Diffractor releases and changelog

• Fixed a crash affecting some users on startup.
• Uses much less memory while browsing and viewing.
• Ratings and keywords cannot be lost to a locked sidecar — a .xmp that cannot be read is refused, not rebuilt from the edit alone.
• Duplicate detection stops fading out — scrolling a video into view no longer clears its checksum.
• Video plays in software rendering — with hardware acceleration off.

• Improved UI, Zoom, rebuilt. Hold to peek at full detail, or press Ctrl+Space for a proper zoom mode that stays put while you pan, compare, and move through your photos. Pinch, drag, double-tap, wheel, or use the corner navigator — and the image sharpens as soon as you stop moving.
• Search by where a photo was taken. Type a city, a state, a country, or just click the map, and photos with only GPS coordinates now answer too. Diffractor no longer confidently attaches the wrong town name to a photo — if it isn't sure, it says Near X with a direction instead.
• Finds the same photo saved twice. A resized copy, a re-export, a re-save, or one you rotated is now recognised as a duplicate even though the file name, size, and checksum are all different. Crops stay separate, and burst sequences and scanned pages don't produce false matches.
• Related items actually finds related items. It used to show duplicates only. Now it also shows photos from the same album, the same series, taken around the same time, and taken in the same place — each in its own group, closest first.
• Rename, Import, and Sync are easier to use and safer. Each one now walks you through it, shows exactly what it is about to do to every file, and lets you decide what happens when a file already exists before anything is written. Copy and Move do this too, instead of quietly making a second copy.
• Better photo editing. Fix converging verticals, warm or cool an image, and let Auto color, Auto straighten, and Auto document do the first pass for you. Auto document sets the same crop and straighten sliders you'd use yourself, so you can nudge or undo any part of it — and none of it freezes the window on a big RAW.
• Faster, safer edits to your files. Rating a RAW file no longer copies the whole file to record one star. Writes to network drives, OneDrive, and files another program has open now either work or tell you why they didn't, and never leave stray temporary files behind.
• Now translated into 13 languages. Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Chinese.
• Multiple bugs fixed:
• #189 — mixed text sizes after changing the font size
• #232 — a missing Calibri font flooded the log file
• #103 — OneDrive reverted ratings and tags after syncing
• #207 — writes to network drives failed and left temporary files
• #180 — tagging a file another program had open froze Diffractor
• #78 — videos displayed with the wrong aspect ratio
• #61 — video locations never appeared on the map
• #219 — Korean tags failed to display, add, or search
• #184 — photos sorted by edit date instead of capture date
• #215 — Explorer opened every folder in Diffractor

Small release with bug fixes and updates.

Fixes:

• Korean (Hangul) tags and search now work correctly, including matching between the NFC and NFD forms used by different cameras and operating systems #219
• Sidebar history chart now shows your full collection, with a configurable number of years in the Customize dialog #175
• Folders starting with a dot (e.g. .dtrash) can now be excluded, even when the path is offline or not yet created #174
• Fixed SHA256 hashing on 32-bit builds

New:

• Genre now supports multiple ;-separated values for search, grouping and autocomplete #117
• Reads more EXIF metadata — Artist, Software, and the Windows XP Title/Author/Keywords/Subject tags — plus APEX aperture and shutter-speed fallbacks
• Updated image libraries (libheif, libjpeg-turbo, libjxl, LibRaw, libde265, zlib-ng, minizip-ng) for better RAW and HEIF handling

Thanks to everyone who reported issues. I hope to work through more issues in the tracker over the coming months.

Small release with bug fixes and updates.

Fixes:
- Add and remove tags now works reliably #115 #209
- Fixed search excluding everything when using "none of these terms" #177
- Fixed search for Cyrillic "Х" and other Unicode characters #203
- "Large font" setting is now remembered on restart #144
- Mouse scroll wheel no longer jumps through images unexpectedly #131
- MP3 files no longer occasionally play silently in the internal player #217

New:
- Search, group and define collections by drive/volume label #213
- Support for DVCAM .avi files including recording date #212
- Switched maps to street view
- Added Czech language support

Thanks to everyone who reported issues. I hope to work through more issues in the tracker over the coming months.

Small release with some bug fixes and updates.

• Fix file updates on network drives #211 #207
• Natural file name sorting #197
• German translation updates
• Updated several dependent libraries to the latest version.

I hope to work through more issues in the tracker over the next few months. Be patient with me :)

This release fixes two long time issues:

• AV1 software support #159.
• Location map fixed #116

Nowadays my free time to work on Diffractor is limited but I am trying to keep it going. These two issues were annoying but thanks to those who have been so patient. The map has been changed to Bing maps because Google maps no longer supports the Windows HTML control.

