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changelog

Note

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

Version 684

misc

  • every thumb/viewer media menu now has 'show detailed embedded file metadata' in the top-row flyout; this is the same window that opens with the media viewer top hover, to which I've been adding EXIF and stuff
  • there's a new shortcut command to spawn this window under the 'media' set, open detailed embedded file metadata window
  • I finally got around to figuring out and adding a Force that hitting Enter/Return on radio button lists triggers a dialog ok checkbox to options->gui. On Windows, an Enter/Return on a radio button list triggers a dialog ok, but on other OSes, it does not. it is one of those platform policy things and Qt is being good and obeying. this casually annoyed me for years, particularly when doing advanced file delete dialogs where rather than a simple yes/no it has a couple of radio button lists, and since moving to Linux full time I finally got my finger out and figured it out. it is default off so I don't mess with anyone's muscle memory etc.., but if this was annoying you, try it out
  • added TEST: Set tool flag to child windows to options->gui. this test sets a different flag and hopefully improves some window behaviour--specifically, stuff like "review services" should stay on top of the parent, not get a taskbar/alt+tab entry, but still look ok. let me know how it goes, and if no problems, I'll set everyone to it
  • I gave the 'my auto-resolution rule says it has x pairs to search/resolve but it cannot clear them' issue another push. thanks to a user, we figured out an interesting orphaned pair situation. I fixed the logical hole in the maintenance code and updated the new error handling to A) indefinitely pause a rule that hits this, to stop pause/error loops, and B) run the full orphan-clearing maintenance code rather than just the re-count job
  • noneable string widgets now blank their placeholder text when set to none
  • test result text boxes in exe manager and parsing UI now have monospaced font
  • system:hash gets a logical makeover. this thing has always been a bit of a mess as it tried to navigate prefixes like sha256:abcd.... I have made it simpler
  • the edit dialog now lets you type or paste whatever, with no instant auto-correct. there are now two buttons underneath, clean up text and guess hash type and clean up text and guess hash type (remove bad lines), which do the parsing on demand. the first button moans about any errors at all; the second removes errors, so if you want to post a mix of garbage and have hydrus filter it, go ahead
  • the ok button is plugged into this tech too and, as the parsing is also improved, gives richer errors. if you hit ok and the hashes are fine but the hash type seems wrong, it now gives you a special error text
  • hydrus hash parsing now recognises and removes an 0x prefix from a hash
  • hydrus hash parsing is now much better about case insensitivity. MD5:AbCD... is fine
  • hydrus hash parsing now has an error state for hashes with a non-even number of hex characters
  • hydrus hash parsing no longer attempts to hex filter an incoming line; if a hash includes a non-hex character, this now goes in a new error bucket for reporting

notes quality of life

  • added a 'when you middle-click to copy a note hover, only copy the text (not the title)' setting to options->notes
  • added that and the 'put cursor at the end' checkboxes to the cog icon button in the edit notes panel
  • added a 'link' icon button to notes that sucks up all the URLs from the current note text. it isn't perfect, but covers all normal 'http...' situations using a https?://[^\s<>"\']+ regex
  • in a new test, when you do this 'copy URLs in the note' job, it fires off a '3 URLs!' tooltip micro-notification for feedback. give it a go, let me know how it feels, and I think I'll spam this all over the place

exe manager

  • finished off the core edit UI for my exe manager, which still only advanced users can see under options->external programs. you can edit everything, and there's a fullly functional test panel that reports return code and stdout/stderr on failures. it isn't perfect, but I'm happy with it as a first step. I will again ask advanced users to check it out, with these instructions: look at the defaults, pick a call that you should have, and then edit it and put in a sensible file path or URL in the test panel and try it! Let me know if you have any errors and where I need to add help text!
  • the defaults button now asks if you want all the default calls or just those for your platform
  • many many other improvements and finishings-off here, and a touch of misc new subprocess tech

boring exe manager stuff

  • rewangled the 'windows startfile' hardcoded launch call to be a platform-agnostic 'OS launch file'
  • added a 'OS launch URL' hardcoded launch call in the same way
  • improved the hydrus subprocess 'this process has timed out' detection system. in doing exe manager work this week, I realised it was waiting after a kill fallback in a blocking way and only reporting the timeout after the final (indefinite) reap went through
  • improved some subprocess error formatting

Version 683

file metadata

  • I am ready to roll out the new file metadata flags. on update, you will be given a yes/no dialog asking if you want to schedule a big file metadata regen on pretty much all your images. I recommend all users click yes, but if you want to handle it yourself, you can click no, no worries
  • it will schedule 'has xmp', 'has iptc', 'has software-source', and new 'has human-readable' flag inspection for all your jpegs and some other image formats depending on the type
  • recall you can look at the maintenance progress under database->file maintenance->manage scheduled jobs and tweak the file maintenance background work velocity under options->maintenance and processing. as a general principle, I do not recommend you try to hurry huge work; just let it do its thing
  • XMP, IPTC, and software/source values are now stripped of leading/trailing whitespace
  • empty XMP, IPTC, and software/source values/list-items are now skipped

duplicates auto-resolution

  • I have added two new hardcoded comparators: "A has same or better metadata flags to B" and "A has ICC Profile if B does". the auto-suggested rules now use these, and the help talks about them, so we do away with the old and awkward and ugly 'both have same x OR B doesn't' formulation. also added some unit tests for this
  • the metadata comparator tests each of EXIF, XMP, IPTC, software/source, and human-readable flags
  • enthusiastic users of auto-resolution may like to swap over to the new comparators once these new flags populate so they can cover more situations
  • if an auto-resolution rule thinks it wants to do search or resolution work but there is no actual pair in the queue, the database now auto-triggers some maintenance to safely temp-pause the rule, regenerate the cached (and miscounted) numbers, and continue. it makes a popup if this happens
  • auto-resolution rules now stop work quickly when paused during a busy work cycle
  • the maintenance jobs that regen auto-resolution rules numbers and clear all potential duplicate pairs generally now trigger a proper, full reload of any list of auto-resolution rules in UI. previously, these guys needed an explicit refresh button click to catch up

