changelog¶

Note

This is the new changelog, only the most recent builds. For all versions, see the old changelog.

Version 651 ¶

user submission¶

the user who has been sending in UI features has some more--
the options dialog now has a search bar!! you type something in, and it'll present any text strings in the whole options dialog that match. you select one and it'll take you to the associated page and highlight the text. it is still experimental and because the underlying strings are a little jank, sometimes the results are weird too, but it is pretty cool and a clever way to get this functionality without a whole dialog rewrite, as I was expecting to do
the regular command palette now supports smart wraparound so you can press 'up' after typing something to get to the bottom of the list
it also supports page up/down/home/end for fast results navigation! I fixed a couple things with page up/down and made home/page up terminate on the top result, rather than the text entry--let me know if anything feels/renders wrong
a new checkbox in options->command palette, default on, makes favourite search selections in the command palette open a new page rather than populating the current
the command palette now highlights favourite search 'folder' name
bug fixes for some recent menu search stuff and undo/redo search stuff

duplicates auto-resolution launch¶

this system is now v1.0 and ready for all users to use. I invite everyone who has done some duplicates work but has yet to touch auto-resolution to check out the updated help here https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/advanced_duplicates_auto_resolution.html
if you are interested but don't want to get into the details, there's a 'tl;dr:' section that tells you how to get set up in about a minute
if you have yet to do any duplicates work at all in hydrus, I also updated the core dupes help here: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/duplicates.html

misc¶

the duplicates filter's right-hand hover window now has a 'this window is always visible' checkbox under the cog menu. turn it off, and it will only appear when your mouse is over it, like the other hover windows
all 'checker options' in subscriptions and watchers now support sub-integer 'intended files per check' values. the spinner widget now changes in increments of 0.05 and can go as low as 0.25 (previously '1')
videos that are rotated with file metadata 90 or -90 degrees in the ffmpeg metadata report now get the correct resolution in hydrus and will get the correct shape of video canvas (non-letterboxed) with mpv or the native renderer. I have not scheduled all videos for a metadata regen since these seem to be very rare, but if you see a video with a whack thumbnail and it renders in, say, a small landscape cutout within a portrait black box, while being fine in an external player, try hitting manage->maintenance->regen file metadata on it. it is still doesn't fix, send it to me please!
an error of 'There are no playback devices available' in an 'ao/xxxxx' component from mpv now counts as 'crashy' in the emergency dump-out mpv error handler
all fatal mpv errors are now caught by the emergency dump-out mpv error handler and assumed to be 'crashy'
fixed a bug related to the new search history stuff that could raise an error if a search page were edited in some early initialisation states

boring stuff¶

added a new call to create new file search pages that uses the richer 'file search context' object. this allows the new 'load a favourite search from command palette' job to load the correct tag context. we still don't set the 'searching immediately' state correctly here, but it'd be nice to have one day
when file maintenance changes a file's filetype or resolution, details are now printed to the log
a safety throttle that stopped checker options checking too fast is relaxed to 'no faster than one quarter of the time since the last hit'
tweaked some layout stuff in the options dialog

duplicates auto-resolution misc work, mostly boring¶

gave the duplicates and duplicates auto-resolution help a full pass
in the auto-resolution review actions window, the approve, deny, select-all, and both undo buttons will now enable/disable as their respective lists' selection status changes
for clarity and unity, replaced some final instances of 'declined' with 'denied' in the auto-resolution system
renamed 'both files match different searches' to 'the two files match different searches'
the pause icon button is now a clear text button with 'pause/play'. when I figure out a nice icon or dynamic icon-switching button for pause/play, I'll put this back
removed the 'this is being built' warning labels from the UI
fixed some bad tooltips in duplicate hover window
I put off a couple of features I had planned for launch, like having more modified time merge in duplicate metadata merge options, and a column in the preview's failed-test thumbnail pair list to say which comparator failed. I didn't want to rush these out; I can add thm later in normal work

Version 650 ¶

misc¶

I forgot to mention last week that the user who added a bunch of nice UI stuff also added file search page predicate changes to the main undo menu. if you accidentally remove some clever predicate, it should be possible to bring it back now. undo is a tricky subject, but we're experimenting with some stuff
fixed a logical typo in last week's better prefetching code where the media viewer was prefetching no further than the smaller of the prev/next directions. e.g. if you were set to prefetch 3 back and 5 forward, it would only fetch 3 back and 3 forward. well done to the user with no backwards prefetching who noticed this
when subscriptions are set to process in alphabetical order, this is now smart/human alphabetical, such that, for instance, 'my sub 3' is now earlier than 'my sub 11'
turned off some 0.5/2x size clamping in the options->ratings dialog for incdec ratings. it was a little confusing and sometimes made it seem that the dialog was not saving values correctly
fixed a bad dialog title and some non-expanding UI layout in the new 'edit service specifier panel' (the thing I added for the clever new rating pred last week)
I believe I have fixed a handful of file storage initialisation and/or migration issues that all stemmed from a file location storage path being stored in a Windows system with forward instead of back slashes (mostly a legacy issue). thanks to the user who worked with me on this
install_dir/static has a new 'empty_client_files.7z' that just has an empty 'client_files' structure, 512 subfolders in fxx and txx format, to help ease some database maintenance jobs
wrote 'help my media folders are broke.txt' for the db directory to directly talk about missing subfolders

duplicates smart counting updates¶

tl;dr: the duplicates system is less laggy and some annoying stuff is fixed
in the panel that sets up a search for potential duplicate pairs (e.g. on duplicates page 'filtering' tab), the little 'x pairs searched; y match' text label now updates very fast to pair changes. previously, any time a new pair was added (e.g. right after an image is imported) or an existing pair removed (e.g. you confirm a pair are duplicates), the count was invalidated and it had to be redone; now, that widget receives clever specific info of 'this pair was added/deleted', and it sees if it cares about that and updates its counts or decides to search that new pair as needed. you can now leave the client open looking at a 'filtering' page while a bunch of imports are going on and it is no longer a refresh-fest
this is universal to any pair change, no matter the cause (previously there were a couple of maintenance edge cases I'd missed)
in a separate set of signals, any time a file moves in and out of any local file domain or 'combined local file domains', these update signals also happen. so moving or deleting a file will cauise an instant count update where appropriate. the problems we had with 'if I delete one file of a pair manually, that count doesn't show up quickly' are solved
the underlying search cache this tech relies on uses the same update-optimisations, so the slow 'initialising' step you'd see all around here now only happens on the first access

duplicates auto-resolution smart counting updates¶

tl;dr: you shouldn't see trashed stuff in auto-resolution any more and some annoying stuff is fixed
auto-resolution rules are also hooked into this smarter signalling system. they also now only track the pairs that are in their search domain, so if you send one file of a pair to trash, the pair now disappears from the rule (if, for instance, it was sitting in the 'pending actions' queue, it now disappears). and, if you vice versa import or migrate a file to a rule's file domain, any potential pairs that it comes with will be added to the rule, so rules that are set up to only work in one specific local file domain now operate more sensibly
there's a new maintenance job under the auto-resolution cog icon button that resyncs all rules to their correct file domains. this routine will run on db update, so you'll likely see some deleted cruft cleared out of your 'denied' queues and so on
when you change the location of an auto-resolution rule's search but nothing else, it no longer needs to re-search everything. it just adds new pairs for search and discards an excess it now has. just works a bit faster on this particular change
when you do some semi-automatic auto-resolution 'pending actions' work in the duplicate filter, the pending/actioned/declined lists now refresh properly when you exit the filter after work done. because of the location filtering, deleting a file from a pair now correctly removes it from the pending actions queue!
same deal for the preview panel, when editing a rule--if you open the list up in the filter and do work, the list will refresh on exiting the filter

