Changelog

Version 26.0.21 beta current

5 September 2026 · build 38 · delta update from 26.0.20

• Unplugged disks: edited photos no longer vanish. Three fixes in the offline path. The cache now serves the render it actually has for a photo whose disk is away, even after the develop engine's signature changed; it never invalidates (and never deleted) those renders while the disk is out; and a file that is simply absent is no longer memoised as “undecodable”, so thumbnails regenerate by themselves the moment the disk is back.
• Icon. The lighthouse on a plain yellow sky.

Version 26.0.20 beta

5 September 2026 · build 35 · delta update from 26.0.19

• Icon, final. The lighthouse at sea under a yellow sky, on Mac and on Glassroom.
• ⌘Z undoes the grid's destructive commands. Set Rating, Set Color Label, Rotate, Reset XMP Metadata, Apply Preset and Duplicate are each one undo step — even across a hundred photos — and the Edit menu names what it will take back. Reset XMP restores the deleted sidecars byte for byte; undoing Duplicate sends the aliases to the Trash, never deletes them.

Version 26.0.19 beta

5 September 2026 · build 31 · delta update from 26.0.18

• New icon. The lighthouse on its rocks under a yellow sky — the same icon on Mac and on Glassroom for iPad.
• ⌃+ / ⌃− zoom the grid from the keyboard.
• The feedback bubble is blue and can be dragged anywhere on the window.

Version 26.0.18 beta

5 September 2026 · build 27 · delta update from 26.0.17

• An unplugged external disk stays browsable. Lighthouse keeps a local shadow of every favourite that lives on an external disk: the folder tree, each file's name and date, and a copy of every XMP sidecar. With the disk out you still see the folders and their thumbnails (red titles mark photos whose original is away), you can rate, label, rotate and even develop — the RAW editor opens the largest preview it has — and everything is written to the shadow sidecar.
• Reconnect and it reconciles. When the disk comes back, sidecars edited offline are written to the disk; if the same sidecar also changed on the disk in the meantime, the most recent edit wins and the other is kept as a conflict copy and in the edit history. The tree is refreshed and the shadow updated.
• Shares are untouched by any of this, and an edit made offline still reaches iCloud — and the people you share the folder with — as soon as you're online.

Version 26.0.17 beta

5 September 2026 · build 25 · delta update from 26.0.16

• Updates install themselves. Lighthouse now looks for a new version every three minutes, downloads it quietly and installs it, relaunching by itself — no consent dialog, no “Install and Relaunch” prompt. A “Check Updates” button sits in the top bar next to the sync status for when you don't want to wait.
• iCloud library sync is on by default. It used to stay off until the iCloud account check had answered; it now starts on and only switches itself off when there is really no iCloud account. Your own choice in Preferences still wins.
• New icon. The lighthouse, up close.
• One layout for the whole sidebar. Favorites, Shared with me, Shared by me and From my devices share the same header (chevron · icon · title · count), the same group rows and the same folder rows: 48-pt mosaic, name, and a “count · size” subtitle. Folders shared with you are grouped by who shared them.
• External-disk favourites wear a disk icon — full when the disk is mounted, crossed out when it isn't.
• Sharing a folder that isn't yours. A folder someone shared with you, or one mirrored from another of your Macs, can't be shared from here; the menu now says so instead of offering “Share Folder…” and then failing with “hasn't been synced to iCloud yet”.

Version 26.0.16 beta

5 September 2026 · build 24 · delta update from 26.0.15

• The neutral-preview crash is fixed at the root. The error object produced by the preview renderer was released with the wrong autorelease pool and the app died on it. The renderer now survives its own failures; a file that cannot be rendered is quarantined per build, and the crash reporter records the load address and the last log lines so the next report is readable as-is.
• External disks. A sidebar favourite that lives on an external disk is no longer forgotten when the disk is unplugged. It stays in the list, dimmed and labelled “Disk not connected”, keeps its mosaic and count, and comes back to life by itself when the disk is plugged in again — including the folder you had open.
• Sharing repairs itself. A folder could end up marked as shared with no invitation behind it (“This folder isn't shared” from Sharing Options…). The invitation is now created before the photos move, so that state cannot happen again; a folder already stuck in it is repaired the moment you open Sharing Options or the Shared With window, which now also has a “Repair Sharing” button.
• “Shared by me” in the sidebar. The folders you share now have their own section under “Shared with me”, with Sharing Options, Shared With and Stop Sharing in the context menu.

