Phokus v0.2.0

Draft for the GitHub Release body. Fill in the checksums and trim as needed.

Phokus is a local-first desktop media library for Windows — point it at your image and video folders and it builds a fast, searchable gallery with thumbnails, semantic search, visual discovery, AI tagging, and duplicate cleanup. Everything is processed on your machine; nothing is uploaded.

0.2.0 is the biggest update since launch: albums, gallery multi-select with bulk actions, colour search, a second AI tagging model (JoyTag), a full tag manager, camera EXIF details in the lightbox, a slideshow mode, and a large batch of performance and theme fixes. Updating from 0.1.x? The built-in updater will fetch this for you — and afterwards, a new in-app "What's New" tour shows you around.

Install / update

Updating from 0.1.x: the in-app updater will offer 0.2.0 on launch — one click downloads, installs, and relaunches.
Fresh install: download Phokus_0.2.0_x64-setup.exe below and run it. Windows SmartScreen will warn that the publisher is unrecognized — this build is not code-signed. Click More info → Run anyway.
Requires Windows 10/11. WebView2 is fetched automatically if missing.

NVIDIA users wanting GPU embedding/tagging speed can use the Phokus_0.2.0_x64-cuda-setup.exe variant instead (larger download; bundles the CUDA runtime DLLs). Settings → Updates now shows which build you are running.

Highlights

Added

Albums — cross-folder collections without moving files: their own sidebar section with cover thumbnails, create/rename/reorder/manage, and album-aware similar-image search.
Gallery multi-select — hover a thumbnail's corner to start selecting, then bulk tag, rate, favorite, add to an album, or delete from a floating action bar. Works in similar-image, region, and album views too.
Colour search — filter the Gallery, Timeline, or tag results by dominant colour via toolbar swatches or a custom picker.
Choose your tagging model — pick between the anime-focused WD tagger and JoyTag (better for photo libraries), each with its own confidence threshold, plus a Reset AI tags action that never touches manual tags.
Tag manager — rename, merge, and delete tags across the library, with live search and sorting; Explore's Tag Cloud also shows related tags on hover.
Camera info in the lightbox — EXIF camera, lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, focal length, and a map link for geotagged photos.
Slideshow mode, What's New tour after updates, quick theme switch from the title bar, an editable path bar in the folder picker, persistent per-folder worker pauses, and add-to-album from the right-click menu.

Changed

Settings reorganised into General, Media, Updates & Setup, Storage, and AI Workspace pages.
Menus unified — all context menus and dropdowns share one style, stay on screen, close on Escape, and support submenus.
Faster Explore — quicker cluster revisits, much faster first-time clustering on large libraries, and a calmer Tag Cloud during active tagging.
Faster CPU tagging (multi-core with headroom) and smoother GPU tagging.
Safer deletion — deleting media now asks for confirmation and says clearly that files are removed from disk.
Better narrow-window layouts, a real update download progress bar, and a two-column lightbox info panel.

Fixed

No more self-indexing loops — Phokus now skips its own thumbnail cache when you add a broad folder like your user profile.
Ratings keep your search order — rating an image mid-search no longer reshuffles similar-image, region, semantic, tag, or album results.
AI tagging stays responsive — big GPU tagging jobs no longer freeze the UI, and noisy low-signal tags are filtered (older ones cleaned up on startup).
First launch now fits smaller screens, Explore no longer flashes the previous folder, and a long list of Subtle Light readability fixes.

See the changelog for the full list.

Checksums

SHA-256 (Phokus_0.2.0_x64-setup.exe)      = TBD
SHA-256 (Phokus_0.2.0_x64-cuda-setup.exe) = TBD

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