boring duplicates tech that makes this all work¶

when potential duplicate pairs are added, deleted, deleted-by-group-dissolve, or completely cleared, the duplicates database module now broadcasts specific pubsubs for each change. its cache of initialised potential duplicate pair search spaces are also updated directly rather than being cleared for regen
the potential duplicate id pair and distance object now stores a smarter internal mapping allowing for more types of search and filtering, and obviously now supports the above update routines, including delete stuff, which it couldn't do before. the merge routine of this guy, which is used in some clever multi-domain searches, now also correctly eliminates duplicate rows
the internal mapping of this object now also updates on these changes, rather than needing regen every time
the fragmentary potential duplicate pair search object can now eat these pubsubs and update its search space and 'remaining to search' stores
the fragmentary search now tracks actual rows that hit, not just a count. when a potential pairs update comes through, the hit store is also updated!
the potential pairs search panel listens for the pubsubs and updates its fragmentary search live
the fragmentary search is now aware of being in a '1700 out of 1703 rows searched' situation, where there is just a little bit more to do. in this case, it'll run those last three nice and quick rather than lazily settling for an estimate. this obviously happens all the time with these new incremental updates
deleted the old and blunter 'potential counts have changed' pubsub
I plugged the file add/delete routines into this system and wrote a bunch of domain filtering code to quickly figure out pair-updates based on file migration, and I wrote some location context consideration logic to make sure every guy who cares about this stuff gets told at the appropriate point
I overhauled the auto-resolution update signals to fit into this smarter system
the db module that manages duplicate file info is now split into a 'storage' unit, which does filtering and id management, and an 'update' side, which does verbs and update signals. auto-resolution now has access to the storage to do its filtering gubbins
cleaned up a bunch of code here
fixed a logical error when a duplicate pairs count search is asked to estimate the final count before any searching has happened

Version 649 ¶

big user submission¶

a user has sent in a large set of command palette, page navigation, and rating updates--
when you edit a rating service in services->manage services, there is now a live and interactable rating widget that updates to show your chosen shapes and colours!
when you edit the rating sizes in options->ratings, there are similar live rating widgets that will dynamically resize to the widths and heights you choose!
under options->command palette, you can now add your 'page history' to the initial results
under options->command palette, you can now add your 'favourite searches' to the initial results! I love how this works
you can also limit the number of search results, which appears to reduce command palette lag significantly on clients with many hundreds of pages
and you can also re-order the results by their type
under pages->history, you can now clear the history
options->gui pages now allows you to limit the number of pages kept in the history
the media viewer's zoom options menu has even more granular control over remembering zoom options with a new setting to allow updating the default settings by clicking the menu (rather than it being transient to that media viewer instance)
there's also a "do not recenter media on window resize" option (allowing you to now turn this behaviour off), and in options->media playback too
'page of pages' now automatically put a ↓ suffix at the end of their name label. you can change the suffix or turn it off under options->pages,

user client api¶

the user also added /get_service_rating_svg to the Client API, which lets you pull the svg used for a rating. there is help for this
I wrote a unit test for this
Client API version is now 83

misc¶

every ffmpeg call we make now flags ffmpeg to fail on the first error. we encountered a not-fun issue a week ago when certain JpegXLs were putting ffmpeg into an infinite error loop on a 'is animated' pre-import test. this loop is now broken instantly, but if a similar issue comes up, all external process calls also now cancel out if they take longer than (usually) fifteen seconds. I am not sure how prevalent errors are in normal videos, so let me know if many new videos suddenly get no thumbnails or something. this might be something we eventually want to tune (issue #1912)
the animated jxl test is re-activated
I renamed the confusing 'all my files' to 'combined local file domains' for new users a couple weeks ago. nothing exploded, so all existing users are being renamed today
across the program, the places where you locally store files and tags are now called 'local file/tag domain'. there was a mix of 'service' and 'domain' before, and I am trying to harmonise
fixed some traceback errors related to middle-clicking stub system predicates (like 'system:rating' in the initial file auto-complete dropdown), where it wasn't checking for the stub status and couldn't navigate what to do next
fixed importing pdfs (or any other file format) if the thumbnail creation fails silently with a null result
the archive/delete and duplicate filters, which have a 'want to commit all this?' interstitial dialog on close, no longer tell the parent media window to focus the current media before the interstitial is finished. previously, if you started this process while looking at a video, you'd suddenly get that video playing in the background while thinking about hitting 'commit', and if you decided to cancel out and go back to filtering, the underlying thumbnail page would still have that video highlighted. since the archive/delete job often clears out processed thumbnails right after, this would IRL be a small blip of noise and CPU as the video was loaded and then unloaded. I'm pretty sure this was the cause of the odd mpv lock-up we had a few weeks ago when testing out the new mpv async interface, because of a quick mpv swish before I had code to handle early unload. anyway, this annoyance should be fixed now--the 'play this mediia' signal is sent only on a confirmed media viewer close signal. I brushed up the specific logic about which media to send from an archive/delete, too--depending on which files are set to hide after processing, it'll try and send a different appropriave focus media, often none at all
options->tag presentation has a pair of advanced new options that set the default 'tag display type' of the normal page sidebar taglist and the media viewer taglist. I also fixed a rendering bug with this experimental system; changing the tag display type of a taglist now corrects the 'render for user' state for things like whether to display namespaces or custom namespace separators no matter what the starting state of the list was

clever rating search¶

in system:rating, if you have more than one rating service, there is now a powerful compound 'advanced rating' predicate. it lets you do 'system:all of x are rated' and 'system:any of x are rated', where x is a new widget that lets you select all rating services, just like/dislike, numerical, and/or inc/dec, or individual services in a checkbox list. there is also 'system:only x (amongst y) are rated', where y is a different set of rating services where all of x need to be rated but none of the remainder of y can be rated, with the classical example being x being one rating service and y being all of them, for finding files that are only rated on that service
all these support 'not rated' too, so you can now find files that have no rating anywhere, somewhere, or within a specific selection (e.g. system:'only favourites not rated out of all my like/dislike ratings')
I assembled this system through sheer force of will and there may be bugs. let me know how it goes
if you enter 'only x amongst x rated', i.e. with an uninteresting y, it swaps in 'all x rated'. there are probably some more optimisations if you enter certain one-service edge cases
I may be convinced to add an 'only-or' variant, but only if there is a real scenario for it and we can come up with clean nomenclature

duplicates¶

the auto-resolution rules review list (in a normal duplicates page) now grows and shrinks depending on the number of rules
on the first load of a page's auto-resolution rules, the list panel now starts disabled and there's a little 'initialising...' text

subprocess improvements¶

all subprocess calls (when hydrus opens another program, like ffmpeg, or asks your system to open a file externally) now happen in one place with cleaner code and better error handling
subprocess calls that launch a potentially long-lived program that we don't care much to talk to again, like an external music player run from 'open externally', now hand the process handles to a maintenance list to be polled every few minutes in normal memory maintenance. should be cleaner reaping and fewer zombies in non-Windows environments
all subprocess calls that we do care for an answer from now have a timeout. if they exceed that time, they are terminated, killed, reaped, and stdout and stderr reported nicely
all ffmpeg file metadata calls now have special handling for timeout problems, generally raising the 'damaged or unusual file' exception, which lets thumbnail gen and so on know to use a default thumb. timeout is usually 15 seconds
wrote a separate wrapper for subprocess calls that stream data over a longer time (video, PCM rendering). these use a context manager to ensure the process is terminated and reaped cleanly and also support timeout errors on each individual pipe chunk read
the calls that create streaming ffmpeg renderers for some more unusual thumbnail gen jobs now properly close the underlying process cleanly
all subprocess debug reporting mode stuff now happens in all cases