Version 26.0.15 beta

5 September 2026 · build 23 · delta update from 26.0.14

• New icon. Lighthouse now wears the lighthouse — the same icon as Glassroom on iPad.
• “Check for Updates…” stays put. 26.0.12 re-inserted the menu item by hand every time macOS 27 rebuilt the menu, and it still flickered in and out. The item is now a proper SwiftUI command declared next to Settings…, so the system draws it itself and there is nothing left to lose.

Version 26.0.14 beta

5 September 2026 · build 22 · delta update from 26.0.13 — if any 26.0.11–13 build crashes at launch for you, download this one fresh from this page

• The launch crash is gone for real. 26.0.13's crash fence was not enough: the neutral-preview renderer that crashed on some libraries could restart before the fence quarantined the file. The neutral previews are switched off again in this build — the renderer no longer runs at all, so nothing crashes. They will come back once the decoder is fixed at the root; until then editing a synced photo on iPad uses the developed preview (red title) exactly as before this morning.

Version 26.0.13 beta

5 September 2026 · build 21 · delta update from 26.0.12 — if 26.0.11/12 crashes at launch for you, download this build fresh from this page

• Fixed a startup crash loop. 26.0.11 re-enabled the neutral editing previews, and on some libraries the very first preview render crashed the app at every launch, before the window appeared. The renderer is now crash-fenced: a file that kills a render is quarantined on the next launch and never retried, so the app opens no matter what — and the crash reporter now names the file, so the underlying decode bug can be fixed for real.

Version 26.0.12 beta

5 September 2026 · build 20 · delta update from 26.0.11

• “Check for Updates…” is back in the menu. On macOS 27 SwiftUI replaces the whole main menu after launch and took the item with it; the updater now watches the menu itself and re-inserts its entry whenever that happens. Automatic background updates were never affected — this is the manual check’s menu entry.

Version 26.0.11 beta

5 September 2026 · build 19 · delta update from 26.0.10

• Denoise, one checkbox. A new Denoise toggle in the develop panel renders the photo from Apple's RAW 9 neural engine — demosaic and ML denoise fused on the Neural Engine — with Lighthouse's own develop chain applied on top, untouched. Per photo, saved in the sidecar, honoured by the grid and the sync; turn it off and the linear rawler base is back. (Apple's base is brighter by design and leaves little HDR headroom — that is its rendering intent, not a bug.)
• Originals travel between your Macs, on request. Right-click a photo whose file lives on your other Mac and ask for it: Request Original from the Other Mac. The other Mac answers by itself for your own library (shared folders still ask the owner), the file lands next to its preview, and the temporary iCloud copy cleans up after delivery. Folder pictures travel too: the sidebar's 2×2 mosaics now sync with each folder, so “From my devices” shows real thumbnails instead of yellow folders.
• Editing previews are back on iCloud. The ~4096px neutral previews upload again with the library sync — they are the base your other devices develop on without cooking the edits twice. Originals still never upload on any automatic path.
• The iCloud tab speaks in megabytes. Sent and still-to-send are measured from the actual cache files (not estimates), with the projected total at queue end; the full request queue is listed photo by photo with what each still owes (metadata / thumbs / preview); and the log now names every record that leaves, with its real attached sizes.
• You can tell what is not local. Photos in received shares and device folders wear a red title in the grid — the pixels on disk are synced previews, the negative lives elsewhere. Same red as the editor shows when it opens one.
• The Tools palette became the iPad capsule. The floating toolbox is now the same dark rounded capsule Glassroom has — ✕ on top, pan/zoom/crop/straighten in a column, the armed tool on a light slab. No window chrome, keyboard never stolen.
• Terracotta. The app's accent is now Glassroom's #C66633 — selection in the sidebar included.
• Fixes. The folder sidebar scrolls all the way to the bottom again (the last section could be unreachable); crashes are now captured and filed to the feedback backend on next launch, stack included, on both platforms.

