Project Kestrel v(Great-Horned Owl) Release!

v(Great-Horned Owl) — 2026-05-24

This release dramatically simplifies the user interface and introduces new tools to help you tag your scenes by bird species and family. Kestrel's main GUI and Analyze Folders dialog have been completely redesigned with a focus on intuitiveness and simplification. Bird species and family tags are now supported by a searchable dropdown with comprehensive coverage of all global bird species.

Project Kestrel is now operated and offered under Project Kestrel LLC!

Major Changes

• Regional bird catalog — ~11,250 species, fuzzy search, 4-letter codes, sci-name toggle

  • Species and family comboboxes now search a bundled global catalog built from the IOC World Bird List (v15.1, CC-BY 3.0) and IBP-AOS Alpha Codes (66th AOS Supplement, 2025) — expanded from the 500 labels the ML model produces.
  • Intelligently search through all your regions' bird species and bird families while typing the name of the tag.
  • New Species & Region settings section with a multi-region picker (defaults to North America) and a Show scientific names toggle that renders the Latin binomial in italics under each species pill and shows the scientific family name on family pills.
  • New keyboard shortcuts: CTRL+R and CTRL+SHIFT+R + TAB help you label your scenes without even leaving the keyboard.

• Redesigned Analyze Folders dialog (3-column layout)

  • New layout: Queue Builder (add folders + recents chips + dialog-local tree), Settings (critical knobs always visible, advanced collapsed), Queue Summary + Start (live counts, warnings, per-folder list).
  • Dialog state is fully independent from the main sidebar tree, so picking folders to analyze no longer disturbs what you're browsing.
  • New recents row with a chip strip of recently-queued folders, persisted across sessions.
  • Live local-rate time estimates use a new perf-samples history (GPU vs CPU tracked separately).

• Redesigned home page — less cluttered, segmented controls

  • Old three-button header replaced by a single + Load Folders… button, recents chips, empty-state hint, and a clean Clear / Select All ↔ Select None segmented strip at the bottom.
  • Sidebar footer is now a segmented strip (Settings | Feedback | Tutorial | Donate); the zoom widget (slider + buttons) has moved to the bottom status bar where it belongs.
  • In-progress folders are now marked with a lightweight ⏳ hourglass emoji instead of the old purple-background-and-italic-text styling.

• Homepage simplified — search/filter/sort moved to a sticky top bar

  • The two large "First time" / "Returning" welcome cards are gone — the welcome panel now focuses on the What's New banner and the rotating tip carousel.
  • Search, confidence, sort, and grouping/multi-subject toggles moved out of the sidebar into a new sticky timeline filter bar above the timeline, with an ⚙ More ▾ popover for less-used options.

• New Folder Actions dropdown and Clear Kestrel Data confirmation

  • Per-folder actions menu in the scene grid for re-analysis, removal, and clearing analyzed data.
  • Clear Kestrel Data is now gated by a typed-confirmation dialog before the .kestrel/ folder is removed.

Minor Changes

• macOS USB-drive crash fix — Sony A1 users on macOS-mounted exFAT/NTFS drives no longer see a wall of "Unsupported file format" errors. The pipeline now skips macOS AppleDouble (._*) companion files and all other dot-prefixed files (.DS_Store, etc.) at every enumeration site (folder UI, analysis, --validate, telemetry).
• macOS ONNX null-cascade fix — when a CoreML GPU promotion failed mid-analysis, every subsequent image used to crash with AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'run'. The resilient session now restores the previous session on rebuild failure, and the provider coordinator forces a clean CPU rebuild after a failed GPU promotion.
• Windows 64-bit shutdown-watch fix — switched WNDPROC callbacks to pointer-sized c_size_t / c_ssize_t types so 64-bit LPARAM values stop throwing OverflowError: int too long to convert on every affected Windows session.
• Removed clunky "Loading Kestrel Analyzer…" overlay that briefly appeared on analysis start.
• Tightened scene-card layout to reduce visual noise and increase information density.
• API cleanup — removed redundant logging on every settings get/save; new get_bird_catalog_meta, search_birds, and lookup_birds bridge methods (catalog cached on the bridge instance).
• Tests — 454-line test_bird_catalog.py (48 new unit tests covering region filtering, alpha-code lookup, fuzzy-search tier ordering, and full coverage that every ML-model label resolves to a catalog row), 227-line test_settings.py additions for the new bird_regions / show_scientific_names / analyze_recents fields, plus new test_folder_inspector.py and test_config_helpers.py.
• Project Kestrel LLC — the Microsoft Store appxmanifest PublisherDisplayName is updated from "Project Kestrel" to "Project Kestrel LLC" this release reflecting the new corporate entity.

Known Issues

• Re-queueing a pending folder ignores new analysis options — If a folder is already in the queue (pending or running) and you change its per-folder options (e.g. "Delete existing analysis data first" or "Skip if already analyzed") and click Start again, the new options will be silently dropped. Workaround: remove the folder from the queue first, then re-add it with the desired settings.