better image prefetching¶

a different user sent in some ideas for smarter image prefetching/pinning, particularly to deal with very-full-cache situations (like when you scroll through ten 12,000x14,000 images), and I worked on it a bit. I ended up not using the pinning for now, but I've improved prefetch intelligence significantly
when canvases do a neighbour prefetch, they now only perform one prefetch render at a time, alternating with next/previous/next/previous. if any of the prior prefetches are still rendering, we wait until they are done before we start another one. this saves time and memory, improves nearest-next availability when files are slow to load, and improves stability in extreme cases
the prefetch medias are now submitted and weighed together in order every time, and if doing the next prefetch load would cause the total prefetch size to exceed the percentage allowed in 'speed and memory', we stop prefetching at that point. this stops excessive cache churn when we have lots of extremely-large-file prefetch going on. this saves time, memory, and improves stability in extreme cases
the 'how much cache size to prefetch' option in 'speed and memory' is altered as a result. it is no longer per file, but for the whole prefetch and the allowed settable range is expanded. the default value is increased from 15% to 25%, and any user who has an existing value less than 25% will be bumped up. with the default options (25% of 1GB image cache), this means about 10x 4k images
the 'are your prefetch numbers good?' bit in the next section now gives warnings for explicit 1080p/4k counts, so, if you are set to prefetch 4 total files, and they and the current file at 4k would exceed the prefetch threshold, it'll tell you
the main image prefetch routine also now explicitly asks the cache if it can free up easy space to fit a new prefetch in before firing the prefetch request. images that are currently rendering are counted as 'not easy to free'. this will stop the cache churning when there's big stuff already hitting the CPU
cache logic is generally improved a little bit
there are still issues when scrolling through a selection of very large images quickly. the next step here is going to be a 'max number of images rendering at once' setting and render slots and, finally, nicer 'rendering...' loading status in the media viewer on the image you are currently looking at for when things are taking a while
the old 'delay neighbour prefetching by this base millisecond delay' option no longer does anything and is retired
fixed an issue where in rare maintenance/cache reset commands, hydrus data caches could be maintaining a fifo record for an item that was already specifically deleted

boring stuff¶

broke the master file search query in the database into constituent parts (the top level was 1,100 lines, now 250)
wrote a simple search-state object to better track some bool flags throughout a file search
lots of general cleanup around here
shuffled some things around to make certain complicated and exclusive searches work faster
a new safety hook now catches when a search fails to initialise its file domain correctly. the search now returns 0 results and you get a popup about it once per boot
wrote a new 'service specifier' object to handle some 'here's a bunch of services' storage stuff in a nice-to-serialise way, and wrote an edit panel and button for it
some db jobs that line many cancellable things up one after another (e.g. file search) will now cancel a bit faster
all image prefetch code is now done in the same location
shufled some subprocess stuff around to a new HydrusSubprocessing file
refactored my process, subprocess, and threading code to a new 'processes' module

Version 648 ¶

misc¶

I have disabled animated jxl parsing. some/many jxls are causing ffmpeg to go into an infinite loop when I ask it to see if the file is animated. I will harden the ffmpeg calling system and fix this for next week
the 'update selected with current options' buttons that appear in the gallery and watcher download pages now pop in below the import options rather than squashing in beside. before, just clicking the 'file limit' checkbox with some of the list selected would often cause the sidebar width to overflow and make a horizontal scrollbar etc..
system:duration now allows 'equal' and 'not equal'
system:framerate no longer allows 'less/greater than or equal to' in its edit panel, and there is a label mentioning how fuzzy framerate is. the hardcoded quick-select framerate system preds in the 'system:duration' panel are now ±1. I used to have a hack in the db search code to handle the fuzziness, but that was removed when I moved to the new number test system. I have not yet decided, but I may change all framerate calculations to be to the nearest integer, since that's pretty much what we display in UI
fixed an error-raising typo when the database is trying to do a large db job based on a tag filter that has a namespace blacklisted. an example of this would be a tags->migrate tags for 'all tags except title: tags'
if a user loads up a thumbnail grid that wants to have a virtual height greater than the Qt max (~16.7 million pixels, 2^24-1), I now pop up a one-time warning about it. these pages 'work' for ctrl+a type stuff, but you can't scroll below the magic line, and I suspect they are unstable
fixed an instabality bug in the regular file right-click menu, when non-sha2356 hashes are async-populated in the menu after a db fetch (issue #1908)

duplicates auto-resolution¶

'test A or B' comparators now support the spectrum of normal tag predicates: tags, namespace:anything, and wildcards. all their negated versions are also supported (-creator:anything, etc..). the search domain here is fixed at 'combined local file domains'/'all known tags'
'test A or B' comparators now support 'system:number of tags'. it works on 'all known tags'
'test A or B' comparators now support 'system:duration', 'system:framerate', and 'system:num frames', all under the 'system:duration' stub in the edit panel
'test A or B' comparators now support 'has audio', 'has forced filetype', and 'has transparency', and 'has duration', and all the 'has/has no' guys are now collapsed to the regular 'system:file properties' like in a normal search
'system:known url' and 'system:num urls' are collapsed in the edit panel down to 'system:urls'
'test A against B' comparators now support 'system:framerate'. a note in the edit panel reminds that these numbers are blurry, so you need padding
the various 'test A against B' tests that are non-time based now accept a null value for a property and treat it as zero for comparisons. for instance, an image with null duration will now have less duration than a video with duration 3s. previously, if either file had a null value for the system pred in question, the comparator would fail, which is not how the rest of the search tech works in the program

boring stuff¶

fixed an instability bug in the new async defaulterrback handling when the main window has died
if the user is running from source, the 'ffmpeg failed to render' exception now recommends that users try updating ffmpeg before doing anything else
I cleaned up some autocomplete dropdown behind the scenes stuff. these guys have been rewritten and reworked so many times, they aren't beautiful
all framerate calculations on media results now happen in one central location

boring duplicates auto-resolution stuff¶

the duplicates manager is now stricter about the order it clears work. it now clears the search work and then immediately the resolution work for each rule in clever-alphabetical turn. no more interleaved work
the duplicates manager can now pack more search work into each work slot, and it reports the 'searching' state for a rule more reliably
my mainloop daemons now have two sleep modes and differentiated wake signals to ensure they take forced breaks more reliably. I'm hoping to finally quash the problem of some workers (like duplicates auto-resolution) waking up too early and thus working far too hard when there are lots of other things (e.g. import queues) telling them there are various updates
similarly, the potential pair discovery manager now uses this nicer wake system and will not hammer potential discovery work while file imports are going on. it previously had a system that said 'if caught up, ok to hammer'. now it keeps pace with its maintenance work time preferences, waking immediately if idle but otherwise smoothing out a rush of new work over a few seconds rather than going bananas
duplicate auto-resolution rules now render themselves to a nice string with name and id when in various debugging modes
when you open a one-file comparator edit dialog, the focus now starts on the tag text input box
added unit tests for the normal tag metadata conditional file tests
added unit tests for the num_tags metadata conditional file tests
added unit tests for duration, framerate, num_frames metadata conditional file tests
added unit tests for framerate media result value extraction

Version 647 ¶

misc¶

if the selected subtags have any whitespace, all taglist menus now offer 'copy (selected subtags with underscores)'!
all existing users will see 'all local files' renamed to 'hydrus local file storage'. I did this for new users a couple weeks ago and we had no obvious problems, so now everyone gets it
the similarly not-excellently-named 'all my files' is renamed for new users to 'combined local file domains'. I'll do everyone else in a couple weeks if no problems
a file import options now has two 'do this if file is already in db' checkboxes--one for the auto-archive option, which now disables in the panel if you aren't auto-archiving, and the other to specifically say whether 'already in db' files should be re-sent to the stated import destinations, which matters for clients with multiple local file domains. this latter question is typically more annoying than helpful, so it is now default off and will move to off, on update, for all file import options you have. if you use multiple local file domains and want your 'already in db' files to be re-sent to a particular domain somewhere (I'm guessing we'd be talking a special import folder, rather than always), please go into that import context and edit the file import options back
thanks to a user, 'system:ratio' and 'system:rating' predicates can now produce inverted copies of themself, so they can invert on a ctrl+double-click (also available in the predicate menu under search->require) and can auto-exclude clearly mutually exclusive predicates (you may not have noticed, but see what happens when you add system:inbox to a query with system:archive. this happens with a bunch of stuff). when you have something like 'system:ratio is 16:9', you'll now be able to replace it with 'system:ratio is not 16:9'. for ratings, you'll similarly get 'rated' and 'not rated' and like/dislike flips. they will also do taller/wider and 'less than/greater than' numerical or inc/dec ratings, but since these predicates do not yet support >= or <=, the inversion is imperfect. this will be fixed in future when I eventually migrate these guys to the newer object that, for instance, 'system:number of frames' uses (issue #1777)
the default pixiv downloaders now say a more clear 'no support for pixiv ugoiras yet' when they veto an ugoira URL
the 'notes' and 'zoom - index' in a navigable media viewer window are now background-drawn in the 'media viewer text' colour, matching the top file info text and the top-right stuff
the command palette now displays and searches long page names without 'eliding...'
the 'edit gallery url generator' panel now shows separate text boxes for the raw url generated and the post-normalised url if there is a matching url class

