Spanish Support and Getting Close to Release · Aspect Release Candidate One

Starting with this version, the application icon will be the full color logo instead of the blue draft variant. Almost any work on the application will now go towards stability, but if you have anything that you feel is very important for you to have, still feel free to speak out, even if this is already a known feature request or bug report, as we may still decide to prioritize one or two issues to get into the final release.

Also, if you currently have a beta license and you want to use some of the "pro" features, there is currently still an early access discount available. Anyone who has bought an early access license will get a full license with an additional year of fully owned upgrades by e-mail, on the day of the release.

There will be at least one more release candidate after this one to ensure we did not introduce any new issues.

Spanish Translation

We had this in the pipeline for over two years now, but because there is no native Spanish speaker in our team, we didn't feel confident to release the initial translation that was kindly done by a friend that, although being a native speaker, didn't have experience using a computer set to Spanish and thus didn't know many domain specific terms. On top of that, the number of translation strings is growing considerably with each release (over ten thousand words total currently), so we also needed a solution that we could rely on to give good results quickly and regularly.

Now, the most obvious choice would be to use an AI based translation service, as these generally yield very high quality results these days. However, they still have the fundamental issue that they don't know the exact context for a given translation text snippet. As a result, they will often use the wrong terms or will misinterpret the English original — ruling this out as a decent solution to rely on.

What finally allowed us to solve this issue was to implement a custom AI based translation assistant that we run locally. This solution uses a multi-language LLM, but will not only output a translation of the English original, but instead gets a lot of additional context information, as well as the German translation as a second reference. And finally, it is instructed to adhere to a particular set of rules and an additional glossary. It then only corrects the existing (human or AI based) translation instead of generating a totally new one.

Although there were still hundreds of manual corrections necessary on our part, the result finally gave us enough confidence to publish it, leaving further polishing to later releases.

Other Notable Improvements

Apple Photos Import

On macOS, there is now a new menu entry “Import from Apple Photos library…” that allows to import all photos from the main Apple Photos library. Duplicates will be skipped during import, so you can run the import again at a later point to import only new images.

Note that in contrast to the iOS app, the desktop import will import all images, including those only stored in iCloud.

Streamlined Library Organization Tasks

Background tasks, such as “Synchronizing file system” or downloading missing files from other library instances are now running in an optimized order, resulting in better responsivity and performance. We have also reduced the number of tasks that were previously running redundantly, resulting in a noticeably lighter feel.

Notable Bug Fixes

The main focus for this release was the synchronization process between different library instances. After several known and some yet unknown issues had been addressed, the “experimental” badge for this feature has now also been removed!

Apart from several crash issues, a more noticeable issue has been mitigated, where for some file formats, most notably TIFF and PNG, images would display as black if they were larger or equal to 16384 pixels in at least one dimension. If you encounter any such images, you may need to manually refresh the thumbnail cache, by selecting them and choosing “Image” -> “Renew cached data”.

As usual, the full list of changes can be found in the change log.

Update Nov. 19 · Second Release Candidate

We've released a second release candidate that contains some additional bug fixes, as well as one behavior change that we still wanted to go in the first release — For RAW files, the embedded preview is now displayed by default, while it is still possible to optionally display the developed RAW in 100% zoom (Go to “View” → “Develop RAWs for 100% Zoom”).

This approach has the advantage of being much faster, as well as retaining the original color rendition of the camera. The main drawback is that some cameras do not store the preview at the full resolution, so inspecting details may still require looking at the developed RAW.

The full list of changes for RC-2 can be found in the change log.

Update Nov. 21 · Third Release Candidate

Due to a critical crash issue happening when the new Spanish translation is active, we have published a new build. This also contains a bunch of small bug fixes and enhancements that for issues that were reported for the second release candidate.

The full list of changes for RC-3 can be found in the change log.