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

• Quick theme switch — right-click the settings cog in the title bar to switch theme (Phokus / Subtle Light / Conventional Dark) on the spot, without opening Settings.
• Albums — curate your own collections. A new Albums section in the sidebar (with cover thumbnails, kept visually distinct from Libraries) lets you create, rename, reorder (drag the row), and open albums; albums can span multiple folders. Add images from the gallery's bulk action bar or from the lightbox, remove them from within an album, and use Manage mode to multi-select and delete albums in one go. Deleting an album never touches your files — only the grouping is removed.
• Multi-select & bulk actions in the gallery — hover a thumbnail's top-left corner to reveal a selection checkbox (click it to start selecting); while selecting, click tiles to toggle and double-click to open. A floating action bar then lets you tag (with autocomplete), rate, favorite, add to an album, or delete the whole selection at once. Works in similar-image, region, and album views too.
• Colour search — filter the gallery (and Timeline) by dominant colour via a collapsible swatch palette plus a custom colour picker in the toolbar; existing libraries are backfilled automatically in the background.
• Album-scoped similar search — when finding visually similar images or searching by a selected region from an album, you can now keep results scoped to that album, switch back to the source folder, or search all media.
• Tag management — Explore → Tag Cloud gains a Manage mode with a flat tag list where you can rename a tag, merge it into another (rename it to an existing tag's name), or delete it from every image. Changes apply across the whole library. Settings → AI Workspace also has an "Open tag manager" button that jumps straight into it.
• Camera info in the lightbox — the image info panel now shows EXIF details (camera, lens, aperture, shutter, ISO, focal length) and, when a photo is geotagged, its GPS coordinates as a link that opens the location in your browser. Read on demand from the file, so it works on already-indexed images without re-indexing.
• What's New — after updating, Phokus now greets you with a "What's new" toast that opens an in-app release-notes screen for the new version, with the changes grouped into collapsible Added / Changed / Fixed sections.
• Build badge in Settings — the version line in Settings → Updates now shows whether the running build is the CPU or CUDA (GPU-accelerated) variant.
• Choose your tagging model — Settings → AI Workspace now lets you switch the AI tagger between the WD tagger (anime-focused) and JoyTag, which also handles photographic content and is stronger on NSFW concepts — a better fit for real-photo libraries. Each model downloads on demand, and tags are attributed to the model that produced them. JoyTag has no built-in rating, so its explicitness rating is derived from its tags.
• Related tags in Explore — clicking a tag in the Tag Cloud atlas now reveals its most co-occurring tags with animated connection lines and per-tag image counts, so you can quickly see how tags cluster together and jump to a refined search.
• Persist worker pauses across restarts — a new toggle in Settings → General lets you save per-folder worker pause states so they survive an app restart; useful when you want a folder permanently excluded from background processing without having to re-pause it every launch.

Changed

• Two-column lightbox details — the image info panel now lays metadata out in two columns (Dimensions/Duration, Video codec/Audio codec, Type/File size sit side by side), so the panel is more compact and less scrolling.

• Faster Explore on large libraries — revisiting a folder's visual clusters is now near-instant. The cluster cache is validated from a lightweight image-ID signature instead of re-reading every embedding, so big libraries no longer stall for several seconds even when the cached result is reused.

• Tag manager search and sort — the Manage mode tag list now has a live filter input and a sort dropdown (most-used / least-used / A–Z / Z–A). The list is virtualised so libraries with thousands of tags scroll without lag, and renaming or deleting a tag no longer clears the current filter/sort state mid-edit.

• Safer deletion — deleting media now asks for confirmation and spells out that it permanently removes the file(s) from disk. This covers the new gallery bulk delete and the Duplicate Finder, which previously deleted on a single click with no confirmation or warning.

• The updater now shows a real download progress bar with a percentage in Settings → Updates (previously it only said "Downloading").

• Smaller-screen layout — the toolbar adapts on narrow windows: the filter chips scroll horizontally instead of squashing (so "Similar: Folder/All" no longer stack), the search box shrinks, and the colour-search swatches now open in a compact popover rather than expanding inline and running off-screen. The sidebar and the lightbox info panel also narrow to give the gallery more room.

• Explore cluster layout — clusters are now sized by image count (busier clusters are larger and stack on top) and repositioned to avoid overlapping, so every cluster stays viewable and clickable even in dense libraries.

• Faster CPU tagging — when AI tagging runs on the CPU provider (no usable GPU) it now uses multiple cores instead of being pinned to one, several times faster on multi-core machines. A couple of cores are left free so the rest of the app stays responsive. GPU (DirectML) tagging is unchanged.