duplicates¶

duplicate auto-resolution rules now have a separate paused status and operation mode. it was not ultimately helpful to go for paused/semi/automatic; now it is paused/unpaused, semi/automatic. any rule that was previously paused is now paused and semi-automatic
you can now pause/play rules from the normal duplicates page list with a button. you don't have to go into the edit dialog to pause or resume a rule
I wrote a new hardcoded comparator for 'A has a clearly higher jpeg quality than B'. just a simple thing for now, no testing of specific value or anything, but maybe that'll come in future
the rule edit UI now explictly says 'hey these work in name order so name them "1 - ", "2 - ", if you want to force one to have precedence'
the sort order here is now my clever human sort (so '3 - ' is earlier than '10 - '), and the list in the edit and review panels sort the name column that way too
deleted the 'pixel-perfect pairs - keep EXIF or ICC data' suggested rule--this is generally now covered by the 'pixel-perfect pairs' rule
after a user suggestion, added 'near-perfect jpegs vs pngs' suggested rule. this guy uses a 'visual duplicates' comparator in 'near perfect' mode to check for what is for practical purposes a pixel-perfect jpeg/png pair, but with a couple extra caveats in the rule to ensure we don't throw out a useful png. it has comparators to select the jpeg that is of same or higher resolution (obvious), of smaller filesize (so we don't select a wastefully high quality jpeg of a vector or flat screenshot that is better as png), where the png doesn't uniquely have EXIF data (to err on the side of originality). also added a note about this guy in the help
tweaked my visual duplicates algorthim, the edge detection part in particular, to better filter out heavy jpeg artifacts
the cog icon beside a potential duplicate pair search context panel's count now has allow single slow search optimisation when seeing low hit-rate, which turns off my new optimisation. it looks like it performs very badly in some complicated edge cases, so now you can turn it off. I will gather more information and revisit this
just to be a little more human, some arbitrary user-facing numbers around here are moved from 4,096/512/256/128 to 4,000/500/250/100
to stay sane with the file search logic here, potential duplicate pair searches will no longer let you select a 'multiple locations' domain. just a single local file domain or the 'all my files'/'combined local file domains' umbrella
fixed up a number of update-signals that bounce around the duplicates auto-resolution system. some maintenance tasks now correctly update all duplicate pages lists, not just for the page that started the job, and different jobs are careful to emit the correct 'rules changed' vs 'state changed' so various things update more efficiently
duplicate auto-resolution sub-pages now only update their rules or rule number display when they are in view (or switched to)

client api¶

thanks to a user, the /manage_pages/get_page_info call now returns file selection data: num_files_selected, hash_ids_selected, and in non-simple mode, hashes_selected
clarified in the help (and checked in code) that sending a client api file delete call to 'hydrus local file storage' will work on any local file, anywhere, as a 'permanent delete now' command. I wasn't sure if it would only work on currently trashed files, but we are good
client api version is now 82

blocking ui calls and a memory leak¶

I discovered a long-time memory leak for busy clients at the last minute last week. I patched it just before release, and this week I have polished my patch. any time that an asynchronous 'thread to ui' job that waits on the ui to do something fails due to the attached ui widget dying early (think closing a dialog before an update routine finishes) now handles this situation appropriately to the caller and yields back the thread, in all cases (previously it could get stuck in a loop waiting forever for the dead window to respond, tying up that thread worker until program exit, and, in critical situations, when there were more than 200 current ongoing jobs, block other work indefinitely). there's about sixty of these calls across the code, including a bunch in the Client API when asking about pages, and some were not coping with all error situations nicely--they now do
many of these calls also now navigate to a last-ditch ui widget anchor correctly (e.g. when they are doing something during boot/shutdown, when the main gui isn't available)
reporting to a custom async errback is also now handled more gracefully. if the ui panel dies before a custom errback can be called, we now fallback to the default errback
also did some smart typing here so an IDE can figure out what is supposed to be coming back from one of these

boring stuff¶

mpv file load error reporting is nicer, and simple missing file errors have their own hook
fixed a logical issue in the new potential duplicates debug report mode, where it'd error out if you started the mode while a long job was still working
fixed some bad newlines and old text in the running from source help
cleaned up the default auto-resolution rule definitions, which was turning into a monolith
I think/hope I have fixed an issue with loading the client when URL Domain Masks have bad data
did some misc type linting, particularly around some non-beautiful clientside service juggling

Version 646 ¶

misc¶

I made mpv safer, both in the existing recycle system and the create/destruction test. if you tried the mpv test last week and got hangs when flicking quickly or when leaving certain media viewers on an mpv window, please give it another go
when pages load themselves initially, the individual file load jobs are split into different work packets for the worker pool, so a handful of big pages will no longer monopolise the queue. also, if a page is closed, the initial load pauses--if it is undo-reopened, initial load resumes
in the duplicate filter, when the difference in import time is less than 30 days, the 'imported at similar time (unhelpful average timestamp)' label is replaced with 'a little newer/older than' (issue #1898)
if you have a very large database, it now requires up to 5GB of free disk space on the db partition to boot (the cap was previously 512MB)
the db disk space check now occurs on shutdown too. if you have less space than it thinks is safe, it warns you that shutdown may not save correctlly and you should immediately free up some space. you have the choice of backing out or going ahead (issue #1895)

low hitrate potential duplicate pairs search¶

when potential duplicate pairs are counted or searched with just one small creator tag or a system:hash or something, and the final result is tiny, like 5 out of 750,000, it now won't iterate through your whole pair store but instead do a few blocks and then immediately come up with the answer in one step (issue #1778)
this works by examining the running sample, and if we are confident the hit-rate is lower than 1%, the search strategy now inverts, and rather than iterating through 750,000 pairs to find 5 that match the search context, it runs the underlying (typically very small and fast) file search and runs those n files against the 750,000 rows, getting the 5 hits
it should all just work, but let me know how it goes. does it kick in too late, too infrequently? are there search types it lags out at?
I've added a 'potential duplicates report mode' to help->debug->report modes that spits a bunch of search data to log. if you are into all this, please run it on a variety of searches in IRL situations and copy/paste to me
this was the last difficult job for duplicates auto-resolution. I've now got about a dozen small jobs for comparator tweaks and stuff, and maybe some smarter count update tech so we aren't resetting search spaces so much, and then this system is v1.0 done. I still feel good about hitting this by the end of the year

boring duplicates stuff¶

the routine that performs the 'search duplicate pairs in small increments' iteration now has a unified object to govern the search. it handles search space initialisation/reset, search progress, reset, block-popping, block-throttling, hitrate tracking, estimate confidence intervals, desired total hits, status reports, and now search strategy
put this new fragmentary search into the potential duplicate search context panel count call and the Client API version
put it in group/mixed filtering pairs fetch, the 'fetch some random', and the Client API version
put it in the auto-resolution preview panel thumbnail pair fetch
added another wilson interval confidence test to the fragmentary test to do 'are we 95% sure the hitrate is below x%?'
added some logic to figure out if a one-time file search or the remaining iterative search is going to be faster, including if the caller only wants n hits, and I profiled stuff a bit so I could establish a magic coefficient
the search space randomisation strategy is now based on whether the searcher is looking to stop/switch early or always wants to do the whole job
deleted some old pair-fetch code that is no longer used by the Client API since the pairfactory overhaul
updated my Client API unit tests for potential pair fetch to use nicer db mocking to handle some cleverer fragmentary update stuff properly
wrote some neater db routines for navigating these questions
cleaned up some search optimisations in here. not that significant, just edge cases

