Performance and Library Reliability · Release Candidate 56

Automatic Library Catalog Recovery

One of the more significant additions: if the library catalog file goes missing, the application now recovers it automatically from the previously saved version. The catalog is the central index of a library – losing or corrupting it doesn’t endanger the photos themselves, but recovering from such a situation by hand can be time-consuming. With this fix, the fallback happens without any user intervention.

Edit Variants and XMP Sidecars

If you use external editors that write to XMP sidecars, this release addresses a specific inconsistency: when an externally created edit variant of an image is detected, more metadata fields are now restored from the original. Notably, this includes the date/time already stored in an existing XMP sidecar, which some applications simply ignore and overwrite – the common cause of date/time mismatches between an original and its externally edited variants.

Fullscreen Performance

While in fullscreen view, the details view resolution of the displayed image is no longer loaded. The practical effect is that switching between images in a fullscreen workflow – during review or a slide show, for example – no longer carries the cost of maintaining a second, slightly lower resolution version of each image.

Additionally, the display no longer turns off after a while when a slide show in fullscreen mode is running.

Import

Before starting an import, the application now checks that the target volume has sufficient disk space and alerts you if it doesn’t. This avoids interrupted imports on an almost-full drives, but more importantly, it also avoids the drive becoming completely full, which can lead to more serious issues, such as being unable to store the library catalog.

Smaller Improvements

A confirmation dialog now appears when assigning a keyboard shortcut that is already in use by another action, so rebinding no longer silently conflicts with existing shortcuts. The duplicate detector gained a “Show in Folder” button for locating a result directly in the file system. Collapsed folders in the event selection bubble are now remembered. Affinity 3 is recognized automatically as an external editor, so it no longer needs manual configuration. The scripting API gained functions for getting and setting the thumbnail size, and after sending a crash report the application continues loading instead of waiting for the success dialog to be confirmed.

Bug Fixes

A dozen or so crash scenarios were addressed in this release, most of them edge cases involving race conditions – for example, crashes when closing a window at particular moments, when new files appeared in an event folder that was deleted again immediately, when the event selector opened during a refresh of the navigation pane, or timing issues between a transition animation and a change in the number of displayed thumbnails. One fix addresses a crash after a library lock failed while the system was in standby, which could happen when the library had been opened on a different computer in the meantime. On macOS, a crash caused by unrecognized mouse buttons was fixed, and on Linux, external hard drives are now detected and displayed as such.

Library cloning received two related fixes: a clone operation can no longer be interrupted by the system going into standby, and edit variants are now properly associated with their originals directly after a library instance has been cloned. A separate fix addresses a possible issue where a library instance could lose its authorization for synchronization, and device records are now properly isolated so that one device can no longer alter the device information of another.

The remaining fixes are minor in scope: the toolbar area at the bottom of the thumbnail view no longer blocks mouse clicks, the scroll position is no longer lost when changing the thumbnail size while a collection bar entry is active, the field lines of text editor entries in the metadata pane are now visible in the light theme, palette images with less than 8 bits per pixel load correctly, and a stray toast label no longer appears when setting a star rating via the menu with no images selected.

As always, see the change log for the full list of changes.