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Release Notes

Welcome to PhotoMapAI, an AI-based image manager. See Features for a quick introduction, Installation to get PhotoMapAI installed on your home computer, and User Guide for usage and configuration.

PhotoMapAI Version 1.1.0

This is a big feature release — the highlight is a much smoother install experience on Macintoshes, Windows machines and Linux boxes. In addition, since the previous 1.0.5 release there are 22 new features and dozens of fixes large and small.

⭐ New install experience

  • Signed, double-clickable desktop installer for macOS, Windows, and Linux (#300). No need to install Python, CUDA, or anything else first — on first launch it downloads a private Python plus the AI libraries, starts the server, and opens your browser automatically. Later launches start in seconds.
  • Reliable first-run setup, everywhere. The launcher installs its private Python and required libraries, avoiding interfering with other software installed on the machine.
  • GPU "just works": an NVIDIA GPU is detected and used automatically. You no longer need to install the CUDA Toolkit — only a recent NVIDIA driver. Apple Silicon acceleration is automatic too.
  • Python 3.14 support (#258).

🗺️ Semantic map (UMAP)

  • Automatic cluster labeling — clusters are now named by content (#234).
  • Per-image tags in the hover popup (#262).
  • Album switcher built into the semantic-map titlebar (#287).
  • Smooth zoom everywhere: custom scroll-wheel and pinch-to-zoom that work across all browsers, including Safari and iOS touch (#312).

🔎 Search & discovery

  • In-app Back button + browser back/forward for navigating your slide history (#241).
  • Encoder model download progress is now surfaced in the album UI during indexing (#308).
  • Platform-aware default encoder for new albums (#307).
  • Broader auto-tagging vocabulary, with an opt-out toggle (#251).
  • Search and other server errors now appear as toast notifications instead of failing silently (#278, #288).

🖼️ Slideshow

  • Smarter end-of-show behavior: sequential mode stops cleanly on the last slide (with the play button grayed out), while shuffle mode reshuffles endlessly (#293, #296).
  • Shuffle autoplay stays alive through long runs and buffer rebuilds (#297, #313).

🎯 Curation

  • Grid view plus an automatic UMAP on completion, and a ~200× speedup in BLOCKS curation (#281).

🏷️ Metadata

  • EXIF drawer now shows DateTimeOriginal, Orientation, and image dimensions (#279).
  • Clickable reference-image thumbnails in the metadata drawer (#238).
  • Better handling of InvokeAI v5 metadata and assorted format edge cases (#267, #268).

⚙️ Preferences & quality of life

  • Per-device, server-side UI preferences — your layout choices persist per device (#284).
  • Move to Trash / Recycle Bin option for image deletion, instead of permanent removal (#273).
  • An update badge on the About button when a newer version is available (#280).
  • Cached reverse-geocoding for faster GPS location lookups (#272).

🔒 Notable fixes

  • Closed XSS, path-traversal, and partial-write security risks (#242).
  • Resolved indexing/concurrency race conditions and VRAM-release issues (#243, #271).
  • Numerous UI leak and stability fixes across the slideshow, curation, and grid views.
  • In-app "Update" now works for launcher installs (#327). Installs created by the desktop launcher run in a pip-less environment, so the About → Update button previously failed; it now upgrades via uv instead.

Plus internal refactors, CI repairs, and frontend cleanups under the hood.

Upgrading from the 1.0.6rc1 pre-release? If you installed an rc build with the desktop launcher, the in-app Update button may fail with No module named pip (that older build predates the fix in #327). To get onto 1.1.0, just re-run the PhotoMapAI launcher with --reinstall — it reinstalls the latest release cleanly. After that, the in-app Update button works normally. Stable installs (1.0.5 and earlier) are unaffected and can update in place.

For the full commit-level history, see the GitHub releases page.