Release Notes

Grid reflow · album speed · small polish

• Apple Photos albums re-open instantly. Re-entering an album used to re-query PhotoKit every time; it's cached now, so going in and out stays fast. (NAS folders were already instant — 0.4ms.)
• Fixed the grid not re-flowing when you widen the window. Columns now re-lay out to fit the window size.
• On This Day, when empty, shows a friendly note instead of a blunt "No Photos".

Deletion safety net — undo, even on a NAS

• Deleting on a volume with no Trash (NAS/SMB) is no longer permanent. Files move to a hidden .LumenTrash folder on the same volume (an instant rename), purged automatically after 30 days.
• Every delete shows a 10-second Undo button that restores the files — and their favorites, ratings, and album memberships.

Crash reporting — privacy intact

• A crash writes a report with only the version, OS, and stack trace to your Mac; the next launch offers to open a prefilled GitHub issue. Nothing is ever sent unless you choose to — no file paths or photo data are in the report at all.

Performance — bulk operations

• Favorite/rate/label/tag a big selection in one transaction. Favoriting 20,000 photos: 0.4s (was one commit per photo — minutes).
• File work for delete, undo, batch rename, and export all runs in the background — hundreds of NAS photos no longer freeze the UI.
• Renaming a folder no longer recomputes paths in a way that could hang a 60k library for minutes.

Fixed

• A sync race where a delete/undo finishing mid-NAS-scan could be reverted.
• EXIF info for photos deleted during a long indexing pass coming back.
• The slideshow-interval setting now actually applies, and the default sort persists across launches.
• Failed metadata writes (full disk etc.) now show a notice instead of being silently dropped.
• A one-time culling-shortcuts hint (Space/X/1–5) on first viewer open; toasts follow the system language (English/Korean).

Performance — bulk album operations

• Adding/moving photos into a large album is instant now. Adding 10k photos to a 20k-photo album froze the app for 10 seconds; it's ~0.2s now — only the added rows are written instead of rewriting the whole album. Photo order is preserved.
• Bulk removal too. Removing 10k of 20k: 7.6s → 17ms.
• ⌘C no longer stalls. Image data for a copied NAS original was read on the main thread; it now loads in the background — the file path copies instantly and the image data follows when ready.

Sidebar folder tree, Finder-style

• Clicking a folder always selects it and toggles its children. Clicking an expanded folder while browsing another album now folds it immediately — no second click, no swallowed clicks (input was rewritten at the AppKit event level).
• Keyboard navigation is calm now. ↑/↓ only move the selection — folders no longer unfold as you arrow past them; → reveals the selected folder's children, ← folds them.

Fixes

• Favorite/label counting sent a per-photo round-trip to the NAS — large favorite sets could freeze the main thread.
• Thumbnails and badges went blurry after moving the window to a display with a different scale.

Performance — your photos are just there when the app opens

The launch path was redesigned, measured frame-by-frame against a 67,676-photo library.

• The launch loading state is gone. The window appears with a fully populated grid — thumbnails included — within a frame or two. Previously a "Loading your photos…" spinner sat on screen for ~1.4 seconds.
• New binary library cache — decoding 67k photos went from 410ms to ~100ms. Your existing cache migrates automatically on first launch.
• Sorting, stats, and search indexes are all precomputed in the background, overlapping the window construction time — and the first screenful of thumbnails is pre-warmed into memory before first paint.
• The loading indicator now only appears when loading genuinely takes long (first scan, cold NAS).

Performance

A large performance batch, measured and fixed against a real 67,676-photo NAS library.

• Selecting photos is instant. Inspector updates went from ~70ms per click to ~3ms; Select All on 67k photos went from an 800ms freeze to ~0.2s.
• Search no longer freezes the UI. Filtering a large library (~0.4s per search on the main thread) now runs in the background alongside the sort.
• Removed a 3–4 second freeze ~40 seconds after launch — the library reconcile and the thumbnail-cache warm-up scan were blocking the main thread.
• The thumbnail-size slider and window resizing are smooth now. Grid thumbnails are GPU-scaled instead of being re-rasterized on the CPU (~350ms per tick before).
• List view is now a native table — opens instantly with tens of thousands of rows, and large selections are ~5x faster.
• First folder click after launch 156ms → 4ms; first-search and launch-time hiccups trimmed by precomputing the library indexes.

Fixes

• Deleting photos now works on NAS volumes. SMB shares have no Trash, so deletion silently did nothing; Lumen now warns Finder-style ("deleted immediately") and deletes in place. NAS-side recycle bins (e.g. Synology #recycle) still catch it, and failures surface a toast instead of vanishing.
• Backspace/Delete actually delete in the viewer, list, and month views.
• Switching folders starts at the top instead of keeping the previous scroll position; deleting/importing in place still keeps your spot.
• Folders with subfolders select correctly (accent highlight) on a single click and reveal their children every time; re-clicking folds them.
• Corrupt image files (zero-filled failed copies) show a warning mark instead of masquerading as a generic JPEG icon — and no longer poison the thumbnail cache.

New

• Closing the window no longer quits. Thumbnail cache warming continues at a trickle (under 1% CPU, one decode every few seconds) and returns to full speed when you reopen the window. ⌘Q quits as usual.

• Folder tree: clicking a folder with subfolders selects it and toggles its children — expand on the first click, fold on the next (Finder-style).

Performance

• Thumbnail loads no longer stat the original file — one NAS round-trip saved per photo while scrolling.
• Viewport-driven prefetching follows the scroll direction instead of decoding the whole list up front.
• Two-tier thumbnail cache: small grid cells use a 256px tier, fitting ~4x more thumbnails in the memory cache (no more cache thrashing on dense grids).
• The monthly timeline no longer regroups the whole library on every redraw.
• Large albums sort off the main thread like every other view.
• Background cache warming starts with the folder you're currently viewing.

Fixes

• Folders with subfolders select on a single click in the sidebar.
• Grid ←/→ keys wrap to the next/previous row at row ends (Finder-style).

New — update notifications

• Lumen checks for new versions automatically (once a day) and shows a banner when one is available. Check for Updates… in the menu works on demand.
• Homebrew installs get the upgrade command; direct downloads get the release page (no auto-install, so it never fights Homebrew's version tracking).
• The cask gained livecheck — brew outdated / brew upgrade detect new versions reliably.

Search & indexing

• Camera/EXIF search — search by camera name (e.g. "SONY"). The EXIF index builds itself in the background (local disk first, then NAS).
• Indexing progress shows in the status bar, with a checkpoint every 2,000 photos so a relaunch resumes where it left off.

Apple Photos / iCloud

• Selecting a Photos-library photo shows its metadata in the inspector (dimensions, kind, size, camera EXIF, GPS).

Browsing & editing UX

• Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keyboard navigation in the grid.

• First public release — local & NAS folder libraries, grid/list/map views, non-destructive editing (crop, rotate, combine, watermark), favorites/labels/tags/albums, Homebrew cask distribution.