more UI features

  • a user has submitted more UI improvements!
  • the media viewer's 'always on top' transition should now be flickerless for Windows
  • further, we now have a tentative 'always on top (while playing)' option. the always-on-top transition in Linux is still flickery, and if you have mpv up it causes a buzzy-noise crash, so I patched it to simply not happen in this situation, and if you are on Linux, the 'eye' menu in the media viewer has a 'THIS MAY BE BUGGY/CRASHY' warning
  • the new treeview test has several updates: double-clicking on treeview empty tab area opens the new page picker, treeview rows now use alternating colours, some bugs are fixed, the layout signaling is less janky, some code is cleaned, menu code is simplified, and there are several new user-controllable options (row height, indentation, alternating line colours)
  • extra note from hydev: if you have been playing with the treeview, hit up the new cog icon menu and look at the in-menu 'tree row dimensions' sliders and give them a spin. absolute space magic

audio files with embedded images

  • the QtMediaPlayer will now show an embedded image if an audio file has one. I pulled this off with some slightly funky tech, so let me know how it goes IRL
  • the default mpv.conf now has a audio-display=embedded-first line (thanks to a user, for this) that shows embedded images for audio files. if you never tweaked your mpv.conf, you might like to hit up options->media playback and reset back to the default mpv conf there (just hit the 'browse' button and it should start you in the static/mpv-conf dir)

misc

  • added a link to https://github.com/asadtoast/aether in the Client API help; this is an Android app with a bunch of features, including archive/delete and duplicate filtering
  • fixed an issue that was stopping adding potential duplicate pair relationships to files not already registered in the duplicates system. this broke hydrus video duplicate detector and similar tools. sorry for the trouble--I was too keen last week with the valid pair filtering! (issue #2076)
  • the 'external programs' options page is moved to 'default programs'

executable manager

  • the work on this system continues to go well. I fleshed out my previous skeleton, so most of the spinning wheels are connectable now
  • advanced users will see a new 'external programs (TESTING)' options page. this has the first UI available. edit panel isn't ready yet, but you can load the defaults and see what I'm going for
  • wrote out defaults for common OS file launchers and 'open file in web browser' commands
  • I added 'open multiple files externally' tech in prep for finally actually doing this from thumbnail menu
  • next step is to finish the edit panel for this first local call and start a test for advanced users. I'd like to get an early version of this working pretty soon, and get 'open externally' working on it and migrated over, and then I'll add new tech and pipelines to the live system; stuff like tag suggestions

boring stuff

  • added info to the 'help my db is broke' help page regarding .clone crashing/halting, the .backup command, and a very clever trick a user discovered regarding editing the sqlite_schema table to skip cloning a known-malformed table
  • the Docker package is updated to Alpine 3.24 and should have improved HEIF support
  • skipped 'software/source' inspection when examining importing pdfs (this was silently failing, previously, because it was trying to load them as images)

Version 682

more file metadata

  • the client can now inspect an image file and tell if it has (EXIF-like) XMP or IPTC metadata! the data will also show in the media viewer, in the extra info dialog
  • renamed the new 'source' metadata line to 'software/source'. sometimes it is 'photoshop'; sometimes it is a camera model; sometimes it is both
  • the client now tracks and generates 'has software/source', 'has xmp', and 'has iptc' flags, just like 'has exif' and friends. all new files will get these flags and it is all saved to db and so on
  • there are new 'system:file property' predicates to search for these flags; they are also parseable
  • the file maintenance system has new jobs to regen these flags for existing files
  • these flags appear in the duplicate filter comparison statements and in some file flyout menu summaries and so on, similarly
  • 'has embedded metadata' and 'has non-EXIF metadata' and similar terms are now renamed (back) to 'has human-readable metadata'. this flag is now absolutely intended to be Artist, Title, Comment, and AI prompts kind of stuff. 'some dude probably typed this in once metadata'
  • I am, again, not yet triggering the big (optional) 'regen who has human-readable metadata' job for all existing files, but I think we are just about ready, so if no one has any issues with today's work, it'll be next week. we'll do all four xmp, iptc, software/source, and human-readable flags in one go and make something more useful out of all this. if you are an advanced user, give these new flags a spin and let me know what you think

Client API

  • file_metadata call now says has_xmp, has_iptc, and has_software_source, reflecting the above changes
  • Client API version is now 95

misc

  • the right-hand notes hover window in the media viewer now copies the name/note_text on a middle-click. it also has a tooltip that says what different clicks do (is this obscuring/annoying?)
  • the 'edit file notes' dialog has a little cog icon to alter how the copy button works; you can say whether you want all notes or just the current one in view, and you can say whether to copy as JSON, which the paste button accepts, or something more human
  • fixed the new GraphicsView thumbnail widget test to accept drag and drops
  • the options dialog now hides the Qt audio device fetch and list initialisation behind a button click. this has been a source of dialog crashing and other hassle in the past, so, like for mpv, the dialog now needs you to click a thing to go ask your lower level OS dlls whats up with audio device availability right now
  • I fixed an issue in the duplicates system that was sometimes causing non-accessible potential duplicate pairs to be registered. it was when a serf (a non-king member) of a multi-file duplicate group was queued up for potential duplicate discovery and found a pair while the king had since been physically deleted (this typically requires some non-deleting duplicate-setting and then a king delete and then a re-search potentials action, but a big client can have a few warts like this). on update, all clients will run the 'resync potnential duplicate pairs to storage' maintenance job to clean up any location-orphaned pairs
  • thanks to a user, fixed another instance of certain downloaders adding tags parsed in a gallery page fetch passing on their tags to a 'next page' gallery url

executables manager plan

  • I have planned out the basic shape of the executable manager, which is my big project for the second half of this year that will allow hydrus to call external exes and servers in a more flexible way. basically a reverse API that will add tech like 'please download this complicated URL' and 'generate clever tag suggestions for this file' without needing me to write the exe hooks. now I have sunken my teeth into it, I feel fairly good and hope to have richer 'open file/url externally' options page as the first step quite soon
  • in closer detail, I had a think, made a plan, and sketched out some early enums and objects
  • also wrote out a new serialisable tracker object for objects that have an immutable id and a string name label; something nicer than the hackery I have previously deployed in the downloader system

boring stuff

  • added distortion and date:timestamp to the ignored fields for human-readable metadata
  • since we now track seven boolean flags for stuff like 'has exif' and 'has transparency', I cleaned up some of the db storage code here. I considered folding it all into one table, but in my experience, this particular shape of data doesn't benefit from such a thing. I kept it separate and spammy but KISS and collapsed the code to more shared calls. the search code however is now pretty spammy so I will revisit this
  • cleaned up some code in the master main gui drag and drop catcher and improved how it handles some drag mouse events. there's a small chance some odd drop bugs may be fixed in weirder OSes
  • added some unit tests for the new file metadata flag tech
  • fixed up some unit tests in the duplicates auto-resolution system that were skating on thin ice and needed tighter logic for my new 'only add potential duplicate pairs when they satisfy x and y' filter
  • removed some old defunct Linux help regarding ffmpeg on the frozen builds. you got it now, bro
  • fixed some 'waiting for a work slot' labelling in the downloaders UI
  • a bunch of misc linting and some voodoo linting

Version 681

misc

  • status bar 'busy' indicator is simpler, and the tooltip now says the number of threads working
  • wrote a catch to stop QSS stylesheets from specifying a hydrus property colour with transparency. these were drawing crazy, with noclip garbage left on bitmaps used for transparenty images and animations in the media viewer. also fixed the e621_redux stylesheet, where this issue was discovered, to simply set a background colour for the media viewer

more human-readable embedded metadata filtering

  • I further cleaned up what hydrus considers 'human-readable embedded metadata'. many more technical fields are now hidden from the little text panel, meaning when this guy does pop up, or you search 'has non-EXIF embedded metadata', you'll now tend to see something nice and human like 'Artist' or 'Title', or otherwise rich like an AI prompt or Character card
  • I now invite advanced users to do some 'determine if the file has non-EXIF embedded metadata' maintenance regenning on some 'has non-EXIF embedded metadata' files and tell me what technical/inhuman text remains in their collections. I'm getting pretty happy here and I expect to (optionally) schedule a big regen for all users pretty soon
  • the newly excluded fields are: 'software', 'transparency', 'bit_depth', 'duration', 'primary', 'default_image', 'Creation Time', 'create-date', 'modify-date', 'date:create', 'date:modify', 'chroma', 'loop', 'timestamp = 0', 'extension', 'photoshop', 'bbox', 'blend', 'mpoffset', 'disposal', 'interlace', 'aspect', 'sizes', a ton of 'Thumb::' garbage, 'iptc', 'Raw profile type exif', 'Raw profile type iptc' (ye olde XMP), 'xmp', 'XML:com.adobe.xmp', 'adobe', and 'adobe_transform'. a bunch of these are format specific DPI data and such and not useful to elevate to the user. the IPTC and XMP stuff will come back when I expand EXIF parsing
  • excluded 'comment' or 'Comment' from human-readable metadata fields if it matches a handful of 'Created with X' style regexes; this is now parsed as a 'software' field
  • the 'Creator' and 'Source' fields are now appended to the 'software' field
  • excluded any human-readable metadata fields that have null value or empty list/dict
  • I realised while doing this that maybe going for a whitelist of what we do want would be saner, but I think I prefer, for completeness and fun, to get everything and actually deal with the sore thumbs
  • put 'software' metadata field in the 'extra info' panel below, as 'source' ('source' rather than 'software' because sometimes stuff like Kodak blah blah comes through here). there's an argument to include this in human-readable fields, if we are keeping artist/title, but I'm falling on the side of extracting it. I like this field a lot as human-valuable and it'll be high priority to be its own thing when we add richer metadata storage/search
  • similarly, the 'create-date' and friends are cool and I'll figure out some way to pipe that to a 'file metadata' modified time 'domain'. you can't generally get any better than the file metadata for this
  • if a file has a 'chroma' field talking about '420' subsampling, this is now converted to a subsampling field in the 'extra info' panel, like for jpeg
  • optimised 'has human-readable metadata' test for a fast yes in many cases

new graphicsview thumbnail grid test

  • the new 'thumbnail rendering tech' TEST under options->thumbnails is fixed up a bit and ready for advanced users to tentatively try out. I think I have it doing pretty much everything the existing code does without complaint, but I would like to confirm that with a broader test. it only applies to new pages, so I recommend first opening a new page and do some of your normal stuff before you test your whole session with a full client restart
  • fixed 'collect-by' transitions, removing the ghost singles that hung around
  • fixed a late waterfall thumb keyerror when transitioning through collect-by states
  • fixed collections not redrawing for a new first media on sort-by changes
  • fixed updating the status bar on any collect-by change, in either old or new thumbgrid code. it now flips between '200 files' and '200 files in 12 collections' when you change the collections
  • fixed drawing of thumbs at higher than 100% UI scale (the bitmaps were cropped due to DPR fun)
  • fixed a blurhash thumb fallback route in the new test
  • shaved the test animation time down for snappier feel. I'm pretty sure the old animation is accidentally heavily curved so despite ostensibly being 0.5s it was visually done faster. new guy is now ~13 frames at 60Hz
  • did some KISS refactoring of this code

more de-laggification work

  • I hacked in a test last week to try a different way of scheduling jobs in the background. it worked very well and I seem to have found the cause of the 'I have a fat client and when it does heavy work like archive/delete filter commit, everything slows down a lot' issue. basically, when certain sorts of heavy work was going on, threads waiting on new work to do or database jobs to come back were getting into a kind of traffic jam and wasting lots of time figuring out who had to go first rather than letting the guy who was actually doing the work go ahead and do it. I have now replicated and cleaned my work to several places and big clients that do a lot should be a good bit less laggy when big things are going on
  • cleaned up the successful CallToThread anti-CPU-thrashing test, taking out older code and cleaning the loop of it
  • added anti-CPU-thrash tech to db mainloop
  • added anti-CPU-thrash tech to threads waiting on the db to finish current work
  • added anti-CPU-thrash tech to database jobs; when many threads are competing for the db, they'll wake less
  • added anti-CPU-thrash tech to network job waits; when many threads are competing for network resources, they'll wake less
  • added anti-CPU-thrash tech to pubsub, both in the managing daemon and any threads waiting on 'background work to free up'
  • added anti-CPU thrash tech to 'are we currently rendering any thumbnails?' wait, which a bunch of threads wait on before going ahead with their own work
  • added anti-CPU-thrash tech to the core read-write lock used in the filesystem. I was very careful here as this is not my forté, and tests are good. this should improve latency, particularly thumb and file loading latency, when many file imports are going on and the locks are churning, which is another place we've seen inexplicable lag during certain busy periods
  • retired the debug 'db ui-hang relief mode'. this was an interesting experiment but the incorrect solution to the problem of GUI threads waiting on the db

boring de-laggification stuff

  • wrote a new thread worker pool object to look after calltothreads
  • primary controller and test controller now use this same object to manage threads (test guy had its own hacky code before)
  • tightened up db mainloop shutdown--to assure that db jobs can wait forever safely, we now guarantee that every job posted will get explicitly woken with a result through db shutdown
  • network engine now guarantees every network job it gets will be done'd so waiting threads shall all be woken up on program shutdown
  • rejiggered some 'is it time to commit?' in db idle time stuff given the changes
  • cleaned up some thread status-checking locking, mostly in debug code
  • KISSed some network job status stuff, and removed some confusing shutdown detection from the core 'isdone' calls
  • removed defunct db I/O-locking error-handling code
  • pubsub takes work breaks more often
  • pubsub system now has a shutdown signal to tidy up waiters properly on shutdown
  • thumbnail caches now have an explicit shutdown signal and clean up after themselves better on shutdown
  • cleaned up some misc thumb cache code
  • misc shutdown code cleanup
  • reordered some controller shutdown code
  • misc cleanup of controller wait code
  • removal of spurious event flags in db and pubsub

future build committed

  • This release commits the changes tested with the recent future test build, which went well
  • the summary for this update is: loads of stuff
  • there are no special instructions for the update. update as normal
  • since library versions have been bumped, users who run from source will be encouraged to rebuild their venv on update this week.
  • the library changes are--
  • PySide6 (Qt) from 6.9.3 to 6.10.3
  • OpenCV (opencv-python-headless) from 4.12.0.88 to 4.13.0.92
  • beatifulsoup4 4.14.3 to 4.15.0
  • cbor2 6.1.1 to 6.1.3
  • cryptography 48.0.0 to 49.0.0
  • Pillow 12.2.0 to 12.3.0
  • pillow-heif 1.3.0 to 1.4.0
  • pillow-jxl-plugin 1.3.7 to 1.3.8
  • pyopenssl 26.2.0 to 26.3.0
  • service-identity 24.2.0 to 26.1.0
  • numpy 2.3.1 to 2.4.6 (this jump was a bit of a juggle, and now possible with OpenCV 4.13)
  • requests 2.33.1 to 2.34.2
  • SQLite dll and sqlite3 terminal updated on Windows from 3.51.2 to 3.53.3
  • SQLite terminal executable 3.53.3 now added to Linux and added to new db folders just like the Windows extract
  • the 'test' library changes are--
  • PySide6 (Qt) from 6.10.3 to 6.11.1
  • OpenCV (opencv-python-headless) from 4.13.0.92 to 5.0.0.93. I did some research, and this upcoming jump doesn't seem to be a super significant change for our purposes. mostly C++ cleanup and finally dropping python 2 support.
  • other stuff--
  • db folder is now completely masked in gitignore
  • build environment--
  • updated the workflow actions versions across the board
  • Windows and Linux builds are moved from python 3.12 to 3.13
  • pyinstaller 6.16.0 to 6.18.0
  • the builds now share the core pyproject.toml rather than using their own requirements.txt files
  • pywin32 in Windows build env from 311 to 312
  • Windows ffmpeg (GyanD) 8.1.1 to 8.1.2
  • Linux build now comes with ffmpeg (BtbN) 2026-06-30, which I think covers 8.1.2

Version 680

misc

  • updated the newish tldextract stuff (which helps navigate two-part domain suffixes like .co.uk in URL parsing) to no longer fetch a fresh suffix definition file on first ever use from publicsuffix.org and not to make a cache in ~/.cache/python-tldextract. hydrus now ships with a copy of public_suffix_list.dat in the static dir for this library to use, and it doesn't make a cachedir entry any more. I regret not reading the docs closer! I also optimised this code so it should be a bit quicker now, too. thank you to the user who noticed this! (issue #2067)
  • I think I may have fixed some of the heavy CPU thrashing we have seen during heavy work like archive/delete commit and such. if you have had bad UI lag, I would like to know if some of it suddenly leaps forward today
  • made file add/delete calls a tiny bit faster when they have many tags
  • some thumbnail generation scheduling is a little smarter, with expensive filetypes generated more reliably at the end of the queue
  • fixed thumbnail generation for cbz. sorry for the trouble--I messed something up with a recent refactor! all cbzs imported since july 5th will get a thumbnail regen call (issue #2069)
  • setup_venv.py now warns the user that the path will be deleted if they specify a non-standard venv path that already exists
  • added a little safety warning to the Client API page. I don't make any of those plugins and cannot guarantee anything about them--use your common sense!