Version 26.0.10 beta

4 September 2026 · build 10 · delta update from 26.0.9

• iCloud carries thumbnails only. The library sync and folder shares upload 512px developed thumbnails and metadata — the multi-megabyte neutral previews are gone (your originals never went, on any path, ever). The iCloud tab counts exactly that: thumbnails on iCloud out of the library total, and the queue speaks in photos, not internal records.
• Received folder shares actually arrive now. Accepting a share fetches its zone immediately, builds each share as its own virtual folder under a single Shared entry in the sidebar (thumbnails + the sender's edits as sidecars — never originals), and opens it. A share that had arrived empty repairs itself on launch.
• Stability. Fixed a crash in the sync store (a recursive dispatch onto its own queue via the new edit-history hooks) — the store is reentrancy-safe now. Fixed a bookkeeping bug that kept metadata records "queued" forever after they had actually been uploaded.
• Small truths on the tiles. A red top-left dot marks photos whose original file is missing (deleted, unmounted volume, broken alias); sidebar folder rows now count photos and gigabytes including subfolders; undecodable files (SVG) stop haunting the upload queue.

Version 26.0.9 beta

4 September 2026 · build 9 · delta update from 26.0.8

• Publish to the web, properly. ⇧⌘P now publishes a public web gallery: your photos go to iCloud's public database as 2048px previews (never the originals — that option is gone everywhere, and so is the page's Download button) and the link is a page on this site anyone can open in a browser, no app, no account. The private iCloud share moved to Share ▸ Share Gallery via iCloud….
• A whole Share menu. ⌘J publishes or withdraws the selection silently (link lands on the clipboard); ⌘B opens the published photo's page in the browser; folders publish from their right-click menu; Published Galleries lists everything with one-click open.
• You always know what's online. Published tiles carry a small azure dot — blinking while the upload is in flight — and the new Publish tab in the inspector shows the live upload queue photo by photo, plus your latest galleries. The iCloud tab next to it shows the library sync: status, queue with thumbnail, totals sent, per-photo state.
• Single-photo links are private by construction. Sharing one photo mints its own unique page — no gallery reference, no way for the recipient to reach its siblings. Gallery links stay for when you mean the whole set. The web page itself learned two layouts: the grid, and a full-screen single-image page with shareable per-photo URLs.
• Edit a published photo and the page follows. Close the editor (or rotate) and a few seconds later the published version re-uploads by itself — same link, new look, the dot blinks while it happens.
• Rotation is nondestructive now. ⌘R / ⌘⇧R write orientation into the sidecar — Adobe-compatible, instant (the cache turns its own bitmaps instead of re-developing), always exactly ±90° even on mirrored files, and the original file is never touched. Works on RAWs that physical rotation could never write back, on aliases (each keeps its own), and in shared folders. A bug where one ⌘R turned 180° with the viewer open is gone.
• The tone curve is finally free. Points can cross each other — drag the black point past the white one and the curve descends: hand-made negatives, at last. Clipped whites now go through the curve too (only real EDR headroom passes untouched), and clicking beside a moved-in endpoint no longer plants a broken point.
• The RAW editor is modal for real. The window floats above the browser and the browser is veiled and deaf until you close — nothing beneath can steal the front any more.
• Little big things. Drop a lone photo on the sidebar and it becomes a photo favourite — just that photo, not its 109-sibling folder; clicking shows it alone. Drop a .xmp from the Finder onto the open editor or onto any thumbnail and its develop applies as if pasted. The Cache tab header counts every cached image and its gigabytes (no limit — by design).
• The great cache-storm hunt. A day of live tracing killed four compounding bugs: the sync re-applying the Mac's own just-uploaded edits (whole folders regenerated for nothing — now skipped by digest); RAW+JPG pairs sharing one sidecar so editing the RAW re-rendered the JPG on every slider commit (the bare sidecar now belongs to the RAW; JPG twins get their own); a phantom orientation in the cache key that made every portrait file regenerate forever; and duplicate scheduler submissions while one job waited behind the editor. Editing one image now regenerates exactly one image.
• Publishing is fast. Exports decode the cache's own 2048px tier (milliseconds) instead of re-developing every photo (seconds each) — a cached folder publishes in moments.

