where layers are somehow turned into groups. That’s a bummer and of course rather Affinity’s problem than AE’s, but if there was a way in which the SVG import could be improved with an option to turn SVG groups into layers too, that would help my workflow a lot :-)

      1 reply

      sskaz
      sskaz
      Inspiring
      May 29, 2026

      From my understanding, the SVG spec doesn’t have a concept of “layers” but it does support groups. You can check this by saving an SVG with layers and groups from your design app of choice, then opening it in a plain-text editor. Instead of anything like `<layer>` you’ll see lots of `<g>` groups. So while it’s not exactly Affinity’s problem as they’re just following the spec, it does highlight how AE decides to import and convert SVGs into one massive shape layer. AE does the same thing when converting Illustrator files into shape layers—even though Illustrator files absolutely can have both layers and groups, it still makes one giant shape layer.

       

      For these giant shape layers, I’ve been using the Explode Shape Layers script to expand/merge shape groups to/from layers, though there are other scripts/utilities that offer similar functionality (Overlord is a great companion, though there is no Affinity app connection). While Adobe could definitely improve this process, they have a tendency to not step on developers’ toes (see “Sherlocking” in Apple community terms), which is good/bad depending how you look at it.

      P
      Philipp27039834jf6qAuthor
      Participating Frequently
      May 29, 2026

      Hey, thanks for commenting. Yes, I hear what you’re saying. Did you try out the latest AE update (26.2.1)? The reason I’m asking is that one of the headline features for this is that SVGs (the right ones :-)) will be turned into a stack of shape layers upon import, i.e. you import as a composition and you should receive a stack of shape layers that mirrors what you had in your vector app (i.e. all the individual layers). However, from my tests this doesn’t work with Affinity exported SVG due to the formatting issues it causes. SVGs exported from Illustrator however do seem to work like that. I don’t have Illustrator, so I can’t test it, but if you want to give it go, it’d be great to see, if it actually works as advertised - and if it does, I’d like the same functionality for SVGs from Affinity :-)

        Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
        Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices