2020 PhotoStructure release notes

Note that these are notes for versions released in 2020.

Please see the current release notes.

vnext 🔗

See v1.0.0

v0.9.1 🔗

Released 2020-11-08

Main visible changes:

• ✨ Keywords are now shown in the Asset Info panel

• ✨ Error reporting can now be enabled or disabled via the settings page

• ✨ Docker users can customize their scan paths on the settings page

• 🏃💨 Faster tag gallery loads from more accurate materialized tag counts

• 🏃💨 Image hashing and sync import speeds have been improved in some cases

• 20+ bug fixes and enhancements

This release contains all changes from v0.9.1-alpha and v0.9.1-beta pre-releases. See below for details.

v0.9.1-beta.6 🔗

2020-11-08

• 🐛 Fixed an issue with the new tag normalization migration added by beta.5, which would fail if multiple tags normalized to the same path.

• 📦 The “.photostructure/previews” directory is now customizable via the new previewsDir system setting or PS_PREVIEWS_DIR environment variable.

• 📦 Added several new camera make/model parsing patterns.

• 📦 Tag normalization migration now has debug timing.

v0.9.1-beta.5 🔗

2020-11-06

• 🐛 Windows system recovery volumes are now ignored (prior releases could fail health checks if a system recovery volume wasn’t healthy, but we never use those volumes, so we ignore them now).

• 🐛 The embedded SQLite binary didn’t run properly on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (it did work on 20.04, though). I’ve rebuilt the binary on 18.04 x64 and it seems to work properly now.

• 🐛 Prior versions of PhotoStructure may have added non-normalized tags. Current versions of PhotoStructure assumed all tags were normalized, which would prevent these tags from being cleaned up. A new migration was added to force all tags into normalized form.

• 📦 Health check warnings and failures are now pushed out in a progress panel shown on the home page, to make sure people see that their system is failing a health check.

• 📦 v0.9.1-beta.4 PhotoStructure for Desktops for linux was built on an Ubuntu 20.04 box (as the SSD on my Ubuntu 18 box died during the upload of the build). This caused beta.4 to not launch properly on 18.04 boxes 😢.

  I’ve rebuilt my 18.04 box, and beta.5 should restore Ubuntu 18 compatability.

v0.9.1-beta.4 🔗

2020-11-04

• ✨ Experimental support for HDR imagery. See this reddit post. You’ll need to rebuild your library (available via the main navigation menu) to rebuild previews, or run “Re-sync this asset” from the ⋮ menu on the asset page to just try one example first. If you have P3-gamut source images, and an HDR display, please share how this works for you!

• ✨ Clickable elements with multiple keyboard shortcuts now list all shortcut options.

• ✨ vi users, rejoice: you can now navigate between assets with j and k (synonyms to left and right)

• ✨ ./photostructure info --volumes is now supported (to get volume metadata from the command line rather than the About page).

• 🐛 “Manual” scan paths was broken for docker users in v0.9.0: they had to select “automatic” to continue. Version 0.9.1 adds (working!) support for manual scan paths for docker users. Apologies if you got bit by this bug!

• 🏃💨 Large library owners, rejoice: tag pages, even for large libraries, render in < 100ms now! The home page in prior versions could take upwards of 1.5 seconds to render, due to several expensive database queries. One of the most expensive queries was library asset counting due to the way PhotoStructure’s hierarchical tags are structured. v0.9.1 adds materialized asset and asset file counts. Prior queries could take 200-300ms per tag to count assets, and another 300ms to count asset files. These counts are now automatically updated periodically. 🎉

• 🏃💨 Image hashing speed has been improved for larger images (in some cases, like panoramas, 10x faster! This was due to a call to sharp.trim() to automatically remove letterboxed embedded thumbnails. trim() can take 5-10 seconds to run on larger images, though, and larger images are never letterboxed, so image hashing skips the trim() on larger images now).

• 🏃💨 Sync import parallelism has been improved. Due to the way videos are transcoded, only 1 or 2 videos can be processed at any given time. In prior versions, if the next N files in the work queue are all videos, PhotoStructure would refuse to start additional work, in effect “single-threading” the sync. This version detects this scenario and pops off eligible work from elsewhere in the queue.

• 🐛 In some cases when many assets shared the same captured-at time, the asset stream wouldn’t present the correct images. This has been fixed.

• 🐛 Tags from prior imports that are no longer correct or relevant are now removed by the “Resync this asset”, “Sync”, and “Rebuild.”