Version 26.0.8 beta

4 September 2026 · build 8 · fresh download — this release moves the app to its new unified identity, so 26.0.x copies will not auto-update: download once from the site, updates resume normally from here

• Share galleries through iCloud. Publish now hands you a real icloud.com link — your photos live in your iCloud, no third-party server anywhere in the loop. Links can be open (anyone with the link) or invitation-only with per-person access you can revoke; recipients with Lighthouse open the gallery right in the app. Existing web-link galleries keep working and can be migrated with one click.
• Plugin editing is ~25× faster. The develop stage behind every OpenFX preview now runs on the GPU (measured: 330–590ms → 2–6ms) and plugin instances stay warm across thumbnails and exports — with Dehancer or spektrafilm active, sliders finally feel like sliders.
• Apple RAW 9 in the second engine. The ⌥⌘E editor opts into macOS 27's new neural RAW decoder wherever your camera supports it (a RAW 9 pill in the header says when) — the biggest image-quality jump Apple's engine has had in a decade, one keystroke away from our own linear engine.
• Settings, redesigned. A sidebar window — iCloud · Display · Editor · Print simulation · Plugins — replaces the endless scroll.
• Editor refinements. The hand is the resting tool and Z is a momentary zoom with a proper magnifier cursor; scrub-zoom matches the fullscreen preview; ⌘0 fits; the footer grows Save Alias (freeze the current look into a virtual copy and keep working) and Cancel (leave without keeping the session's changes); Reset all now truly resets everything, curve panel included; crosshair guides while dragging curve points; right-click removes them; LUTs preview live while you scroll their menu.
• Grading fixes with numbers behind them. Shadows no longer lifts the whites when exposure is pulled down (the band now scales with EV — verified on 14 real CR2s); wheel saturation adds density instead of brightness (subtractive, held in true linear luminance); Desat white anchors to the image's own maximum after the tone curve.
• Color wheels polish. Vertical gradient bars with per-band grey ramps and an amber wash marking each wheel's working range; Dark/Mid/Light naming; wider panel.
• Aliases mature. ⌘D virtual copies are real references (a few bytes) with a framed preview of their original on the tile — click it to jump to the original; grey “alias di …” titles.
• Metadata panels redone. EXIF as a curated card (camera, exposure in human units, GPS) with the raw dump behind a disclosure; XMP Data shows only what you touched, with delta bars and named look chips; the Cache tab shows the actual per-tier cache state and the live queue with full paths.
• Fixes. A case-twin identity bug that re-developed every edited image in a loop (and made one-image edits re-churn whole folders) is dead; folder entry develops the first four tiles in parallel; favourites survive bookmark failures (and were restored); the fullscreen debug log overlay is gone; folder tiles get a right-click menu and an unscanned “?” badge; single files can be dropped on the sidebar; a Copy Log button hands support logs to us in one click.

Version 26.0.6 beta

3 September 2026 · build 7 · delta update from 26.0.5

• Color grading wheels. The four-wheel Dark / Mid / Light / Global panel — hue disc, saturation arc, and a range arc that sets the tonal band each wheel works on (near-black, midrange, highlights) — as a live parametric control right after Contrast, with its own bypass switch. Ported intact from Flare Photo Editor, applied on the GPU, saved in the sidecar, carried by presets, copy/paste and thumbnails.
• HSL curves. Six curve modes — Hue vs Hue, Hue vs Sat, Hue vs Lum, Lum vs Sat, Sat vs Sat, Sat vs Lum — with the hue-ramp background and quick-select color dots, also live, also bypassable, also everywhere the develop goes.
• Third-party OpenFX plugins actually work now. The host keeps a live instance per plugin and speaks the full InstanceChanged protocol, so plugins that build their option lists at runtime — Dehancer's Vendor / Camera / Film Profile popups — populate and render their complete pipeline, in preview, thumbnails and exports. Choices are stored by name, so saved looks survive.
• And they no longer freeze the Mac: plugin renders run at background priority leaving cores to the interface, drag gestures bake at draft resolution with the full-resolution frame on release, and the scaled source is cached instead of being rebuilt from the full RAW on every tick.
• Preset live preview. Hover a preset — in the editor's menu or the menu-bar Presets menu — and the image shows it in real time; leave, and the original look returns untouched. Presets sort newest first.
• Edit history. Every editing session that changed something records a version (with thumbnail) when the editor closes; right-click ▸ History lists them, and reverting asks first — and never discards the only copy of the current grade.
• Aliases — virtual copies. ⌘D creates a reference to the original (a few bytes, shown amber as “alias di …”): same negative, its own independent develop. Rate, grade and export each alias separately.
• Desat white reworked. It now anchors to the image's own maximum luminance and runs after the tone curve, so it grips real highlights even on frames that never reach pure white — verified numerically on real CR2s.
• Fixes. The editor honours EXIF orientation on TIF/JPEG (portrait files no longer open sideways); clicking near a curve point grabs it instead of planting a twin; catalog-filtered views show stars and edit badges; entering a folder develops the first four tiles in parallel so the grid is never empty; tool buttons joined the editor header.