Diffractor is now free. Thank you to everyone who purchased in the past – very much appreciated. I am hoping donations will cover the running costs. Let’s see how it goes :)

This release removes any payment verification screens. It also includes several small fixes:

• Support display scale factor #111
• Make Diffractor free #110
• slide show stops bug #100
• Option to remove shadows around image view panel #99
• Caption/Description - mixed up #97
• Full screen image not reloaded after tag or rename #95
• Tags with space at the end #92
• Add option to not update file modified timestamp when changing file metadata enhancement #86
• HEIC Support #85
• Allow space in search scope #42
• very short wav files do not play bug #39
• Option to toggle on/off playing media at the last known position enhancement #19
• Better “customize” screen #18
• Optimize network IO enhancement #15

The version of Diffractor adds a new smart scrollbar to the items view that shows year or other grouping information about the items displayed. It also improves performance when displaying large lists of items.

• Enable wildcards when searching in the scopes enhancement #90
• Cannot "bulk remove" tag when there is more than one word in it bug #89
• Folders thumbs are shown when using WITHOUT #93
• Wrong glyphs/fonts in description #87
• Thumbnail's size keeps changing when clicking on it #88
• Title - no action when clicking enhancement #77
• Typo in sidebar 'todo' label bug #71
• Search box doesn't always find what is needed #70

Diffractor goes 64bit:
- The installer now contains both 32bit and 64bit configurations of Diffractor. It automatically links shortcuts to the appropriate executable.
- Improvements to sound playback latency. This makes video playback and scrubbing seem faster.
- Added filters to allow only images, videos, or audio files to be shown.
- Fixed an issue where DNG files were not shown correctly. #83
- Fixed playback of short videos and audio files less than one second. #39

This release improves workflow and collection management:

• The import screen has a new 'analyze' feature to preview where items will be copied to.
• A synchronize collection feature has been added to allow the collection to be synchronized with an external folder or NAS.
• An advanced search dialog has been added to easily create more advanced searches.
• WEBP save support has been added.
• The resize and convert dialogs have been combined as they have overlapping behavior.
• Combine to PDF has been replaced by print to PDF as it has more layout options.
• Other various bugs and crash fixes.

This release adds support for XMP color labels and fixes several bugs:

• Support XMP color labels #46
• system speakers volume (fn+...) affects Diffractor internal volume #60
• Not all keyboard shortcuts are working in Edit Window #59
• "with" scope gives same result as "without" #58
• folders thumbnails overlap #56
• "artist" scope - comes together with "album" scope #54
• Thumbnail View changes to Details View #53

Minor release containing:

• Fix to diffractor randomly closing #55
• Updated location dialog that allows selecting a location by clicking on the map. #11
• Added option to show verbose metadata #33
• Fixes to various crashes identified by Diffractor crash reporting.

This is a major release including many improvements. The main changes are:

• Diffractor has been translated into German by a helpful volunteer. This is exciting because Diffractor has many German users. Wunderbar!
• The sidebar has new history and map selectors. They allow quick searches by date and country.
• The dark color scheme allows Diffractor to do more with color in the user interface. For example highlight differences and special items.
• Comparing photos and other files has been enhanced to show differences in file attributes.

This release fixes crashes and bugs:

• #34 "Genre" metadata problems (bug)
• #32 GUI visual glitch in busy_control (bug)
• #29 Update POPM metadata in MP3 files (enhancement)
• Fixes based on crash reporting telemetry (crashes)

This release adds new features to make it easier to manage a large collection of photos and videos. It allows you to easily determine if an item is in your collection or not. All indexed locations combined make the collection.

The changes are:

• Allow grouping items by presence. "Did you ever insert an old memory card and wonder do I have these photos on my hard disk? Now you can open diffractor and sort those items by presence in your collection. Items not in your collection will be grouped together."
• #16 Separated ordering and sorting
• #23 Fixed crash when structured copy screen opened on an invalid drive.
• #12 Added support for .m2ts files
• #24 Fixed for importing before all selected items are fully scanned
• #10 Returned shift based selection of multiple items
• #25 Returned drag and drop of items to/from windows explorer
• #26 Reduced the amount of CPU used when starting Diffractor.

This release fixes several crashes and bugs.

• Fixed occasional issue where diffractor would not start up. This was caused by an error processing empty tags in xmp metadata. Diffractor would go into an endless loop.
• Fixed a crash when decoding truncated TIFF files.
• Fixed a crash when decoding malformed GIF files.