Quality of Life and Fuji X-Trans Improvements · Aspect Preview 38

Organization improvements

On the way to make manually organized folder structures a first-class use case, this release improves the way events are created from files within scanned folders. Previously, new events were always created as managed, within the library folder. Now, when selecting files from a scanned folder, the event will instead of created in the folder that contains the images, leaving them within the scanned folder.

Two minor improvements, revolve around collections and other collection bar items. A new "Add to" context menu entry allows adding a selection of files to any collection, without the use of drag'n'drop. Also, it is now possible to Ctrl+click (Cmd+click on macOS) items in the collection pane in order to filter the current view according to the clicked item.

The auto-complete popup that appears when using the search bar now links to the documentation that lists the possible semantic search expressions. Finally, two new sorting modes are available for all thumbnail views, “File Size” and “Rating”.

X-Trans RAW improvements

Due to the special sub pixel placement RAWs generated by X-Trans sensors are generally more complicated to process. Up to now, we used the same algorithm that is used for traditional Bayer patterns, which yielded good quality, but was an order of magnitude slower for X-Trans RAWs. This release switches to a simpler algorithm that is much faster while trading a little bit of quality.

Also related to the different sub pixel pattern, there was an issue where loading a RAW file at 50% zoom would sometimes result in broken colors, because pixels were binned together incorrectly. For this reason, we are now using a fast linear interpolation process instead of pixel binning, trading a slightly worse performance for correct colors.

Other notable changes

• This version has a non-backwards compatible change to the network protocol, so when synchronizing over the network, all Aspect installations should be updated to the latest preview
• On macOS, the application now has a standard “Window” menu
• The metadata pane now handles large selections of photos much better and robustly
• The “Synchronizing file system…” activity has been optimized and should now interfere much less with the UI and other activities
• Fixed various crashes reported since the last preview release

As always, the full list of changes is in the change log.