Version 26.0.5 beta

2 September 2026 · build 6 · delta update from 26.0.4

• The app no longer fights your Mac. Thumbnail and cache generation moved to a single slow, thermal-aware background lane: visible tiles still load first and fast, but the bulk pre-generation now trickles in small blocks, pauses while you interact, backs off when the machine warms up, and stops entirely under serious thermal pressure. Browsing stays fluid even while a big RAW folder is being indexed.
• Instant sidebar. Favorite-folder mosaics and photo counts persist on disk and appear the moment the app opens, instead of being rebuilt from scratch each launch.
• No more jolt when you come back. Switching back to the app no longer refreshes the grid (and loses your place) unless the folder actually changed on disk.
• Edit badges, finished. One small chip per edit family — develop controls, tone curve, film simulation, print simulation, LUT, OpenFX, crop/straighten — drawn on the tile; tiny thumbnails collapse them to a colored type dot plus an amber edited dot. Catalog-filtered views now show badges, stars and labels too (their fast index never read the sidecars).
• Paste Special (⌥⇧⌘V): choose which families of settings to paste — curve only, LUT only, everything but the crop, any mix.
• Editor refinements. The header now shows the current preset with a menu of your presets (each with its thumbnail and family icons); curve endpoints drag freely on both axes; a Tools palette (pan, zoom, crop, straighten); dragging outside the crop rect rotates the image with a live angle readout; the LUT menu leads with None.
• Fixes. Pasting after selecting a single image no longer hits the previous multi-selection; the browser window no longer stays glued above other apps after the fullscreen preview; the fullscreen top gradient is gone and Reset Transformations works (both from your feedback reports — thank you, keep them coming).

Version 26.0.4 beta

2 September 2026 · build 5 · delta update from 26.0.3

• Crop tool. Press C in the editor: the full straightened frame with a draggable rect — thirds grid, eight handles, Return applies, Esc cancels, ⌘Z undoes. Non-destructive, stored in the standard Adobe crop fields, composed with the straighten tool with a single resample; exports, grid thumbnails and presets follow.
• One badge strip under the thumbnail. The rating stars sit left, on the same line as the edited dot and the file-type pill — and the edited dot now lights only for real develop edits, not for a rating-only sidecar.
• Edit button in the fullscreen preview (bottom right) opens the editor on the viewed image; an unmissable “+ Add Folder…” button tops the sidebar.
• Check for Updates… restored — now right under Settings, and it survives the system rewriting the menu bar (the reason it could vanish).

Version 26.0.3 beta

2 September 2026 · build 4 · delta update from 26.0.2

• Presets in the menu bar. The Favorites menu is now Presets: your develop presets, each with the thumbnail of the image it was created from — pick one to apply it to every selected image in the grid. Favorite folders live in the sidebar (⌘D / ⇧⌘D still add and remove the current folder).
• Right-click a favorite folder for Show in Finder and Remove from Favorites.

