Diffractor 1.27.2

• Three dates, each labelled — Original, Created and Modified are now separate and searchable, so an edit no longer moves a photo to the day it was retouched (#184).
• Panoramas and 360° photos — wide stitches sweep at full width, equirectangular files become a camera you turn by dragging, and @panorama finds them.
• Items view settings without scrolling to the top — group, sort, media-type filter and Show items in subfolders open from the scroller (discussion #251).
• The sidebar map is now a globe, and the history chart spans your whole collection (#175).
• Verbose metadata reports what the file actually holds — unnamed tags kept, maker notes as directories, embedded thumbnail shown.
• Security updates — expat 2.8.3 closes CVE-2026-72522, plus libopenmpt, libarchive, libebml and sqlite.
• Before you upgrade: taken:, when:, timeline: and c: now mean Original, so saved searches may return different results. Every icon is redrawn.

Full detail: docs/v-1.27.2.md

Diffractor 1.27.1

• Fixed a crash affecting some users on startup.
• Uses much less memory while browsing and viewing.
• Ratings and keywords cannot be lost to a locked sidecar — a .xmp that cannot be read is refused, not rebuilt from the edit alone.
• Duplicate detection stops fading out — scrolling a video into view no longer clears its checksum.
• Video plays in software rendering — with hardware acceleration off.

Diffractor 1.27.0

• Improved UI, Zoom, rebuilt. Hold to peek at full detail, or press Ctrl+Space for a proper zoom mode that stays put while you pan, compare, and move through your photos. Pinch, drag, double-tap, wheel, or use the corner navigator — and the image sharpens as soon as you stop moving.
• Search by where a photo was taken. Type a city, a state, a country, or just click the map, and photos with only GPS coordinates now answer too. Diffractor no longer confidently attaches the wrong town name to a photo — if it isn't sure, it says Near X with a direction instead.
• Finds the same photo saved twice. A resized copy, a re-export, a re-save, or one you rotated is now recognised as a duplicate even though the file name, size, and checksum are all different. Crops stay separate, and burst sequences and scanned pages don't produce false matches.
• Related items actually finds related items. It used to show duplicates only. Now it also shows photos from the same album, the same series, taken around the same time, and taken in the same place — each in its own group, closest first.
• Rename, Import, and Sync are easier to use and safer. Each one now walks you through it, shows exactly what it is about to do to every file, and lets you decide what happens when a file already exists before anything is written. Copy and Move do this too, instead of quietly making a second copy.
• Better photo editing. Fix converging verticals, warm or cool an image, and let Auto color, Auto straighten, and Auto document do the first pass for you. Auto document sets the same crop and straighten sliders you'd use yourself, so you can nudge or undo any part of it — and none of it freezes the window on a big RAW.
• Faster, safer edits to your files. Rating a RAW file no longer copies the whole file to record one star. Writes to network drives, OneDrive, and files another program has open now either work or tell you why they didn't, and never leave stray temporary files behind.
• Now translated into 13 languages. Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Chinese.
• Multiple bugs fixed:
  • #189 — mixed text sizes after changing the font size
  • #232 — a missing Calibri font flooded the log file
  • #103 — OneDrive reverted ratings and tags after syncing
  • #207 — writes to network drives failed and left temporary files
  • #180 — tagging a file another program had open froze Diffractor
  • #78 — videos displayed with the wrong aspect ratio
  • #61 — video locations never appeared on the map
  • #219 — Korean tags failed to display, add, or search
  • #184 — photos sorted by edit date instead of capture date
  • #215 — Explorer opened every folder in Diffractor

Diffractor 1.26.4

Small release with bug fixes and updates.

Fixes:

• Korean (Hangul) tags and search now work correctly, including matching between the NFC and NFD forms used by different cameras and operating systems #219
• Sidebar history chart now shows your full collection, with a configurable number of years in the Customize dialog #175
• Folders starting with a dot (e.g. .dtrash) can now be excluded, even when the path is offline or not yet created #174
• Fixed SHA256 hashing on 32-bit builds

New:

• Genre now supports multiple ;-separated values for search, grouping and autocomplete #117
• Reads more EXIF metadata — Artist, Software, and the Windows XP Title/Author/Keywords/Subject tags — plus APEX aperture and shutter-speed fallbacks
• Updated image libraries (libheif, libjpeg-turbo, libjxl, LibRaw, libde265, zlib-ng, minizip-ng) for better RAW and HEIF handling

Thanks to everyone who reported issues. I hope to work through more issues in the tracker over the coming months.

Diffractor 1.26.3

Small release with bug fixes and updates.

Fixes:

• Add and remove tags now works reliably #115 #209
• Fixed search excluding everything when using "none of these terms" #177
• Fixed search for Cyrillic "Х" and other Unicode characters #203
• "Large font" setting is now remembered on restart #144
• Mouse scroll wheel no longer jumps through images unexpectedly #131
• MP3 files no longer occasionally play silently in the internal player #217

New:

• Search, group and define collections by drive/volume label #213
• Support for DVCAM .avi files including recording date #212
• Switched maps to street view
• Added Czech language support

Thanks to everyone who reported issues. I hope to work through more issues in the tracker over the coming months.

Diffractor 1.26.2

Small release with some bug fixes and updates.

• Fix file updates on network drives #211 #207
• Natural file name sorting #197
• German translation updates
• Updated several dependent libraries to the latest version.

I hope to work through more issues in the tracker over the next few months. Be patient with me :)

Diffractor 126.0

This release fixes two long time issues:

• AV1 software support #159.
• Location map fixed #116

Nowadays my free time to work on Diffractor is limited but I am trying to keep it going. These two issues were annoying but thanks to those who have been so patient. The map has been changed to Bing maps because Google maps no longer supports the Windows HTML control.

Diffractor 125.0

Diffractor is now free. Thank you to everyone who purchased in the past – very much appreciated. I am hoping donations will cover the running costs. Let’s see how it goes :)

This release removes any payment verification screens. It also includes several small fixes:

• Support display scale factor #111
• Make Diffractor free #110
• slide show stops bug #100
• Option to remove shadows around image view panel #99
• Caption/Description - mixed up #97
• Full screen image not reloaded after tag or rename #95
• Tags with space at the end #92
• Add option to not update file modified timestamp when changing file metadata enhancement #86
• HEIC Support #85
• Allow space in search scope #42
• very short wav files do not play bug #39
• Option to toggle on/off playing media at the last known position enhancement #19
• Better “customize” screen #18
• Optimize network IO enhancement #15

Diffractor 124.0

The version of Diffractor adds a new smart scrollbar to the items view that shows year or other grouping information about the items displayed. It also improves performance when displaying large lists of items.

• Enable wildcards when searching in the scopes enhancement #90
• Cannot "bulk remove" tag when there is more than one word in it bug #89
• Folders thumbs are shown when using WITHOUT #93
• Wrong glyphs/fonts in description #87
• Thumbnail's size keeps changing when clicking on it #88
• Title - no action when clicking enhancement #77
• Typo in sidebar 'todo' label bug #71
• Search box doesn't always find what is needed #70

Diffractor 123.6

Diffractor goes 64bit:

• The installer now contains both 32bit and 64bit configurations of Diffractor. It automatically links shortcuts to the appropriate executable.
• Improvements to sound playback latency. This makes video playback and scrubbing seem faster.
• Added filters to allow only images, videos, or audio files to be shown.
• Fixed an issue where DNG files were not shown correctly. #83
• Fixed playback of short videos and audio files less than one second. #39