system tray

  • you no longer need to be in advanced mode to see the system tray icon in Linux (old safety check I forgot about)
  • added two BUGFIX checkboxes to options->system tray for those who have odd minimise-to-system-tray behaviour. if you had trouble, try these out and let me know what works

number locale

  • added TEST: Use your locale for integer rendering to options->gui. try it out, let me know where it works well and badly. I noticed in a fake fr_FR locale that the space-separator somehow messed up some taglist rendering and made system predicates no longer parse correct (I guess I hardcode commas out of numbers)--anything else?
  • system:filesize, system:ratio, and system:num pixels now render with separators when the number exceeds 999

file permissions

  • there were some file import paths that did not set the standard hydrus file storage 'you can read and write this guy' permission bits (read+write on Windows, 644 otherwise), which I have fixed. this was affecting some downloads and some local file imports for some time in hydrus's past
  • if we try to move a file during larger 'move this directory here' type operations and get a permission error, hydrus now attempts to assign the hydrus-normal read/write permission bits before trying once more (issue #2064)
  • we are dealing with some legacy read-only guys here. I have a file maintenance job that tries to fix this retroactively, which I am considering firing off, sometime, to address this

embedded metadata

  • the test for the presence of file metadata is now more reliable and reflects what you see in the media viewer. previously, the file may not have been loaded the whole way during file import or file maintenance, and sometimes text was being missed, particularly in the new system where I filter out some stuff like DPI. it wasn't being missed in the media viewer since by happenstance it would generally check for EXIF beforehand, which triggers a full load. now, the thing that fetches embedded metadata now checks the file is loaded fully before grabbing the available text
  • when importing files, the embedded metadata test now saves an image load (it re-uses an earlier EXIF load, if one happened) to save a bit of time

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

Version 679

misc

  • added a checkbox to options->importing to disable .cbz scanning. switch this off, and .cbzs will import or metadata-rescan as .zips
  • fixed a recent issue where the mouse could become perma-hidden in the media viewer when transitioning to an mpv window with the mouse clicked down (e.g. in archive/delete)
  • on Linux, I no longer set an application-associated desktop file on boot if you do not have a io.github.hydrusnetwork.hydrus.desktop file in your Applications dir(s). this fixes a warning many LInux users were seeing on boot

system tray

  • I gave the system tray hide/show tech a KISS pass. the main controls are now: 'left-click' the system tray will either (restore and) bring the program to the front, or, if it is already the front, minimise it. 'middle-click' the system tray does the full hide/show that disappears the gui from the taskbar. the 'system tray' options panel now says this specifically
  • when windows go through the hide/show cycle, they remember their state better. if a media viewer is minimised before the hide, it now remembers that
  • the system tray now has the 'minimise/close to system tray' and 'start in system tray' options in a new submenu. if there is a problem restoring from hide state (and thus you can't get to the options), there is now an escape hatch
  • restoring from minimise is also more reliable; if the main gui was maximised before the minimise, it remembers this better
  • some loop-de-doop systray icon double-click handling was removed. just middle-click it bro
  • the "doesn't work half the time" 'restore/minimise' menu option is removed from system-tray right-click. just left-click it bro

file embedded text clarity

  • the 'embedded metadata' text that many images have, and which you can review using the little document button up top of the media viewer, has never been great. it grabs everything our image decoder can see and spits it into something human-readable. today I clip out many common file metadata rows so that when you see this property, you'll actually see something rich and not the ten-thousandth instance of 'this is a jfif'
  • specifically, the keys of jfif, jfif_unit, jfif_density, jfif_version, dpi, compression, resolution, srgb, gamma, and chromaticity are no longer included in the metadata text. these are file property strings that PIL munged on load, not true embedded textual metadata. if a file has these tags (and if it has ICC profile data too), this is now presented in nice hardcoded lines below the embedded text box, same place it currently says 'progressive' and 'subsampling' for jpegs. less noise in the complex bit, more signal in the hardcoded bit!
  • I am NOT scheduling a 'has embedded text?' rescan on existing files just yet. there are more rows out there, like 'Software' and a bunch of 'adobe' stuff. I'll keep working here, and advanced users please give me your feedback, and when we've culled things to our satisfaction, I'll trigger a regen on all old files and we'll wipe out a whole bunch of false-positive 'has embedded text' flags and make this thing interesting and useful

custom temp dir

  • the temp_dir launch argument can now be relative to your userdir, like ~/blah/hydrus_temp, or simply relative, db/temp, which will be treated as relative to the base install dir, and it'll now resolve properly
  • if you specify a dir that does not exist, hydrus will try to create it
  • if you specify a dir that does not have write permission, hydrus now raises an exception and boot is cancelled

faster manage tags

  • if you have the 'related tags' tag suggestions panel set up, the manage tags dialog is now much more careful about how it asks that guy to go fetch tags. previously, too many pages' of related tags could be searched for on init, and they were scheduled too aggressively, and on legit refresh calls we could get overlapping refreshes, all leading to wasted CPU work. I cleaned it up a bunch
  • if you have the 'file lookup scripts' tag suggestions panel set up, the manage tags dialog is now a frame or two faster to boot after first boot. the scripts are now cached rather than loaded for each service panel on each dialog load
  • on my fairly dense but session-light test client, this got manage tags on one file from 160ms down to 120ms load time

file maintenance updates

  • when files get metadata updates during file maintenance, e.g. it realises it has an ICC Profile when previously it did not think so, the file is now re-queued for search in all duplicates auto-resolution rules it is in with a pertinent status (i.e. did not match search, ready to test, failed test, passed test ready to action)
  • a bunch of 'ok this file has new metadata, reload the metadata object and redraw them thumb' signals are now more careful to only do that when the pertinent metadata actually changed
  • re-setting pixel hashes and perceptual hashes now skips the remove/set work if the desired hashes are already set