boring mpv stuff¶

all media viewers will now defer any media transition if they are currently looking at an mpv window that is still initialising. once the mpv window is ok, they'll recall the most recent set-media request and move on. this seems to fix the 'spawn errors/hang the client when scrolling through many mpv windows fast' issue in the mpv destruction test, and some related jank
all media viewer top level windows (i.e. not the preview) now immediately ignore window close events if the current mpv player is not yet initialised
in the new mpv destruction test, mpv windows are put in a holding queue and the mpv handle explicitly terminated before Qt widget deletion. previously this was handled by the python garbage collector, which is not ideal
when any top level media window (i.e. not the previews) gets a close signal, if there are any mpv windows awaiting destruction, the window hides itself and waits until mpv is clear before allowing Qt to destroy it
in both the 'is initialised?' and 'is cleaned up?' checks, we just go ahead if it has been 180 seconds
fixed an mpv options-setting bug that could sometimes print an error to log on shutdown

other boring stuff¶

I think I fixed an issue where some thread jobs could not terminate correctly if the UI window they were attached to died before the job was done. this may be related to some hanging clients that have extremely busy sessions
all multi-column temp integer tables in the db are now row-unique
fixed an issue where a couple of shutdown-late CallAfter guys could try to do a CallAfter after Qt was down and the log was closed out, which would spam some error to the terminal
cleaned up some media viewer close logic
the thumbnail-preview focus-media logic is now more cleverly idempotent and stops spamming some excess update signals
all async updaters have names that now render nice in the 'review threads' debug panel (we're chasing down a guy that seems to be stuck on one client)

Version 645 ¶

mpv samsara¶

background: after use, mpv players are not destroyed but released to a hidden pool and reused when another media viewer needs them. this is because, in my original implementation, attempting to destroy an mpv window caused an instacrash. many users have long-time struggled with situations where one of their persistent mpv players would get a fault due to an audio or video driver issue, such as a bug in restoring from system sleep, and thereafter their hydrus client would have one player good/one player bad, interlaced, as the media player swapped between them. there's a lame 'seal away bad mpv windows and create more' debug routine that ameliorates this, but the overall solution was just to restart the client
this hopefully changes today. I have added TEST: Destroy/recreate mpv widgets instead of recycling them to options->media playback. if you are an advanced user ready to risk a crash, or in particular if you are someone who gets the 'every other mpv window is broken' issue, please try it. load up one video hesitantly, then try unloading it. try browsing between video and images, video and video. then, if you like, go bananas. do you get any crashes? I cannot get it to crash, but if I scroll as fast as I can through videos, I'll get some warnings in the log, and if I scroll through a loop of like ten audio files it will hang
I am not sure why it does not crash any more. most likely I have simply cleaned up some really garbage code around here in the past couple of years and the problem is gone. it could also be a fix in mpv, mpv-python, or Qt in the same time period, or a mix of several of these things. it doesn't even crash with the legacy mpv interface I just moved from. in any case, I feel fairly good about this, and with a little more polish, if we have no big problems, I expect to make this mpv destruction/recreation the default behaviour going forward, with the recycling being another legacy mode people with problems can switch to. the only drawback of the new mode is a couple extra frames of delay to boot a video since we are initialising from nothing every time. I can address that in future in various ways, or users who care can just switch back to the legacy system
in a related thing, I'm trying to chase down a long-time layout flicker bug where after a media viewer sees a single mpv window, image-to-image transitions in some clients get a flicker where the next image is at the top-left position of the previous for one frame before moving to the correct position. I get this on my IRL machine but only sometimes on my dev machine, and I'd like to see if this layout-poisoning still happens if the associated mpv window is fully destroyed (I figure the media viewer converts to some sort of hardware-accelerated compositing mode or something for the mpv window, and that introduces some delay or voids double-buffering-something in future layout calcs. maybe that can be unwound, maybe not, but keeping the window alive but hidden with a new parent is definitely not doing it)

misc¶

for new users, 'all local files' is renamed to 'hydrus local file storage'. this is to address confusion with the other umbrella local file service, "all my files", which I am also thinking of renaming. if nothing blows up, most likely r.e. some commonly used Client API script that happens to access services in a funny way, I will rename all existing users in a couple weeks, for v647
the 'review services' panels now have a micro-FAQ description blurb for each service type
the 'review bandwidth' window now sorts 'web domain' network contexts with subdomains below their parents, so you'll get site.com and then media.site.com right after. it was previously raw alphabetical on domain
the four network->pause->paged importer x entries now wake all importers when they change, so all your import pages should update their UI and start allowed work immediately after you hit them (previously it would take up to thirty seconds to unpause)
you can now select the strictness of the 'has transparency' test under options->media playback. the default is still the 'human perceptible' test I added last week, but if you like you can change it to 'not totally transparent/opaque' (what it was before) or 'has any alpha channel at all'. this affects rendering and the "has transparency" property for new files and future file maintenance jobs
with help from a user, running a hydrus server or the client api in https mode with a proper cert now loads the full cert chain with issuers, letting a browser verify it properly. the old method was a very basic stub that was only sending the first leaf in the cert, and thus only appropriate for self-signed certs

duplicates auto-resolution¶

if an auto-resolution approve/deny action from the rule review panel takes longer than 4 seconds, it now boots a popup window with progress. if you like to fire off 1,000 approves and then close the window, you'll now see them finish up

duplicates search tech¶

there's a legacy situation in the duplicate system where potential duplicate pairs were not being delisted when one or both files in the pair were physically deleted. this is fixed today
when a single file or a king of a duplicate group is physically deleted, all potential duplicate pairs it is part of are now removed
added a new maintenance task under the duplicates page 'preparation' tab cog icon button to resync pairs to the currently local kings. this job will run in the update this week to fix us all
your various duplicate pair counts will now line up better in edge cases such as 'system:everything' searches or when the count of actionable pairs nears zero. there won't be a bunch of spare unmatching pairs you can't get at
there's still an issue here in that duplicate pair search operates in 'all my files', but the delisting happens when files leave hydrus local file storage, so if you manually delete a pair, it will stay in the master count until it is physically deleted. I considered making pairs delist when leaving 'all my files', but this would mean a delete/undelete cycle would re-queue the file for similar files search and it would make a 'set duplicate' action with a file delete component slightly logically frustrating, so I'm leaving it as-is now. let me know if your numbers are still so out of whack that it is distracting

boring stuff¶

fixed an intermittent Qt warning related to creating/showing menus with non-top-level-window parents
fixed a source of mpv/Qt instability with the mpv event processing during window destruction
fixed the mpv crash restart loop crash handler, which missed some recent rewrites
across the codebase, all the 'all local files' and 'combined local file' nomenclature is now unified to 'hydrus local file storage'
thanks to a user, added a note about sudo xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine setup_venv.command to the macOS 'running from source' help
all the macOS .command scripts now start with #!/bin/bash -l with the -l, which forces a login terminal that has more env stuff like homebrow on your PATH. finding ffmpeg and such should be easier hereon--sorry for any trouble!
the 7,000 line, 444KB main options dialog py is refactored into 38 sub files; all the panels now separated
added a tl;dr section to the duplicates auto-resolution help
updated some duplicates help to talk about trying too hard to saving disk space
added a note about https://github.com/hydrusvideodeduplicator/hydrus-video-deduplicator to the normal duplicates help
couple of misc linting fixes