Version 26.0.2 beta

2 September 2026 · build 3 · delta update from 26.0.1

• Favorites, grown up. A Favorites menu in the menu bar (⌘D adds the current folder, ⇧⌘D removes it); each favourite shows a four-photo mosaic of its most recent images and a photo count in the sidebar.
• Bridge-style grid. Hairline separators between cells, and the selected image carries a clickable star-rating row (⊘ + five stars, keyboard 0–5) that writes real xmp:Rating — visible to Lightroom and Bridge.
• OpenFX plugin presets. The parameter palette gains a Presets menu per plugin: save the current parameters under a name with a thumbnail captured at that moment, re-apply in one click.
• Vectors and PDFs open in their apps. SVG, AI and EPS files open in Vector Designer, PDFs in Pdf Editor Pro (system default when not installed); PDF/AI/EPS now list in the grid with real content thumbnails.
• LUT on/off switch beside the LUT picker, matching the OpenFX one — bypass without losing the choice, honoured by exports and grid thumbnails.
• Develop presets in the editor panel, with thumbnails, storing the complete develop state.
• The window opens maximized at launch; the Z zoom tool shows the magnifier immediately and steps instantly while held; heavy OpenFX plugins no longer stall editing (draft-resolution previews while dragging, and grid thumbnails wait until the editor closes).

Version 26.0.1 beta

2 September 2026 · build 2 · delta update from 26.0

• English interface throughout. Every label, menu, palette, status and error message is now in English (205 strings). Sidecars and presets written by 26.0 still load unchanged.
• The app file is now Lighthouse.app. The 26.0 disk image installed a file still named after the internal project; from this release the bundle carries the product name.
• Installed copies of 26.0 receive this update automatically (a ~4 MB delta).

Version 26.0 beta

The first public release, and a beta: a signed and notarised DMG with built-in updates, published so people outside the workshop can finally use it. Everything below is in this build; the app is young, so treat your originals as originals and send us what breaks.

Feature list

• The grid — an entire folder of shots drawn by Skia on Metal, with mipmapped GPU thumbnails, realtime pinch and ⌘-scroll zoom, folder navigation and history, drag and drop, multi-selection and keyboard navigation
• Two RAW engines — the in-house engine (rawler, linear half-float) on ⌘E, and Apple's CIRAWFilter on ⌥⌘E: the same negative, two demosaics, one keystroke apart
• Raw formats — CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, DNG, ORF, RW2, PEF and SRW, alongside TIFF, JPEG, PNG and HEIF
• Develop — exposure, white balance by temperature and tint, contrast, shadows and highlights, and the whole saturation family including vibrance, applied to the linear raw data on the GPU
• Free-form tone curve — a real curve editor drawn with NanoVG: points anywhere, dragged live
• Vectorscope — a live scope beside the picture while you grade
• Preserve-highlights fusion — an HDR pass that rebuilds blown highlights from the raw headroom instead of clipping them
• Twenty film LUTs — Portra 160, 400 and 800 (with push), Gold 200, UltraMax 400, Ektar 100, Ektachrome 100, Kodachrome 64, Verita 200D, the Vision3 50D, 200T, 250D and 500T print stocks, Velvia 100, Provia 100F, Pro 400H, C200 and X-Tra 400 — plus film grain
• OpenFX plugin host — third-party plugins rendered on Metal, with parameter palettes ported from Flare Photo Editor; Dehancer, Filmbox and the openfx-misc suite load as they are
• Print and CMYK simulation — see what the paper will do before the paper does it
• Physical straighten — levelling a horizon rotates the pixels, in one undo step, instead of leaving an orientation flag for another app to misread
• XMP sidecars — develop settings and star ratings written next to the file in Adobe's crs namespace, so Camera Raw and Lightroom read what you did
• Copy and paste develop settings — from one frame to a whole selection
• Export — 16-bit TIFF and HEIC in HDR PQ
• Feedback built in — Help ▸ Send Feedback… (⇧⌘F) and a floating feedback chat (⌥⌘F), both with the log attached
• Updates built in — Check for Updates… in the Lighthouse menu; the DMG is signed by RainbowFactory LTD, notarised by Apple, and every update is verified against the app's own EdDSA key before it is opened

Known limits of this beta

• No catalogue and no database: the folder on disk is the library
• Apple silicon only, macOS 12 or later
• The app is named Lighthouse everywhere it speaks, but the bundle in the DMG is still called imagebrowser.app — its working name, kept for this release so installed copies and their settings survive the rename
• Rough edges are expected: this is a first public build, and feedback is what turns it into a second one