new client api projects

  • added a couple links to the client api help: first, one to 'hydit', which is a lightweight, feature-rich hydrus client for Android (https://github.com/BashCooler/hydit)
  • second, 'kaimen', which shows hydrus searches in your file explorer using virtual FUSE mounts (https://github.com/Dry-Leaf/kaimen)

some mostly boring duplicates cleanup/optimisation

  • added an index to optimise some duplicate-files setting code that would particularly slow down a client with many alternates
  • optimised a particular 'reset potential dupe search' update call that is used in various file relationship dissolve and 'remove alternate member' operations (and I think some triggered by normal but complicated duplicate-setting operations too as certain groups are merged)
  • optimised a number of sqlite delete calls, particularly in the duplicate files system, and particularly for clients with many dupes or alts, that were performing inefficiently on non-bleeding-edge versions of SQLite due to a particular dual-index OR clause

  • fixed a file domain filtering issue with the 'maintenance: fix orphan potential pairs' job in duplicates auto-resolution; in some cases it was adding pairs that were outside of the rule's location context

  • boring UI cleanup

  • did a big cleanup and decoupling refactor on the new TreeView test. all my code here needs a good cleanup as we integrate the new tech, because it is groaning under the weight of five rewrites, including a transition through UI engines from years ago, and there is weird stuff all over
  • decoupled the history panel from the new view, added some cleaner signals for close/reposition
  • decoupled the filter panel too, same deal
  • fixed filter panel focus-on-show
  • removed the Application-wide eventfilter hook, which was eating a ton of CPU, and redirected to an object focus hook and a new main gui geometry/window state change signal
  • removed some erroneous copy/paste spam from new code
  • did some method reordering and other linting cleanup
  • Main GUI no longer eventFilters itself just for minimise tracking

Version 678

misc

  • audio files that have embedded images will now get thumbnails! all your existing audio files will be scheduled for a thumb regen on update
  • fixed the core ffmpeg video metadata info call to use the 'ffmpeg timeout' option, which by accident it wasn't. thank you for the reports here; this was what was stuck on 15 seconds timeout despite the new option
  • the file import object right-click menu now differentiates parsed tags from inherited tags, and the gallery import object right-click menu now shows inherited tags (issue #2056)
  • pdf documents that have empty human-readable file metadata text (this happens when they have no Title, Author, Subject, or Keywords) are now considered to have no such text. all pdfs are scheduled for a 'has human-readable text' regen on update

some more UI

  • thanks to a user, we have some more UI updates.
  • the options search system reveals some tucked-away widgets better and excludes some other things appropriately
  • there are new shortcut commands for the new per-player mute/unmute/flip-mute (issue #2050)
  • I fixed some issues with the per-player mute (issue #2049)
  • there's an EXPERIMENTAL: Show tab tree view setting under options->gui pages that has some neat new tech, with a tree to replace the existing tab-bar and some interesting flags to move the main page sidebar to the right. this needs a bit more work but is another thing we are playing with and will bring us a few steps towards a more modular 'place it where you like' UI layout

boring mute cleanup

  • tore out and rewrote the new per-player mute/unmute pipeline, fixing several issues related to mute check logic and subsequent state setting, also cleaned up some bad enum names and non-hooked-up signals (issue #2054)
  • for KISS, the Qt and mpv players no longer track mute options; they just handle the doing of it. the parent container now tracks and reacts to options changes and the new per-player state
  • the volume menu now offers a way to stop forcing mute/unmute

boring ffmpeg cleanup

  • added audio and image ffmpeg stream parsing
  • added image stream rendering for audio thumbnail gen
  • refactored the monolith thumbgen call, made it more reliable for weird failure cases
  • refactored ffmpeg rendering calls to their own file
  • misc ffmpeg calling and parsing refactoring and cleanup
  • removed defunct 'only render first second' frame-counting hack
  • deleted some redundant old psd ffmpeg code
  • added a note to the install help about FFMPEG on Linux (issue #2052)

other boring code cleanup

  • fixed and cleaned up the layout code and some options juggling in the new treeview experiment, cleaned up some misc splitter/sizes stuff along the way

Version 677

misc

  • fixed an issue with last week's downloader metadata overhaul that broke some downloaders. specifically, when downloaders had a post with one file url and that file url was changed through normalisation (typically through a URL Class), metadata application was not working. if you had a twitter-type downloader that seemed not to add tags in v676 when there was only one file in the post, please queue up those downloads again in a new urls downloader page and they will get their tags and so on
  • the 'min time to view a file in x' settings in options->file viewing statistics are now minimum 50ms (previously 1s)
  • when doing 'special duplicate' on a shortcut with F12 as the key, it now jumps to F13 (issue #2042)
  • reduced the overhead on two important 'wait a moment' checks that many of the thread workers consult. previously, when checking if the pubsub or db were busy, threads would wake too frequently in busy periods and thrash as they competed for 'is busy' locks. now the pubsub and db themselves maintain a single 'I am idle' signal the waiters can wait nicely on without needing extra checks
  • the code that terminates and then kills a timed out subprocess (ffmpeg, typically) now catches permission errors better (issue #2046)
  • fixed a stupid typo from the non-interactive setup_venv.py mode that broke the 'advanced' manual, interactive install. I was so focused on the new thing, I didn't test the old thing to see it still worked

client api

  • fixed the new /manage_pages/new_page command for a 'page of pages' type and updated the unit test to catch this (issue #2044)
  • client api version is now 94

human-readable metadata fix and improvements

  • a user noticed my recent 'chara' file metadata parsing was causing issues for files with metadata that included non-text datatypes and spotted where it was happening. just a stupid logical typo that was causing a bunch of filres with human-readable metadata to parse as not having any at all. I have fixed this issue so these files will show up with metadata again, and it will render correctly
  • any image imported after june 2nd (v674) will get a 'has human-readable metadata?' rescan
  • I have hidden the 'progression/progressive' keys from human-readable metadata presentation; we scan this elsewhere and show it as 'progressive? yes/no' on the same panel. I think I'd like to do the same for some other stuff like the 'jfif' and 'dpi' gubbins you often see

modern animations and ffmpeg

  • tl;dr: fixed some video parsing bugs with the new ffmpeg 8.x.x. avifs and heifs with num_frames=1 should be fixed, you do not have to do anything
  • many users, including all windows built users, have been on ffmpeg 8.x.x for a while now, and my video metadata parser recently broke for the animated 'sequence' variants of AVIF, HEIC, and HEIF. these files were being parsed with a num_frames of 1 and rendering as just a still image or throwing an error depending on the renderer
  • hydrus now recognises when any video file has multiple tracks, and if one track seems to be just a still image file, it selects the true animation stream for fps calculations and so on
  • also, the native renderer will now recognise this situation; if there seems to be no second frame during a render run, it will inspect the file closer to see if there is a different video track to select
  • also, I updated the deprecated vsync ffmpeg call to be fps_mode. this was another source of errors for various native rendering with modern ffmpeg
  • also updatedk the old -s to a combined -vf line with optional crop
  • also updated the overcomplicated -f image2pipe to -f rawvideo. works the same, but it is semantically better and may fix some frame timings
  • also updated the core metadata parse routine to no longer render the first second of the vid at small scale since this is an old hack that burns CPU but isn't used for anything any more and crops resolution parsing to 120 height for certain formats in ffmpeg 8.x.x (old mpegs at least, by my test)
  • all animated AVIF, HEIF, and HEIC files are scheduled for a metadata reparse (issue #2041, #1891)

new thumbgrid drawing tech

  • I found some time to work on the new thumbgrid test. it is better integrated and I fixed some bugs, but there's still some stuff not working so I'll hold off on the wider test
  • so, just as a record, I did--
  • fixing up some type hints
  • misc refactoring
  • undoing thumbnail movable/selectable flags to stop some inherent Qt behaviour stepping in on mouse events (this fixes ctrl+click selection, which was being pseudo-randomly undone I think in the QGraphicsScene event handling)
  • thumbs now have their own selection bool
  • moving click-event/selection responsibility to the GraphicsView since thumbs don't do anything but call the parent atm anyway
  • fixed thumb resolution stuff for non-resolution-having media when cache entry is invalidated
  • made thumbnail 'media' (and the new 'is_selected') bools public
  • tiny bit of thumb gen optimisation

Version 676

more UI updates

  • thanks to a user, we have a slew of additional UI improvements: (#2037)
  • per-viewer mute under media viewer right-click menu!
  • slideshows can now shuffle and 'play media once through' on a per-viewer basis
  • the 'stop' slideshow menu entry now shows the current slideshow period
  • a new type of 'interactive' shortcut action, for the media shortcut set. you set a tag or rating service but nothing else. when you hit the shortcut, it asks you which tag or rating you want to set!
  • new options to choose which types of zoom 'zoom switch' switches between and configure how collapsed the 'eye menu' is under options->media viewer hovers, in the new top hover button/menu controls panel
  • persistent 'be silent on crashy stuff' mpv option unher help->debug->debug modes

misc

  • the -d launch parameter for the program now expands a userpath db path correctly. -d=~/hydrus now resolves to your user dir properly
  • in the parsing UI, the 'test' panel's preview area, where it shows what you downloaded/pasted, will now show up to 500,000 characters before clipping (up from 65536 chars), and the upper description is now clear when this happens
  • added TEST: import local files directly from source, do not copy to temp dir beforehand option to let some advanced users try out direct import. we needed to copy to tempdir in the old days so that some media scanning libraries would not have to deal with cyrillic or other uncode characters in paths, but this situation seems to be resolved these days, so let's try without. if it works ok IRL, I'll keep this for those who do still need a temp dir interim but flip the default behaviour

stylesheet paths

  • me and the guys who make qss stylesheets have been fighting an issue for a while regarding loading external assets, like a little .svg for a button. I solve this today, and it will make loading up stylesheets with assets from your db dir or in the built release much more reliable
  • anyone who was on the _built_release versions of the stylesheets will be migrated to the normal ones on update. the _built_release versions are deleted from the defults qss dir as the problem they addressed is solved in a better way
  • for the specific change, the new 'absolute path qss test mode' proved successful, so it is now the norm. stylesheets now have to specify their paths in one particular way and I handle the path juggling on my end, on load. the readme.txt in the qss dir is now explicit about this, so if you make qss stylesheets and haven't seen it yet, check it out

opening new pages with the client api

  • thanks to a user who did a really comprehensive job, the Client API gets a new /manage_pages/new_page command. it covers pretty much everything, including, say, a new local import page with a list of files. check out the new documentation here: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/developer_api.html#manage_pages_new_page
  • the user also fixed Client API file sorts not defaulting to asc=true and a focus issue when pages are closed
  • the Client API version is now 93

parsing logic fixes

  • this is for advanced users who make downloaders
  • with the help of a couple users who poked around my tangle of gallery parsing code, I think we've fixed some stupid parent-child inheritance stuff where a gallery object would take too manytagsfromcertainpostparsesandthenpassthatontoa'nextpage'galleryurl,particularly,say,ifthatnextpageurlwasauto-generatedbtwmyspacebarbrokewhenwritingthis (issue #2035)
  • keyboard fixed. so, I KISSed how gallery objects create child file import objects and sub-gallery urls and next-page gallery urls. there is less overlap of responsibility between an object passing metadata down and a post parse passing metadata down (this latter system is much better these days, and old hacks in the former pipeline were causing the main issues here). gallery import objects will now not update themselves with parsed tags and referral urls after the fact; only their children will get the metadata from their parses
  • relatedly, I cleaned up how file objects create child file download objects. previously, there were separate pathways for file parses that uses subsidiary parsers vs those that simply had a flat content parser that produced multiple urls and then another for a single url that turned out to match a post url class. this has all been collapsed into a single KISS route that says 'if one file url, eat up the metadata from the parsed post and then download it; else create n child objects'. some bespoke error states like 'hey I grabbed one url, it was a post url, but there's no parser for that url' are now deferred and will just get processed as a normal child file import object
  • also cleaned up some crazy python module inheritance happening here
  • overall, things should be more reliable, and the inheritance of metadata from one import object to the next should be clearer. let me know how it all goes for you