• 🐛 Errors raised from sync-file due to health check failures (which are expected from parsing or importing problematic files) are logged but not propagated to the main service (which would then shut down PhotoStructure).

• 🐛 PhotoStructure opens a “filesystem watcher” for the library opened-by file, to get notified if the library is unmounted or has lost it’s open lock. This error may fail of the library is stored on a remote filesystem. This error is now logged and ignored (as we also poll for the lock when health checks run).

• 📦 PhotoStructure’s UI will now automatically reload with the new frontend code when the server’s version is found to have changed (like after updating to a new version). This should avoid confusion caused by people expecting new features, but running the prior frontend code (because they haven’t hit refresh on their browser). You can tell if you’re running a new UI by clicking the nav menu and see the running version next to the “About” button.

• 📦 PhotoStructure now knows how to parse date-timestamps from macOS and gnome screenshots: y-M-d 'at' H.m.s and y-M-d H-m-s.

• 📦 Retries on database lock timeouts have progressively longer wait-before-retry times. This may help reduce spurious db timeouts after retries.

• 📦 #snapshot directories (found on newer Synology drives) and any non-hidden lfs/objects directories are now ignored automatically. (Scanning these snapshop directories could add many, many duplicates to your library).

• 📦 Updated all dependencies to latest-stable, and switched from node-sass (which was deprecated) to sass (I didn’t see any CSS compilation differences, but please tell me if you see anything!)

v0.9.1-beta.3 🔗

Released 2020-10-28

• 📦 Sure enough, new versions of sharp and electron still don’t agree with eachother on PhotoStructure for Desktops on Ubuntu, so this version rolls back to Electron 9 and sharp 0.23 😢.

• 📦 All other third-party libraries are now latest-stable.

v0.9.1-beta.2 🔗

Released 2020-10-27

• 📦 New greyscaleColorThreshold setting for monochrome image detection. The previous hard-coded default of 3 is now 5, which should allow greyscale images with slight off-white balance to still be considered greyscale.

• 📦 New versions of sharp, electron, and typescript have been pulled in. Note that the new version of sharp produces slightly different image hashes and dominant colors in some cases, but the differences are not large enough to break deduping heuristics and warrant a rebuild (thank goodness). We had to hold off on upgrading sharp for v0.9 due to incompatibilities with AppImage-packaged electron builds, so this change may need to be reverted (again) if integration tests don’t go smoothly.

• 📦 Performance improvements to logcat, “send recent logs,” and error reporting in general.

• 🐛 More URI work: psfile:// uris, specifically, are normalized both in parsing and generation now. This normalization on reads and writes should prevent DUPLICATE_KEY errors that some beta users were experiencing.

v0.9.1-beta.1 🔗

Released 2020-10-26

• ✨ Keywords are now shown in the Asset Info panel

• 🐛 Asset header on iPad displays shouldn’t overlap anymore

• 🐛 Added a migration to normalize and de-duplicate asset files. Libraries from pre-version-0.9 and current libraries used a different URI library which resulted in different encoding for the same file. This migration may take 5-20 seconds to apply. Your asset file count may drop after this migration is applied.

• 📦 New excludedRootTags library setting to omit problematic keywords

• 📦 The “resync this asset” command now forcefully rebuilds metadata, tags, and previews for the asset.

• 📦 Upgraded to Webpack 5 (resulted in slightly smaller packages)

v0.9.1-alpha.2 🔗

Released 2020-10-24

• 🐛 Added a migration to apply recursive tag de-duping. If you see duplicate root tags (like 2 “When” tags) on the home page, this migration should address that.

v0.9.1-alpha.1 🔗

Released 2020-10-23

• ✨ Error reporting can now be enabled or disabled via the settings page

• 🐛 PhotoStructure libraries from pre-v0.6 had migrations that could have prevented launching.

• 🐛 The “What’s new?” link on the About page hadn’t been updated for v0.9.

• 📦 Several non-fatal errors (like corrupt JPEGs) were downgraded (to prevent sync-file from restarting unnecessarily)

• 📦 The navigation menu order used to be

  • (home, root tag links)
  • (about, help)
  • (settings, sync, shutdown)

  We flipped the order to be

  • (home, root tag links)
  • (settings, sync, shutdown)
  • (about, help)

  Several beta users on smaller monitors hadn’t realized there was a third section (which is arguably more important than the about/help links). Hopefully this will help.

v0.9.0 🔗

Released 2020-10-19

See our v0.9 version announcement

Your feedback is requested! 🔗

🙏🏾 Every feature and bug fix in this release is directly due to beta users' suggestions, or via their assistance. Thank you!