Version 644 ¶

new libraries¶

the 'future build' test last week went well with the exception that some Linux flavours were unable to load mpv. I am folding these updates into the normal builds--
Linux built runner from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04
Linux built mpv from libmpv1 to libmpv2
Windows built sqlite from 3.50.1 to 3.50.4
opencv-python-headless from 4.10.0.84 to 4.11.0.86
PySide6 (Qt) from 6.8.2.1 to 6.8.3
if you are a Linux user and cannot load mpv in today's build, please move to running from source (I recommend all Linux users do this these days!): https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/running_from_source.html

docker package¶

thanks to a user, the Docker package is updated from Alpine 3.19 to 3.22. x11vnc is replaced with the more unicode-capable tigervnc, and several other issues, including some permission stuff and the lxml import bug on the server, are fixed (issue #1785)
if you have any trouble, let me know and I'll pass it on to the guy who manages this

misc¶

the new 'show deleted mappings' eye icon stuff in manage tags now properly syncs across the different service pages of all manage tags dialogs that are open. if you click it somewhere, it now updates everywhere
added all paged importer work to network->pause and clarified the three more specific pause-paged-work options. I noticed at the last minute that these guys don't wake the downloaders when unpaused (if you don't want to wait like ten minutes, atm you have to jog each downloader awake by manually poking them with their own pause/resume etc..), I'll fix this next week
when a large page is loading during session initialisation and it says 'initialising' in the page tab, the status bar text where it says 'Loading initial files... x/y' is now preserved through a page hide/show cycle. when you switch to a still-initialising page, the status bar should now say something sensible (previously it was resetting to 'no search done yet' kind of thing on every page show until the next batch of ~~64 files~~ now 100 files came in)
fixed a crash when a thumbnail suffers a certain critical load-processing failure. it now shows the hydrus fallback thumb and gives you popups

ui optimisation¶

the session weight in the 'pages' menu is now only recalculated on menu open or while the menu is open (it now has a dirty flag). this guy can really add up when a lot of stuff is going on
same deal with the page history submenu. I KISSed some stuff here too
when a file search is loading, the media results are now loaded in batches of 100 rather than 256. I also fetch them in file_id order, which I'm testing to see if it saves a little time (close ids should share index branches, reducing cache I/O)
on many types of page status update, the GUI is now only hit with a 'update the status bar' call if this is the current page. this was hitting a busy session load a bunch

filename parsing¶

I completely overhauled the background worker and data objects that kick in when you drop files on the program and the window appears to parse them all
all paths that fail (zero size, missing, currently in use, bad filetype, Thumbs.db, seems to be a sidecar) are now listed with their failure reason
the cog button to set whether paths within folders be added in the 'human-sorted' way (ordering 'page 3' before 'page 11') is removed. paths are now always added this way
the paths sent to import or tag are now all sorted according to the #, which is just the order they were parsed. this way preserves some nice folder structure. previously I think it was sending whatever the current list sort was, which sounds good but it wasn't obvious that was happening
paths are now processed in more granular, faster blocks
remaining issues: although sidecars are now listed, they are now sorted at the top of the directory structure they parse from. also, we don't have a nice 'retry' menu action, which would be nice to retry currently-in-use or missing results. let me know if you notice anything else IRL

file operations¶

many file operations are now a lot more efficient, with fewer disk hits per job. I hope that export folders and other 'lots of fast individual file work' jobs will now be a good bit quicker
file-merge operations now bundle their various file property checks into far fewer disk hits
same for file-mirror operations
same for dir-merge operations
same for dir-mirror operations
the 'same size/modified time' check in all file mirror/merge operations now re-uses a previous disk hit and is essentially instant
all the 'ensure file is writable' checks are faster. there's still a slow 'file is writable?'' check however
the 'ensure file is writable' checks on files before delete or overwrite now only occur on Windows. it doesn't matter elsewhere. I think there may be a problem now when doing stuff from Linux on read-only files a Windows network share, but the problem of read-only files appearing in the first place is mostly a legacy issue, so whatever. if you have a weird setup, let me know if you run into any trouble
fixed an issue where on Windows a file-merge operation would fail if the destination differed from the source but was read-only
when mirroring a directory, the 'delete surplus files from dest' work now happens failsafely at the end, after all other copies went ok, rather than interleaved
the delete and recycle file calls now check for symlinks properly and delete only the symlink, not the resolved target. this was true previously in almost all cases by accident, but now it is explicit

image transparency¶

on update, you will get a popup saying 'hey you have 12,345 files with transparency, want me to recheck them?'. I recommend saying yes
in hydrus, if a file being loaded has completely opaque or completely transparent alpha channel, I discard that alpha channel, deeming it useless. this also determines the 'has transparency' metadata on files. I had an opportunity to closely examine a bunch of real-world transparency-having pngs while doing the visual duplicates work this week, and I decided to soften my 'this transparency is useless' test to cover more situations. Where a value of 255 is 'completely opaque', I encountered one IRL file that had 560k pixels at 255, 442k at 254, 20k at 253, 243 at 252, and 22 at 251. another had a spackling of 1 or 2 pixels of alpha 208, 209, 222, 224, 225, 227, 235, 236, 238, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, and 254, and many similar situations. we've also long had many images with just one fully transparent pixel in a corner. this data is essentially invisible unless you are looking for it, and it is not useful to carry forward and tell the user about. thus, the rule going forward is now that an alpha channel needs a mix of values, specifically at least 2 * ( width + height ) or 0.5% num_pixels, rounding up to 1 pixels, whichever amount is smaller, not in the >=251 top band and, in a separate test, not in the <=4 bottom band. the minimum interesting state is now something like a one-pixel border of visible transparency or opacity around the file, and anything less than that is discarded as an artifact of an anti-aliasing algorithm or a funny brush setting
the 'eye' icon in the media viewer top hover now lets you flip the 'transparency as checkerboard' options for the normal and duplicate filter media viewers on and off
the 'eye' icon also lets you draw a neon greenscreen instead of checkerboard. this setting is available otherwise under options->media playback
these three actions are also now available under the 'media viewers - all' and 'media viewers - duplicate filter' shortcut sets

duplicates¶

setting duplicate relationships via the buttons in the normal duplicates page, or by a normal thumbnail menu/shortcut action, or by Client API, will now trigger a 'refresh count' call in the duplicates page
I think this might be painful IRL with lots of new 'initialising' loading time, so let me know how it feels. I strongly suspect I'll want to revisit how smart the refresh/update calls are here

duplicates search math¶

the new 'n pairs; ~x match' count estimate uses richer statistical math (Wilson Intervals) to now be better than ~2.5% imprecise 95% of the time. it adapts to hitrate and total population size. previously, it just stopped when x>=1000 on a not-totally-random sample, which was apparently giving 95% confidence of better than 6.2% imprecision at high hitrates and much worse at low
when the new incremental duplicate pair search works, there are now two sampling strategies. if we are doing a full, non-estimate count, the sample is sorted (to keep db index access at high throughput) and then randomised in large blocks to smooth out count-rate. in the other cases, being estimated count, duplicate filter fetch, 'get random pairs', and the auto-resolution rule preview panel, which can all end early, I now randomise far more granularily, ignoring sort entirely, emphasising a reliable hit-rate and early exit

duplicates auto-resolution¶

added 'pixel-perfect gifs vs pngs' as a static-gif complement to the jpegs vs pngs rule. I noticed a bunch of these in my IRL client. before you ask, yes ladies, I am single and available
I updated my visual duplicates testing suite to do some alpha tests and profiled a number of transparent files against it
the visual duplicates algorithm will now accept and test pairs where both files have transparency. the test is intended to be fairly forgiving and just makes sure the respective alpha channels match up closely. if you encounter false negatives here with (transparency does not match) reason in the duplicate filter, I'd be very interested in seeing them (issue #1798)
if only one file has an interesting alpha channel, then those files are still counted as not visual duplicates
the 'visual duplicates' suggested auto-resolution rule no longer excludes transparent files
the 'visual duplicates - only earlier imports' suggested auto-resolution rule is now A has "system:import time" earlier than B + 7 days. just a little safety padding that ensures that files that were all imported at the same time don't fail a test due to your subscription for the nice version hitting five hours after the worse
I do not plan to make any more changes to the suggested rules. maybe we'll add something like the +7 days padding somewhere, or maybe the transparency test has some issue, but if you have been testing this system for me, I think the suggested rules are pretty good now
I thiiink the 'rescan transparency' job is going to reset affected files' status in potential duplicates. fingers crossed, when a file is determined to not actually be transparent after all, it'll get searched against similar looking files again and the auto-resolution rules will give it a re-go without the user having to touch anything. let's see how it goes