Fixed

• Stale Explore results on folder switch — switching folders (or re-entering Explore) no longer briefly shows the previous folder's clusters/tags with no loading indicator; the view now clears and shows a loading state until the new folder's data arrives.
• Rating no longer scrambles search results — rating or favoriting an image while viewing similar-image, region, semantic, tag, or album results no longer re-sorts the view back into the default order; the current result ordering is preserved.
• The update download/install progress toast now reappears when you start an update from the title-bar indicator or Settings after dismissing the earlier "Update available" prompt — previously progress only showed in Settings.
• Subtle Light theme — fixed several surfaces and buttons that stayed dark or became unreadable on hover, including new dialogs and the green action buttons across the updater and onboarding.
• Endless self-indexing loop — adding a folder that contains Phokus's own app-data directory (for example, your whole user profile) no longer makes the app index its own thumbnail cache, generate thumbnails of those thumbnails, and loop forever. That directory is now skipped by both the folder scanner and the filesystem watcher.
• Background tasks now lead with the active folder — when one folder's workers are paused while another is actively processing, the active folder takes the main slot in the background-tasks bar instead of the paused one.
• Oversized window on smaller screens — on a fresh install the window opened at a fixed size that was taller than the usable area on displays like 1366×768, leaving part of it off-screen. It now clamps to the monitor's work area (excluding the taskbar) and centres there when it would overflow; larger displays and any remembered size/position are left untouched.
• Explore readability in Subtle Light — fixed washed-out and unreadable elements in the Explore view on the light theme. Cluster cards now use a soft dark caption scrim (the previous cream overlay fogged the photos), with a legible label, count, and "Open" button; Tag Cloud words use darker accents and a higher opacity floor instead of near-invisible pale text.
• Explore polish — the Tag Cloud now uses the in-app tooltip instead of the native browser one (and reads "1 image", not "1 images"), and the folder-scope dropdown no longer opens behind the cluster cards.
• AI tagging no longer freezes the app — tagging now runs inference in small GPU micro-batches with a brief yield between them, instead of one wide batch that monopolised the GPU (and with it the whole UI) for seconds at a time. The app stays responsive while tagging runs, throughput is steadier (the old wide batches caused periodic slowdowns), and the first batch after launch starts faster.
• Noisy AI tags filtered automatically — a built-in removal list strips generic or low-signal tags (e.g. "simple background") from WD and JoyTag output before they are stored. Previously-generated tags matching the list are cleaned up at startup. Manual user-added tags are never touched.
• Explore Tag Cloud hover glow in Subtle Light — the radial glow that appears under a tag word on hover was invisible on the light background (white on cream). It now uses a warm dark tone matching the rest of the light-theme palette, and the atlas connection-line gradient adapts to the theme as well.
• AI Workspace "Selected Folders" no longer pre-selects a folder — switching the tagging queue scope to "Selected Folders" previously auto-selected the first folder in the list. It now starts with nothing selected so you can choose exactly which folders to target.

0.1.1 — 2026-06-23

Added

• Custom multi-folder picker — replaces the native OS dialog with an in-app folder browser that lets you navigate, stage folders from multiple locations, and add them all in one go. Duplicate roots are skipped automatically; partially-failed batches remove successfully-added entries from the staging panel so only failed folders remain to retry.
• Rebuild semantic index maintenance action in Settings — drops and recreates the vector tables at the current model dimension, then re-queues every image for embedding. Fixes "dimension mismatch" search errors that occur after switching between CLIP models with different output sizes.
• Video playback settings — new Video Playback group in Settings with two persisted toggles: "Autoplay in lightbox" (default on) and "Start muted" (default off). Settings apply to the next opened video rather than the current one.
• 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

• Settings sections are reordered — General is now the first and default section instead of AI Workspace.
• The Duplicate Finder group list is now virtualised — only on-screen cards mount, so large result sets (e.g. 5,000+ pairs) scroll without lag rather than mounting every thumbnail at once.
• 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

• AVIF thumbnails — AVIF files are now processed correctly by routing thumbnail generation through the bundled FFmpeg path instead of the Rust image decoder (which has no dav1d dependency). Previously-failed AVIF jobs are requeued on startup; JPEG derivatives are fed to the embedding and tagging pipeline while the lightbox continues to display the original file.
• Accent text is now readable in the Subtle Light theme.
• Folder picker chevron tooltip now correctly shows "No subfolders" for leaf entries instead of "Open folder" in both branches.
• Folder picker Unix breadcrumb root now shows "/" instead of always "Home" for non-home paths such as /mnt/data.
• 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.