🛡️ This version includes several new security enhancements, updates to several major dependencies, and hundreds of other changes, both visible and behind the scenes.

🍜 This version really will be the last beta release before we introduce free and premium tiers. We are giving discounts to the beta users that give us feedback (both positive and negative), and help debug any issues they find. Please see this post for more details about subscriptions and pricing.

🐞 As always, if things don’t seem to work correctly, or you find anything odd or confusing or buggy, please email us.

Settings changes 🔗

• ✨ We’ve updated the “Where are your photos and videos?” section:

• The scanning options are now just “automatic” or “manual”.

• To examine your Pictures directory click “Add My Pictures directory.”

• PhotoStructure for Desktop users have an “Add” button to browse and add local directories. You can click it multiple times to add additional paths.

• PhotoStructure scans paths in the order you specify in this list (even if you’re in “automatic” mode).

• This isn’t available on PhotoStructure for Docker users, as PhotoStructure scans all bind-mounted volumes automatically.

Features & enhancements 🔗

• 🛡️ Strict CSP with nonces are now enabled. If you experience page loading errors or see problems in your console, please report them to [email protected]. You can disable CSP enforcement with the library setting cspReportOnly. Also see the new cspDirective system setting for reverse-proxy users.

• ✨ During library rebuilds, assets are now excluded from your library if any file that was already imported is found to be in a NoMedia directory.

  If you want to keep assets that have variations found in other directories, set the excludeNoMediaAssetsOnRebuild library setting to false to retain prior behavior.

• ✨ The complete set of settings is now published to github and included in Docker images as a defaults.env file. See the new environment variables documentation for more information.

• ✨ The number of thumbnails to show per “tag sample” is now dynamic, based on both thumbnail size and screen size.

• ✨ UNC paths (\\server\share\path\to\file.jpg) are now supported both for libraries and for scan paths, but please note that free space cannot be monitored for these devices. We still recommended that you map your network drive to a drive letter, so PhotoStructure can monitor and pause imports if the volume gets too full.

• ✨ The “show streams” button on the asset page is now iconic (rather than just a down arrow), with busy and close states (which should help discoverability of asset streams)

• ✨ Tags are now sorted and stored case-insensitively.

• ✨ Transcoded video encoded max bitrates are now configurable via transcodeBitrateQVGA and transcodeBitrateUHD. Videos with resolutions between QVGA and UHD will interpolate between these values.

• ✨ For MacPorts users: a new toolPaths setting is now configurable, and now includes /opt/local/bin on Linux and macOS.

• 💔 The forceLocalDbReplica setting is now on by default for Docker users. This caused issues with a bunch of beta users, and having it on when not needed only makes shutdown a bit slower (as the database needs to be copied back into the library).

• ✨ Volume UUID reading and writing is now disableable via Settings.

• ✨ On startup, and periodically while running, PhotoStructure will validate the library database. If it is found to have inconsistencies, the database is rebuilt automatically (via SQLite’s .dump or .recover). If this process fails, though, please follow these instructions.

• ✨ PhotoStructure will refuse to start if it detects that a library is from a newer version of PhotoStructure. Newer versions of PhotoStructure can open and upgrade older libraries, however, and the library database upgrade process is automatic.

• 📦 The default value of fuzzyDateImageCorrWeight was changed from 1.2 to 1.5. This makes PhotoStructure much more discriminating when it de-duplicates photos that don’t have a precise date (like from scanned images).

• 📦 Release notes are now available from the main navigation menu from within PhotoStructure, as well as the footer on photostructure.com pages.

• 📦 Docker :beta tags now automatically pull in the last build from either beta or main branches.

• 🛡️ We’re now using Electron’s contextBridge for the render process, and pass all Electronegativity security audits.

• 📦 Localhost is now configurable (so users can try binding to either 127.0.0.1 or localhost if they are fighting firewall issues)

• ✨/🐛 More types of unhealthy volumes are now ignored, rather than preventing PhotoStructure from starting.

• ✨ Several new binary thumbnail variants are now inspected, which can speed up imports of certain RAW images.

• ✨/🐛 Samples are picked randomly from child tags. The prior implementation biased strongly towards more recent assets (which is why you’d see mostly photos from January in the When samples!)