ugoiras¶

ugoiras with external duration (from a note text or simulated) now have the 'duration' icon in their thumbnails. this is also true of a collection that contains external duration ugoiras
the way this stuff is handled and calculated behind the scenes is cleaned up a bit
ugoiras with only one frame no longer get any external duration checks

boring stuff¶

added the Wayland env info to the Linux 'running from source' help
added some stuff about pacman to the Linux 'running from source' help and reworked the 'which python you need' stuff into the three guides better
sudo'd all my apt install lines in the help
added some stuff about environment variables to hydrus_client.sh
after a user suggestion, reordered the 'making a downloader' help to be URL Class, Parser, GUG (previously GUG was at the start, but it isn't the best initial stepping stone)
gave the 'making a downloader' help a very light pass in some places
fixed some dialog yes/no stuff in the database update code which was failing to fire with recent stricter UI validity rules
I deleted the speedcopy test code and removed its entry from help->about. it didn't do quite what we wanted and there hasn't been any action on it
reworked the old thread loop that used to spawn for local file parsing to the newer async updater-worker I've been using in a bunch of places

Version 643 ¶

future build¶

I am making another future build this week. This is a special build with new libraries that I would like advanced users to test out so I know they are safe to fold into the normal release.
in the release post, I will link to this alternate build. if you are experienced and would like to help me, please check it out
In my tests, neither of these required a clean install. Linux users might like to do one anyway, since this week is a big shift for them, particularly if it has been a while or you are on an odd flavour
the specific changes this week are--
Linux built runner from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04
Linux built mpv from libmpv1 to libmpv2
Windows built sqlite from 3.50.1 to 3.50.4
opencv-python-headless from 4.10.0.84 to 4.11.0.86
PySide6 from 6.8.2.1 to 6.8.3
I was going to do dateparser 1.2.1 to 1.2.2, but there was a pyinstaller problem. we'll try again another time

misc¶

animated jxl is now supported! as previously, hydrus handles this with a new 'animated jxl' filetype. mpv wasn't super happy with the jxl files I was playing with, so I'm only enabling this for the hydrus ffmpeg-powered native viewer for now, like animated webp. all existing jxls will be queued for a rescan on update, so you don't have to do anything. performance is not amazing, and there's no variable frame rate support, and I'm afraid the tests here add yet more time to the jxl import process, but it does work. I'll keep checking in future for nicer (native Pillow etc..) solutions here. I looked at parsing jxls manually, like we do for quick png/apng differentiation and parsing num_frames etc..., but jxl appears to be pretty wewmode internally (issue #1881)
in the 'edit times' dialog, when editing an individual time, the 'paste' button now eats milliseconds correctly whether you post a raw timestamp like 1738783297.299 or a datestring like 2025-10-10T12:00:00.123+02:00 (issue #1884)
the manage tags dialog has a new "deleted mappings" text-and-icon that appears below the paste/cog icons if there are deleted mappings. it'll say "3 deleted mappings" and show you an eye icon. click the eye to show/hide deleted mappings. this display setting is now remembered through dialog open/close and is no longer accessible through the cog menu. this is an experiment, and I am open to doing more display options here to finally get on top of some finicky workflows
hitting 'show deleted' in the manage tags dialog now redraws the list immediately; previously, it wouldn't actually show until the list incidentally repainted itself otherwise, e.g. after a click
403 (forbidden), and 509, 529, 502, and 522 network errors (bandwidth and gateway problems) no longer spam the log with so much server response text
fixed some Qt crashes related to PDF import
fixed some Qt crashes related to SVG import
updated the 'eye' icon to svg. I'm actually happy with it; I even added a caruncle
added an 'eye_closed' svg icon
I think I figured out the 'list of tags in the media viewer background has a different line height than the hover window' bug that hit some Linux flavours

duplicates¶

by default, the client now searches for potential duplicates in normal time. this code now has such low per-file overhead that it isn't a bother
'potential duplicate pairs search' panels, such as in the duplicate page or the auto-resolution rule edit panel, now, by default, state an estimate of the matching count once they have found 1,000 matches. for instance, it might say "513,547 pairs; ~210,000 match". it makes the estimate once it has found 1,000 matches and obviously stops working a lot faster this way. a new cog button let's you switch back to the old 'always precise' behaviour. let me know how this feels with IRL data!
I examined making 'apply alternates/false positive to many files at once' work in a sane way (atm it applies to all internal pair combinations, so millions of relationships when you reach a single group of thousands of files), and it is not possible with the current file relationship storage. one solution I had discussed with users as a mid-way stopgap might have legs, but I think it is still insufficient. I have made a plan to improve this but will not do it in the push to finish auto-resolution. sounds like 2026

duplicates auto-resolution¶

added a 'AND' comparator type. this works like the OR one and allows you to clause a bunch of different comparator types together within a OR collection. I know some users have wanted to try something like (A filesize > B AND A imported earlier B) OR (A filesize > 1.2x B AND A imported after B) within the same expensive 'visual duplicates' rule. I think it is a little awkward, but have a think and see how it goes
some more small tweaks for the suggested rules--
- the 'visually similar pairs' rule now has A filesize > B rather than >= because the dialog won't ok without a definitive way to arrange A and B, hahaha. since a non-pixel-dupe visually similar pair of exactly the same size is unlikely, I'm fine not catching them here
- the 'pixel-perfect pairs' rule now has ( A filesize > B ) OR ( A filesize = B AND A imported earlier B ). previously, it just had A filesize > B. I have discovered that pixel perfect duplicates of exactly equal filesize are not uncommon (I particularly encountered it with some imagemagick resizes of the same original files done several years apart on different OSes, where I assume the only difference is some version enum in the file header), so I wanted a tie-breaker clause for them
the auto-resolution help is now updated to talk about this
an empty OR or AND comparator now gives an appropriate summary string
I explored making resolution rules work on their queues in a more random order, but I backed off when I couldn't make it fast. there's a way to make this happen, but not a simple one, so I'll back burner it for now. the rules pull pairs in an order according to SQLite's whim, which often produces pairs featuring the same file in a row, which you may have seen in the pending action log. this is fine in some ways but it wasn't intentional and does give some minor headaches. unfortunately the most important thing about this guy is he runs with very low per-file overhead, so I'll leave things as they are for now

mpv¶

the new mpv interface is now turned on for all users. thanks to those who tested different situations for me. you should notice that mpv is slightly less laggy and generally more stable
if you have a very old version of mpv and video suddenly throws a bunch of errors about command_async, please check options->media playback->LEGACY DEBUG: Use legacy mpv communication method
I also updated this new code to be more polite about seek-scrubbing. if a new seek command comes in while a previous seek command is still working, it now waits until mpv is done and and then sends the most recent seek command received. it is now quite difficult to produce the 'too many events queued' error by scrubbing
as the 'too many events queued' error is rare and no longer big deal, it'll no longer spam to the log
I experimented with 'do a faster keyframe seek while dragging, and only an exact seek when mouse down/up', but it felt pretty bad with the low-latency keyframe seek caret bouncing around as you dragged, sometimes to the start of the video. I'd rather spend the CPU and have a nice experience
added 'allow crashy files in mpv' to help->debug->debug modes. this disables the handler that would catch problems here and allows loading of files previously put on the blacklist. I notice that with the new async interface, I can't really get mpv to crash any more and while even totally whack files will spam the log, visually they'll just flitter between the first two frames or whatever. maybe we'll make this guy less strict in future

boring stuff¶

tweaked some database migration help
clarified in the options that the 'idle mouse' setting is global, not just mouse over the hydrus window
cleaned up some canvas painter handling to do nicer save/restore within draw methods

