The topic I connected Claude to Affinity, and now I batch-edit my designs without touching a… is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Affinity has been one of the most-reached-for tools in my graphics stack since the new unified app dropped. I still think it’s one of the boldest moves by a design company yet, to make a proprietary tool almost entirely free, advanced features and all. And it certainly changed the design industry for the better – newbies can easily get their foot in the door without getting stuck in the Adobe subscription trap.
On a different note, Claude has been my go-to AI tool lately. I’m pretty stingy when it comes to subscriptions and don’t hand them out to just every tool I like, but Claude’s won me over. I can go on and on about how much it’s improved my productivity and workflow, but another area where it’s been immensely useful is connecting it to my design apps. I’ve already connected it to Figma as well as Canva, so when the Affinity-Claude connector beta dropped, of course I had to try it…
Unlike Canva and Figma, you actually need to set up both sides of the connection separately for this. Also, you will need Claude for Desktop and a paid subscription. A free Affinity account is fine though.
On the Affinity side, go to Edit > Settings and select the Model Context Protocol tab. In there, toggle on Enable Affinity MCP. You can toggle the other functions if you’d like, but I left them as the defaults. In Claude, expand the sidebar, then head to Customize > Connectors. Hit the little Plus icon, select Browse Connectors, look for Affinity, and Install. From there, you can configure the permissions further. And that’s all there is to it, now Claude can speak to Affinity.
The connector gives Claude a read/write bridge into your active Affinity documents. In practice that means Claude can do things inside the app without you having to manually set them up or click through them yourself – and it can also build persistent scripts that live in your Scripts panel for later.
The big thing for me was that, similar to Figma, edits happen in real time with this connector. So it’s not read-only and Claude isn’t just giving advice about your Affinity file, but actually reaching inside it. Basically, it’s a bit like vibe-coding your Affinity projects.
The functions I use this connector for the most are pretty simple: creating files from scratch with dimensions and orientations set from a prompt, reading the full layer structure before touching anything, and bulk renaming layers with a consistent naming convention. But why use Claude when these things take seconds in Affinity? Because I can do it within the context of the conversation. I can actually have a design study session in Claude, and start the practice right inside the chat.
Batch renaming is insanely useful regardless of conversation context. If you’ve ever worked on large files, you know how it goes: “shape, shape 1, shape 2, new shape, new shape 1, new shape 2” and so on. One prompt in Claude instantly fixes it, and you can instruct it to follow a naming convention. Batch workflows get even more useful for long documents in the Layout workspace, think brochures or catalogs where you need the same spacing rules, image adjustments, or text frame alignment applied across every page at once.
Style-level edits work too, not just structural ones. Shape layers with specific colors and fills, gradient fills, blend modes, and opacity – I’ve been using them all from within Claude and they work. Beyond that, the connector also handles bulk color changes across a whole document, spacing rules applied across pages, tone and image adjustments across multiple layers, text content edits across frames – worth experimenting with depending on what your workflow actually needs.
Every action Claude takes in Affinity is already a script running under the hood. Saving to the Scripts panel is just the extra step that makes it permanent. So you can switch files, close and reopen Affinity, and it’ll still be there to reuse. I’ve mainly been using it to replicate the same color fills to use as overlays, so I described the opacity, the blend mode, and so on, and can apply it without touching the layers panel.
The comparison worth making is with Affinity’s existing Macro feature. Same concept as Photoshop Actions – record a sequence of clicks and replay them. The hard limit is that macros can’t record a Save action, there’s no conditional logic, and no variable inputs. And before the Claude connector, Affinity had no scripting API at all; the creation of it was driven by its integration with Claude. The ceiling used to be whatever you could record, now it’s whatever you can describe.
The Affinity connector is still in beta, and it’s already changed how I move through a project. I can make real-time edits from my existing Claude sessions and create scripts that stick around. If you’re already using Claude with Figma or Canva, adding Affinity is the obvious next step.