• ✨ Captured-at times are extracted from several more tags now. Rather than using “first-one-in-wins,” PhotoStructure now picks the earliest time with the highest resolution.

• ✨ Stream tags got a redesign to make each tag more visually distinct, and less “busy” when there are many tags:

• ✨/🐛 Progress reports from the web service used to poll the database every couple seconds. When no sync is running, polling drops to every 10 seconds, which should reduce idle CPU consumption.

• ✨ When viewing duplicate assets, zoom is now supported (previous versions disabled zoom if you were viewing an asset variant). View these variants by opening the asset info panel (click the “i” when viewing an asset). Click a file path to toggle viewing that image instead of the top, “shown” asset file.

• ✨ New “pause zoom” mode: you can now “freeze” the current zoom and pan position. Toggle this mode by tapping either the p or the pause key.

  This mode lets you compare different asset file variants while zoomed in, or to compare next and previous assets. This is especially handy when comparing focus or smiles between shots.

• 🐛/✨ Browsing on smaller screens has been improved:

  • Long headers truncate to ellipses before overlapping
  • Tags in asset streams are shortened to just parent/child
  • Asset contents now show under the asset info panel

• ✨ Tools now support --force-open (please read the --help!) and main has a --pause-sync for starting the service “paused” (if you want to prevent sync from running until you manually resume via the navigation bar).

• 📦 Systemd service configuration was added to the PhotoStructure for Node instructions.

• 📦 Added --stop-timeout and stop_grace_period to the docker and [docker-compose] recipes. This should make restarts via docker more reliable (as PhotoStructure will have sufficient time to shut down cleanly).

• ✨ All elements in the UI with keyboard shortcuts now include the key in their tooltip.

• ✨ Library metrics were added to the About page

• ✨ Progress reports are now stored for each instance (like a library rebuild, volume import, or volume synchronization). This helps in debugging, and enables progress reports to discern between initial directory imports and subsequent directory synchronizations.

• ✨ Face tiles from iPhoto are now excluded automatically.

• 🐛/✨ As directories are scanned, files that have been deleted will be removed from the library as well.

• ✨ Logfiles from more than a week ago are removed automatically to reduce disk consumption.

• ✨ All UI widgets that have keyboard shortcuts now say what their shortcut is in their tooltip.

Bug fixes 🔗

• 🐛 Fixed several asset stream rendering issues that could result in the UI “hanging.”

• 🐛 Assets on the home page are automatically refreshed during initial import until there are roughly 200 library assets.

• 🐛 Non-English locale support: Users whose system locale was not “POSIX” may have seen a number of different bugs, including failure to launch. PhotoStructure now forces the locale for child processes to C which should address this issue.

• 🐛 “Click to toggle showing this file” in the Asset Info panel works (again).

• 🐛 Sync/import progress reconnects automatically on service restarts.

• 🐛 Fixed AssetFile URI encoding errors for paths that had special characters. This could prevent prior versions of PhotoStructure from successfully importing files that had “special” characters. Please run “sync” if you think you may have been impacted.

• 🐛 The asset info panel now linebreaks very long pathnames properly.

• 🐛 String comparisons are now locale-sensitive.

• 🐛 Fixed system icon tooltip text (it said function () { ...)

• 🐛 The info tool no longer elides deep object fields

• 🐛 Added more robust race-condition handling for file caches (this mostly impacted high-cpu-count systems)

• 🐛 Binary keyword fields are now properly ignored. (PhotoStructure previously interpreted ExifTool’s (Binary data 32 bytes, use -b option to extract) as a keyword, oops!).

• 🐛 Tags with equal-prefix siblings are now handled correctly. Previous versions of PhotoStructure would show assets tagged with /Camera/HTC under both /Camera/HT and the correct tag.

• 🐛 Beta users with year-old libraries are migrated gracefully now.

• 🐛 Keywords with URLs are no longer parsed as hierarchies, but considered a single “keyword” that is the URL.

• 🐛 Internal filesystem and metadata caching has been changed from LRU to FIFO. Some caches (like asset counts) weren’t updating properly due to this.

(note that this release had been called v0.8.4 in earlier release notes. That version’s changes have been rolled into v0.9.0.)

v0.8.3 🔗

Released 2020-07-29

Every feature and bug fix in this release is directly due to beta users' suggestions or their assistance. Thank you!

