phokus/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to Phokus are documented here. The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project aims to follow Semantic Versioning (0.x: anything may change between minor versions).

[Unreleased]

Added

• Timeline scrubber — a year/month rail on the Timeline view that jumps to any period in the library. Timeline now loads the full filtered set so the scrubber spans the whole library instead of just the first page.
• Folder reordering in the sidebar — drag-and-drop (with edge auto-scroll) or keyboard (↑/↓ on the drag handle), with the custom order persisted across sessions; the Libraries list also gains A–Z / Z–A / Custom sort.
• Failed AI-tagging jobs can now be located from the background worker prompt, including a gallery filter for images with failed tags and an expanded list of failed filenames/errors.
• A new theme system adds Phokus, Subtle Light, and Conventional Dark chrome options across the app.
• First-run onboarding now includes an inline theme picker so new users can choose their preferred app chrome before continuing the tour.

Changed

• The gallery grid is now row-virtualised, so very large libraries scroll smoothly and only on-screen thumbnails are rendered.
• Polished the new theme surfaces before release, including readable subtle-light secondary buttons, failed-worker action buttons, and onboarding controls.
• Onboarding preview media keeps the dark gallery/media surface regardless of the active chrome theme.

Fixed

• Video embedding jobs are no longer claimed before their thumbnail exists, and any that previously failed for that reason are requeued on startup — videos no longer churn through failed embeddings.
• Subtle Light theme consistency — the lightbox metadata panel now follows the light chrome while the image canvas stays dark (matching Conventional Dark), and gallery/timeline media badges, duplicate-finder thumbnails, and the window restore icon now theme correctly instead of staying Phokus-dark.
• Timeline scrolling is now smooth on large libraries — it virtualizes per row of tiles instead of per month, so a month with thousands of photos no longer mounts every tile at once (thumbnails now load in incrementally as you scroll, matching the All Media grid).
• Background worker updates (thumbnails, metadata, embeddings, tags) no longer re-sort the entire loaded image set on every batch. In Timeline, which loads the whole library, this re-sort caused severe lag and could crash the app during background indexing.

0.1.0 — 2026-06-14

First public release. Windows desktop, distributed as an unsigned NSIS installer with a built-in updater.

Added

• Local media library — add folders, recursive background indexing with live progress, and a filesystem watcher that keeps the library in sync as files are added, edited, moved, renamed, or removed (thumbnails and embeddings are preserved across renames).
• Gallery — virtualized grid (handles very large libraries), favorites, star ratings, video durations; filter by folder, type, favorites, or rating; sort by date added, date taken (EXIF), name, size, rating, or duration; compact / comfortable / detail density.
• Search — filename, semantic (/s, via CLIP visual embeddings), and tag (/t) search from one prefix-aware search bar.
• Discovery — similar-image search (by image or selected region), an Explore view with a visual cluster map and tag cloud, and a Timeline grouped by EXIF capture date. Explore, Timeline, and Duplicates are folder-scopable from their headers.
• Lightbox — keyboard navigation, zoom, pan, inline tag editing, and rating controls, plus a custom edge-to-edge video player (scrubbing, volume, speed, loop, fullscreen, keyboard support).
• AI tagging — WD tagger (ONNX, CPU/DirectML) with adjustable confidence threshold, batch size, and per-folder queue targeting. Optional.
• Duplicate finder — three-phase exact-duplicate scan (size → sample hash → full hash) with live progress and bulk delete.
• Background pipeline — strict-priority workers (thumbnails → metadata → embeddings → tags) with per-folder pausing from the sidebar context menu or the background-tasks bar.
• Guided first-run onboarding — background FFmpeg provisioning with live progress and retry, a walkthrough of the library, pipeline, search modes, views, and updates, plus an optional AI-tagger download. Re-runnable from Settings.
• Updater — checks GitHub Releases on launch and from Settings; a title-bar indicator lights up when a new version is ready, and one click downloads, installs the signed update, and relaunches.
• Maintenance — database compaction and orphaned-thumbnail cleanup from Settings, with live size/reclaimable stats.
• Window state persistence and single-instance handling.