QuickView v6.47.2.1 Pre-release

QuickView v6.47.2.1 Pre-release

QuickView v6.47.2.1 introduces the brand-new Photo Star Rating System—featuring ultra-fast zero-decode metadata parsing, lossless in-place writing, and end-to-end reactive UI integration—alongside significant performance hardening for the zoom/presentation pipeline, super-resolution export pipelines, and Russian localization updates.

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What's Changed

1. Photo Star Rating System

• High-Performance Isolated Reading Core (#201):
  • Introduced an asynchronous RatingStore worker pipeline with in-memory caching, keeping ratings completely off the image decoding path (zero image decode overhead).
  • Implemented pure header-scanning metadata readers: Exif IFD0 0x4746 (SimpleRating) with fallback to XMP xmp:Rating for JPEG, IFD direct scan for TIFF, and sidecar parsing for RAW (.xmp).
  • Added detection for Adobe rejected flags (xmp:Rating="-1") and folded RAW+JPG pair conflict reporting.
• Lossless In-Place Metadata Writing (#201):
  • Numpad / Number key hotkeys (0–5) for rating and clearing (0 removes the rating property entirely). Customizable via Settings > Shortcuts. Reassigned legacy hardcoded zoom shortcuts (1/0) to Z/F.
  • Debounced asynchronous disk writes (400ms) with immediate commit on navigation or application shutdown.
  • Sidecar .xmp support for RAW photos with directory-watcher loop suppression.
  • Extended zero-re-encoding rating metadata writing and reading across modern container formats: PNG (eXIf/tEXt), WebP (EXIF/VP8X), AVIF/HEIC/HEIF (ISOBMFF in-place patching/item injection), and JXL (ISOBMFF container wrapping / Brotli compressed metadata box decompression). Updates metadata directly without re-encoding any image pixels.
• UI Integration & Rendering Polish (#201):
  • Gallery: Bottom-left corner badges displaying filled stars for rated photos, staying completely silent on unrated items.
  • Info Panel Lite: Terse single-line rating display option (omitted when unrated).
  • EXIF Panel: Displays star rating row and pair mismatch warnings; reactive repaints via state hashing.
  • Compare HUD: Restored rating row in physical properties comparison group with win/loss highlighting.
  • Theme Accent Stars: Rendered filled star glyphs (★) using DirectWrite with the theme accent color across badges, popups, and HUD overlays.

2. Zoom & Presentation Pipeline Hardening

• Direct Presentation Mode: Removed redundant GPU smooth window scaling passes and unified the pipeline to direct presentation mode, maximizing responsiveness and frame pacing.
• Scale & Boundary Conservation: Resolved fullscreen runaway zoom issues, enforced baseFit as the Single Source of Truth (SSOT), and preserved locked window scale ratios.
• Tear & Flicker Elimination: Enforced aspect ratio caps and atomic VSync presentation to prevent tearing during window adaptive zoom; eliminated 100% surface upgrade flash with symmetric screen boundary bounds.
• Snapping Cleanup: Removed 100% snap damping resistance and cleaned up redundant settings strings.

3. Localization & UI Layout

• Russian Localization Updates (#251): Updated and refined Russian multi-language strings and translation tables.
• No-Wrap Layout Enforcement: Enforced single-line no-wrap text rendering in compact widgets and status labels to prevent awkward text wrapping with longer localized strings.

4. Super-Resolution & Export Consistency

• Coordinate Space Contract: Unified VisualState coordinate spaces across Export, Crop, and Print pipelines.
• Orientation Corrections: Fixed window shrinking and image clipping bugs on initial zoom for images containing EXIF orientations 5–8; corrected inverted width/height dimensions in the "Save As" dialog for rotated and SR-upscaled images.
• Artifact Elimination: Resolved double-scaling and square cropping artifacts during neural super-resolution export by strictly harmonizing model scales and visual dimensions.

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Contributors

Special thanks to the contributors who made this release possible:

• Zhou Ying (@zorange-CN): Designed and implemented the core star rating architecture, header-scan readers, XMP sidecar write engine, numpad interactions, and comprehensive unit tests (#201).
• Dmitry Yerokhin (@Dimmitrius ): Contributed Russian localization updates and string refinements (#251).

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Full Changelog: v6.46.0.6...v6.47.2.1