• 💔 The PS_REQUIRE_MAKE_MODEL setting is now disabled by default. This filter, when enabled, prevents PhotoStructure from importing files that don’t have a Make or Model tag, which prevents images like screenshots from filling up your library. Unfortunately, this also prevents images downloaded from Facebook/Instagram, and SMS. So far no beta users have wanted this enabled once they learned of the setting, which might be a good clue that the default was bad.

• ✨/🐛 Improved the reliability of date extraction for photos and videos that have no dates in their metadata. Two new settings were added, PS_USE_PATHS_TO_INFER_DATES, and PS_FUZZY_DATE_PARSING, which can be used to disable PhotoStructure’s default behavior that attempts to extract captured-at times from paths when metadata is missing from the asset, and to use more relaxed date parsing.

• ✨ De-duping greyscale images has been improved. If you have a number of greyscale photos in your library, please run rebuild to regroup your library’s assets.

• ✨ De-duping of files without precise dates has been improved by requiring more stringent image correlation. This is controlled by the PS_FUZZY_DATE_IMAGE_CORR_WEIGHT setting.

• ✨ Added new PS_STRICT_DEDUPING library setting. Set to true if you don’t want image edits to be grouped together with raw images. NOTE: This will most likely cause RAW and JPEG pairs to not always merge to the same asset, especially if your camera uses extensive computational imagery.

• ✨ When viewing an asset, the automatic header and button hiding-on-idle is now disabled whenever the asset info panel is shown (thanks to beta users for the suggestion!)

• ✨ Library rebuilds now report on the files that are being processed.

• 🐛 Zombie prevention within Docker: The Dockerfile now use tini as the default ENDPOINT, which reaps zombie processes properly. The docker image is a bit larger now, but we don’t have to rely on users using --init (only available on more recent versions of Docker or Docker Compose).

• 🐛 System settings are now written on startup if outdated or missing

• 🐛 If PhotoStructure rebuilt a portion of your library every time you restarted, this should be fixed now. We were trying to rebuild missing files, but we’ll update those files when they re-appear.

• 🐛 A race condition in the image cache that could prevent assets from being imported was fixed.

• 🐛 Non-default array settings (like PS_PREVIEW_RESOLUTIONS) are now correctly handled

• ✨/🐛 Suggested library directories are removed if they are not writable

• ✨/🐛 On Windows, we now read from the system registry to get the user’s Pictures directory.

• ✨/🐛 Improved date parsing for file basenames to require year, month, and day (prior versions would interpret an image with no metadata named “1958.jpg” as coming from the year 1958 (!!)).

• ✨/🐛 Logging errors in v0.8.2 would cause the prior only-held-in-RAM logs to get flushed to disk (to help debug issues later). Unfortunately, several fairly common things were being logged as errors (rather than warnings), which caused logs to get big quickly. These have been addressed.

• ✨/🐛 Renamed the ls tool to list. This tool now has --dirname and --orderby parameters.

• 📦 Added documentation for tools.

• 📦 Added instructions for installing PhotoStructure for Node on Windows 10.

• 📦 Enabled tree-shaking in the front-end javascript build (size dropped from 260KiB to 218KiB).

• ✨/🐛 PowerShell is now spun up with -NoLogo, which may allow profile scripts that are slow to pass desktop pre-flight checks.

• ✨/🐛 v0.8.1 and v0.8.2 had different versions of sharp between the Desktop and Server editions of PhotoStructure, which could result in slightly different image hashes. The version is now consistent across editions.

• 📦 The docker WORKDIR is now /ps/app, so running commands ad-hoc are the same as on PhotoStructure for Node: just docker exec -it photostructure sh and then ./photostructure --help or ./photostructure info.

• 🐛 logcat now handles very large inputs.

• 🐛 The cache directory wasn’t clearing fast enough in v0.8.2. The “vacuum” process would eventually run, but caches could grow to 20gb on a fast enough machine under prior default settings. The cache time has been reduced by 3/4 and the vacuum is scheduled to run more often.

v0.8.2 🔗

Released 2020-07-11

• 🐛 NoMedia directories weren’t respected. They are now only cached for a minute.

• ✨ Filesystem metadata (including UUID and NoMedia) is cleared when you pause and then resume the library import and sync processes (available via the system tray or system navigation menu).

• ✨ Service setup has a timeout to prevent zombie processes. This timeout can now be overridden with the PS_SETUP_TIMEOUT_MS environment variable.