Version 642 ¶

misc¶

pushed a hotfix to source master to fix an issue with users running from source in python 3.10 or earlier. the deprecated datetime calls I updated are still needed in older python!
fixed an issue with 'send all pages down from here and to the right', and a couple of similar commands, which were failing with 'PagesNotebook already deleted' errors when the pages being moved had been previously moved from another place that was now deleted (a parent reference wasn't being updated correctly) (issue #1880)
the 'edit subscription' dialog list now lists the name/query column as 'display_name (query_text)' for any queries with a display name
when you paste queries into a sub, if any existing conflicting queries have a 'display name' different to their query text, you'll now see them reported in the dialogs as this same 'display name (query text)''. also, the part that asks about reviving DEAD queries now sorts the list it shows you
fixed an issue where a drag and drop export (in fact any file DnD initiated from within hydrus) would fail if you had the 'copy files to temp folder...' option set and you had a DnD export filename pattern that produced a path separator (e.g. a slash or backslash from {tags}). now the subfolders will be created within your temp dir just like how an Export Folder or manual export does it. I won't include that folder in the DnD yet--it just won't error and you'll get the same final filenames as before. maybe we can revisit this one day and DnD the whole subfolder(s)(?), so let me know how it goes
the locations->add to menu no longer appears for files that are in the trash. in fact, you'll probably not see a locations menu at all for trashed files
similarly, the central code that mediates all 'move/duplicate file to new local file location' actions now silently ignores files that are not in 'all my files' (i.e. stuff in the trash)
removed some 'if there was a big bump of work, take a big break' logic from my tag display and duplicate file daemons. it was a nice idea, but it misfired a lot and there was no feedback. I'm pretty sure this thing was causing auto-resolution to take inexplicable breaks, so let's see how it feels now
fixed some update signals in the auto-resolution review panel; if you have done some actions, switching to 'actions taken' tab will now correctly trigger an update; if you undo some actions, switching to 'pending actions' will trigger an update; undoing actions taken no longer triggers a no-op update of the 'actions taken' list (the log remains, even if undone); undoing actions taken triggers a numbers reset notification and wakes the potential duplicate discovery daemon, so the UI will quickly reflect the new 99.9% search status, and, if everything is caught up and good to work, trigger a very quick re-search and re-auto-resolution queueing-up of the undone file
added help->debug->report modes->idle report mode, which talks about various 'idle mode' checks, like "IDLE MODE - Blocked: Last mouse move was 41 seconds ago.". it gets pretty spammy, so hover your mouse over the popup toaster 'dismiss all' button and click without moving or launch the program from terminal and watch stdout

crash reporting¶

last week, I tried to roll out an on-by-default crash reporting mode. unfortunately, I discovered late that it wouldn't play nice with mpv. I couldn't fix the issue fully, so this mode is now available but default off. you turn it on via help->debug->debug modes
if you have regular crashes, please give it a go and we'll see what we learn. the only proviso is you absolutely cannot load up mpv and scrub through its seekbar while it is on or you'll just get a crash within seconds. a popup moans about this whenever you turn the mode on

mpv updates¶

tl;dr: I wrote a thing for mpv and would like some advanced users to test it
last week's failed crash-handling exposed some ways I am being rude to mpv. I'm interrogating its properties and giving it commands from the Qt thread, and the mpv mainloop appears to be occasionally bugging out as a result. faulthandler was seeing the serious exception inside the mpv dll and thinking it was a crash and pre-empting the dll's exception handling. so, I wrote a new interface that, instead of interrogating mpv for its pause and video position sixty times a second for the seekbar, now asks mpv to notify us when those things change when it is happy to do so. the transfer of data to Qt is also all thread safe
I do not know how well this new interface works with different mpv api versions, so it isn't on by default yet. if you are an advanced user, please hit up options->media playback and uncheck the new LEGACY DEBUG: Use legacy mpv communication method checkbox. restart the client if you have instantiated any mpv windows. if pause and seek clicks all work and the seekbar updates to follow what you do, that's great. if it errors out or the seekbar stays at the 0 position, let me know please, and if you know it, let me know your mpv version. if this guy works out for anything but the weirdest and oldest mpv, I'll switch that option around to off for everyone and the old legacy interface will be the debug for odd situations
unfortunately while this new polite communication method reduces the crashes with the new crash reporting tool, it doesn't stop them completely particularly when the seekbar is spammed with a drag. it seems some part of the wrapper library's event loop still causes the heavy exception inside the dll, I think probably because of overlapping events before an interrupt completes. oh well. hopefully I can revisit this in future
I fixed a multi-player issue with the mpv crash handler that dealt with certain serious mpv loadfile errors (when the program pops up a 'MPV-crasher' dialog and button). it was not properly halting and reporting when you were looking at the problem file with an mpv window other than the first one created (mpv windows are re-used, and so typically meant this reporter had a 50% or 67% chance of continuing to play the problem file)

visual duplicates tuning¶

tl;dr: visual duplicates works a little better. I still trust and recommend it at "almost certainly" confidence
I completed my visual duplicates tuning suite. this is something I have tucked away in the debug menu that lets me load up some files, programmatically generate 'good' and 'bad' duplicates of various sizes and qualities and with fake watermarks and so on, and then test them against each other with the algorithm so I can get a results at a wider range and faster than me doing it manually with print statements and my IDE's debugger
the results were fairly successful, and I have retuned my algorithm to produce fewer false negatives while, I think, not introducing new false positives--
- the simple quick scan is now more forgiving. more true duplicates will be allowed into the slower, more accurate test
- I made the edge map test more forgiving, allowing more true duplicates to hit the tile tests. almost all true negatives are being caught at this stage
- the tile tests are tuned to allow more 'probably duplicates' results. the 'almost certainly' tests were all good
I am not sure if I want to pursue this work further to get a confidence level between 'probably' and 'almost certainly'. I will have a think about this
I still plan to add transparency capability to this algorithm in future
the algorithm is particularly vulnerable to severe resizes. images of similar size but different quality or subsampling are pretty doable, but anything that resizes to lower than 75% original dimensions has a pretty high false negative ratio
I was not sucessful at re-weighting my algorithm to consider 444 vs 420 subsampling differences. there appears to be no easy linear translation
I was able to produce a couple of false positives if I pushed it. these were generally a pair of ~60% resizes, at 60 jpeg quality, of a busy image, where one had a 25% alpha watermark. I am ok with failure at this level
there are more mathematical options here, but I believe the next significant version of this would be an AI model. a lot of this is fuzzy and organic and involves many weighting coefficients derived through observing real world data, so I believe we would be looking at a simple model that eats the edge maps and tile data and learns with a not dissimilar tuning suite generating synthetic data. I probably do not have time for this, but if we ever end up getting TensorFlow or a similar library into hydrus, and perhaps if we want to categorise different types of alternates, I may have a serious think. alternately, we may end up farming this job out to an exe call or similar, and then it can be anything by anyone
as always, if you come across any false positives (files that are not duplicates that show up as dupes, which at this stage likely means very subtle watermarks or alternates), I'd love to see them
also, I triaged my remaining auto-resolution work in prep for a 1.0 release for all users. we're looking at four medium size jobs--removing potential pairs from rules when at least one file is manually deleted; some tag-based comparators; faster search when the hit rate is very low; and transparency in the visual duplicates test--and then about a dozen small jobs like a jpeg quality comparator, nicer pause for auto-resolution rules, and some metadata merge option tweaks

advanced test stuff¶

updated the 'test' versions for users who run from source--
opencv is updated from 4.11.0.86 to 4.12.0.88
PySide6 is updated from 6.9.1 to 6.9.3
I expect to do a 'future test' build next week

boring stuff¶

after the new event queueing code proved fine, merged the 110-odd CallAfter and CallAfterQtSafe calls together and ditched the old job-label system
removed 50-odd now-redundant IsValid checks in the callafter callables
fixed a potential crash in the login script test UI-reporting system
cleaned up some of the 'move pages' code and deleted old stuff I no longer use
added a couple of notes about 'potential duplicates' and similar looking files to the help and 'system:similar to' edit panel. also wrote some tooltips for the 'search distance' spin widgets and made them step 2
the UI test now boots the review services panel. this guy has a bunch of stuff going on, including bandwidth calendar reports, and would have caught the datetime hotfix