source setup

  • setup_venv.py now takes an optional -i parameter for non-interative (i.e. automated) installs. -i=s will do the simple mode, -i=a will do the advanced mode with all test/yes choices
  • setup_venv.py now expands a userpath venv path correctly. -v=~/hydrusvenvs/venv313 now resolves to your user dir properly

safer builds

  • thanks to a user, our github build scripts, including Docker, now freeze the various github actions we use (e.g. a thing that says 'ok grab that build zip you just made and upload it to the release') to known good sha256 hashes, rather than getting the latest, say, 'v6'. this insulates against a supply attack, like we've seen recently, ensuring we won't use an action that was updated two hours ago by a bad guy to do bad things
  • there's a script also that updates the hashes. I'll be running this regularly to keep up and verifying every time it does. dependbot apparently interrupts whenever it is a big deal, too

startup/shutdown

  • the twisted library, which we use to host the client api and server services, is now started and stopped in a nicer way. previously, it was hacked into the boot scripts. now the main hydrus controller handles it and delivers some additional hydrus shutdown signals
  • twisted now only spins up on the client if you actually start up the Client API
  • when 'shutdown report mode' is on, the final client exit moment now prints all alive threads with their name and daemon status. if you have been working with me on the 'program is down but process is still alive', let's see if this catches it

some help docs work

  • rearranged and brushed up the Linux section in 'getting started - installing' and added more notes/links to 'hey running from source is over here'
  • removed the old Win 7 support comments and updated the Win 10 bits to be 'time to move to Linux m8'
  • updated the 'running from source' help to talk about pyenv, which makes it easy to install and use a different version of python with hydrus
  • updated the 'running Windows version in Wine' help document for the newest version and added info about Bottles: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/wine.html . I managed to get v675 up with a minimum of fuss and not too much weirdness (even ffmpeg and mpv worked!?!), so I now have a basic Windows test environment, hooray. doing it manually with winetricks on my system wine-9.0 did not work, it needed Bottles's newer wine-11.0
  • added easy copy buttons to the command quotes in 'running from source' help

Version 675

misc

  • the command palette will now not highlight an item if the initial results list opens underneath the mouse. I'm trying to resolve a common annoyance here, but I don't use this much IRL, so let me know how this feels to you
  • the new 'recognise an unmounted NAS as similar to a missing path on boot' error catching now detects a locked bitlocker drive on Windows. updated the UI text in the dialogs around this, too
  • fixed an unhelpful old status check that said 'if all network traffic is paused, repository sync maintenance daemon will not work', which was blocking local-only repo processing
  • added a link to 'Hydrus Slideshow Frame', a user-made KDE Plasma Widget for a hydrus photo/slideshow frame, to the Client API help (https://github.com/apampurin/hydrus-slideshow)

custom stylesheets

  • A hydrus user created a bunch of great 'Nereid' stylesheets right here: https://github.com/6788-00/nereid-theme-hydrus . these are now rolled into hydrus by default
  • for stylesheet creators, I had an idea how to fix the external asset relative/absolute path problems we've had. I have written a test and would love to have some feedback on Windows and macOS. To do the test--
    • create/copy a new stylesheet into your db/static/qss folder. change any 'url' paths from any existing url("path/to/my/db/static/qss/blah/my_image.svg"), to url("static/qss/blah/my_image.svg), as if it were loading from and relative to the install dir. if you are copying from the install qss dir, maybe the paths are already in this format
    • hit up help->debug->debug modes->qss absolute path test mode
    • load your QSS file in the options->style section. ok the dialog if you need to hunt around for an asset. did the assets load ok?
  • let me know how it went. in that test mode, I detect paths in the normalised format and swap them with the absolutes on load. if things worked multiplat, I'll make this normal behaviour and this problem is fixed

new thumbnail GraphicsView test

  • a user has rewritten my ancient old thumbnail grid to a new Qt-nice rendering system. I really appreciate his work. I have integrated his code as a new test, and early results are very promising
  • it is not ready for normal use yet and still has bugs/jank. it is under options->thumbnails as an EXPERIMENTAL TEST, DO NOT CLICK checkbox
  • I'll keep working on this, but as it matures, we should have masonry layouts, vertical grids, more dynamic thumbnail sizes, and all sorts, all in a nicer drawing system with more animation options and so on. some bad old design ideas are being swept away at the same time

boring cleanup

  • if twisted (the networking library we use to host a server) fails to un-set the current hosting services on program close, the error is now printed to log. previously it was silenced. I'm narrowing down on a 'the program seemed to shut down but the process is still alive' issue, and I think it might be an overloaded/deadlocked Client API doing it
  • updated the 'help my db is broke' file a little regarding clone vs repair
  • fixed a note in the example .desktop file
  • did some misc linting
  • fixed missing executable permissions on the scripts in the main repo. sorry for the long-time problem here

new dev machine

  • just as a side thing, over my vacation I moved to a new dev machine. I'm finally on Linux to dev. I took the opportunity to rework my very messy dev environment and personal workflow and note-taking. my situation is far less stupid now, with a sensible and pleasant IDE connection to the github repo, a browser not overflowing with tabs, and a zeroed-out desktop and daily todo and such. I've got dozens of pages of overflowing note mess to still slowly work through, but I'm going to devote some specific sunday work time to project management and try to stay on top of it going forward!