• 🐛 Added a per-volume timeout to gracefully handle mountpoints that are in an unhealthy state (which is fairly common on Windows).

• 🐛 Lens metadata matching “unknown” is now ignored.

• 🐛 NFS remote mountpoint metadata is now parsed correctly.

v0.8.1 🔗

Released 2020-07-09

See our v0.8 version announcement

General updates 🔗

✨ 🧭 Easier navigation

Click the new navigation button in the top-left part of the screen for access to

• Root tags, like “When,” “Camera,” “Keywords,” and “File Type”
• The About and Settings pages
• Links to control the sync process and shut down PhotoStructure
• The getting started and support pages on https://photostructure.com/

PhotoStructure for Servers users: this gets you to feature parity with Desktop users that have enjoyed these links in their system tray menu.

PhotoStructure for Desktop users on Linux and Windows: hit the alt key to see your new menu bar.

✨ 🚅💨 Faster sync

Library synchronization is much faster in this release.

In prior versions, PhotoStructure watched CPU utilization and only scheduled new work when your system was “idle enough.” In practice, this resulted in under-scheduling. On slower or busier systems, imports ran so slowly that they didn’t complete.

PhotoStructure now runs all child processes with a nice or BelowNormal priority level. This allows your operating system schedule work much more efficiently. Your system should remain responsive while simultaneously running synchronization tasks substantially faster, especially on multi-core systems.

The new cpuLoadPercent and processPriority settings allow for tuning this behavior. Please email us [email protected] if you need to tweak the defaults for your system.

✨ 💽💨 Faster writes

Prior versions serialized all database writes through the web process. This slowed down writes, and could make the UI less responsive during imports.

PhotoStructure now uses SQLite’s WAL mode to allow all processes to write directly to the database. This speeds up writes as well as allows the web UI to stay responsive, even during imports.

✨ 📹💨 Faster video transcodes

If you’re importing videos, and you’re using FFmpeg, we now import videos in parallel, which can substantially improve import speeds. VLC does not support parallel imports. See our video installation instructions for more details.

✨ 💪 More robust error handling in the UI

While browsing, if an asset is found that can’t be rendered due to an incomplete import, unmounted filesystem, or any other error, PhotoStructure will redirect you to the nearest valid asset as you browse while it runs a background repair job to try to fix the asset.

✨ 📨 More download options

The asset info panel now lets you download the original, large, medium, and small resized versions of your images. These smaller versions are handy for emails or texts, and are available on the first asset file’s ⋮ button.

✨ 📹 Video support improvements

Video duration and FPS, if available, are now shown in the Asset Info panel. Duration and FPS will need to be backfilled for all videos in your library, and will happen automatically after you upgrade to this version.

Transcoding is (by far!) the most expensive operation that PhotoStructure has to do during the import process, and has been refined in this new released. Previous versions transcoded all videos not in video/mp4 format.

PhotoStructure now provides a setting, doNotTranscodeMimetypes, which adds three more commonly-supported video types to avoid transcoding (as most browsers on most OSes can natively render them).

✨ 🔄 More robust rotation support

When you rotate your photos or videos with PhotoStructure, it now applies image content matching to ensure all asset file variants for the asset you rotated are in the same visual orientation.

Note that rotation is a non-destructive operation by writing a sidecar with the orientation next to your original. This behavior can be changed to edit in place with an advanced library setting.

✨ 🏷️ Hierarchical keyword support

PhotoStructure now extracts hierarchical keywords from Categories, TagsList, LastKeywordXMP, HierarchicalSubject, CatalogSets, and Subject tags.

For non-hierarchical keyword sources, like pathnames, PhotoStructure splits by commas and semicolons. For example, car, blue, tree will be interpreted as having the keywords car, blue, and tree. This is configurable via the keywordDelimiters setting.

PhotoStructure interprets keywords as “heirarchies”, or “paths”, when a keyword includes one or more of the characters /,|,>,≻, or ⊃. Note that on windows, there can be issues with filenames that have forward slashes, vertical bars, or greater-than characters, so use the alternatives. This allows for tags like Family|Einstein|Albert, Flora ⊃ Fruit ⊃ Orange, or Fauna > Oceanic > Pelican. This is configurable via the new keywordPathSeparators setting.

✨ 🌍🌏🌎 Better unicode support

Filenames and directories with non-latin characters should now be supported properly.

More frontend updates 🔗

• ✨ 🔎 New zoom loupe control
• ✨ 💬 Chat widget on the settings and about pages, to get just-in-time help from our global team of friendly customer service agents (ok, it’s just me)
• ✨ The settings page now shows which suggested library paths are already PhotoStructure libraries.
• ✨ See your dupes: You can now view all Asset variants on both mobile and desktop views. Open the Asset info panel, and click on the pathname to view that file’s image. If the image is RAW, it will be converted to JPG so your browser can render it.
• ✨ Asset streams are centered around the current asset now.
• 🐛 On some mobile browsers, child tags and assets didn’t always lazy-load. A Load More ... button now shows when needed.
• ✨ The Asset Streams panel on the bottom no longer overlays on the current photo.

Tagging improvements 🔗

• 📦 The cache directory on linux is now ~/.cache/PhotoStructure. It had previously been in /tmp. This can be changed via the PS_CACHE_DIR environment variable, or the cacheDir system setting.
• ✨ All taggers can be enabled or disabled via new library settings.
• ✨ New Type tag, so you can view all videos, or all images of a specific type (see tagType).
• ✨ Date tagging can be “year”, “year/month”, or “year/month/day” (see tagYMD).
• ✨ Date tagging can be limited to only non-stat values (see tagDateFromStat).
• ✨ Lens tagging can use the full lens model (like “Canon EF-M 15-45mm f/3.5-6.3 IS STM”) or a just the lens information (“15-45mm f/3.5-6.3”) (see tagFullLensModel).

Backend improvements 🔗

• ✨ New “Rebuild library” option from the navigation menu.
• ✨ sidecar files use the full filename now, so image “pairs” (like JPG + RAW) can have differing metadata values. For example, for IMG_123.JPG, both IMG_123.XMP and IMG_123.JPG.XMP will be considered relevant sidecars for that file, and the enclosed metadata tags will be overlayed on the original image in order of newest-written-file-wins.
• 🐛 RAW image dimensions should be more accurate now.
• 🐛 Paths can now have non-latin characters.
• 🐛 Unicode keywords (both in ICMP/EXIF headers and in pathnames) are now supported.
• 🐛 Prior versions could persist settings that were set by command-line arguments or environment variables making it the new “default” value. If you had problems with the settings page not saving your values, this should fix that.
• 🐛 If an asset doesn’t have a metadata-encoded captured-at, we now infer the captured-at from the basename (if the file is named something like YYYYMMDD), and if no date is found in the basename, we examine the parent directory path.
• ✨ Improved make and model parsing for more cameras and smartphones.
• ✨ Image hashing has been sped up dramatically for images that have embedded thumbnails. Most original JPEG and RAW images have these thumbnails.
• ✨ Dominant color extraction is faster, more accurate, and dominant color comparisons now use more accurate color perception correlation.
• ✨ Idle background tasks, like exiftool and sync-file are shut down automatically when they are idle to reduce system resource consumption.

PhotoStructure for Servers updates 🔗

• 💔 The start-docker.sh and photostructure.env scripts have been deleted. No beta users (to my knowledge) used them, docker-compose changed their configuration format arbitrarily and had a questionable installation procedure, so it felt like it was just more moving pieces just to support upgrades. (If you want easy image upgrades, try https://www.portainer.io/!). The instructions for Docker have been rewritten and are much simpler to follow.
• 💔 The PS_CONFIG_DIR is now directly written to. Prior versions would write to $PS_CONFIG_DIR/PhotoStructure, which was surprising to several beta users. Please mv $PS_CONFIG_DIR/PhotoStructure $PS_CONFIG_DIR before upgrading your image.
• ✨ Node.js version 12 and version 14 are now supported. 12 is now the minimum.
• ✨/📦 PhotoStructure for docker now uses Node.js v14 and Alpine. This dropped the image size from 1.5GB to 300M.
• 🐛/💔 Alpha, beta, and release builds post to different git branches and different docker tags now. Previously, PhotoStructure for Servers users pulled in the latest build, which might have been an alpha or beta pre-release.
• ✨ Instructions for building libvips (required to support .heic) were added to the README. Note that the docker image does not support .heic/HEVC, due to licensing and patent restrictions. Tell Apple to switch to AV1!
• 📦 For PhotoStructure for Node users, if the version of PhotoStructure or Node.js changes between runs, ./start.sh automatically rebuilds node_modules as required.

Prior release notes 🔗

• Release notes from 2019

Current release notes 🔗

• Current release notes

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