What's newЧто новогоЩо нового

Added

• The sharing port is now a setting you can see and change - and a number the program guarantees. Until now nobody chose that port and nobody was shown it: Windows handed one out on the very first start and the program then stuck to it, but only mostly. If anything happened to hold that number the next time sharing started, the program quietly took a different one - and from that moment the port-forwarding rule you had typed into your router pointed at nothing, as did every access code (QR) and settings file you had already handed out. Nothing said so; the share simply stopped answering from outside. The Share Manager's settings now show "Port" under "Network", filled with the number sharing actually uses - the same one that goes into the router rule and into every code you hand out. It changes when you change it and at no other time, so it is safe to write down. Next to it, "Find a free one" fills in a port that is free right now, from the range meant for exactly this (below 49152; above that is what Windows hands out to outgoing connections, where any program can take it). And if the port cannot be taken at startup, sharing does not start on some other number - it stays off and says which port is busy, because a share quietly serving on a port nobody was told about looks like success and is not. The rare case where nothing is listening and the port still cannot be used - a range reserved by Hyper-V, WSL or Docker - is named too, with the command that lists those ranges. Changing the port needs no administrator rights and touches no firewall rule.

Fixed

• Translating a picture with text in two places no longer covers the artwork with one bar. Two speech balloons either side of a figure, two columns of a page, a caption with a note beside it - the text recognizer reads across the picture and hands back a phrase from the left and a phrase from the right as a single line. The translation then arrived as one plate stretched the whole width of the frame, sitting over the drawing between them, with the two texts run together into one sentence that the translator dutifully translated as one - so the damage showed up in every language. The recognizer's output is now cut apart wherever a gap between two words is far wider than the words themselves are tall, and the pieces are put back into reading order column by column, so each balloon or column gets its own plate over its own text and nothing is drawn over the picture. On the reported image this turns one bar across the artwork into two plates that match the two balloons; a two-column page turns into two plates matching each column word for word. A page whose text the recognizer read correctly in the first place is left exactly as it was.
• The Folder Share Server now puts its shortcuts where you would look for them. Both editions are meant to live under one Start-menu folder named after the product, and the server edition has asked to since 26.8.15 - but an upgrade never moved it. Windows installers remember the folder name a previous install used and treat the one in the package as a mere fallback, so the step that removed the old standalone folder was immediately followed by the shortcuts being recreated inside it again. There was no folder to choose in the first place (the wizard does not ask), so nothing needed remembering, and the name in the package is now the one that is used. The server edition also offers a desktop icon, ticked by default: it has no file association, nothing opens it by double-clicking a document, and its Start-menu entry sits under a folder named after the viewer - which is not where anyone looks for a server they just installed. In the ordinary edition the same icon is offered for the Share Manager, unticked, next to the existing viewer one. And the leftover "Uninstall .." shortcut in a language you no longer use is cleaned up: that name is translated, and a machine reinstalled in two languages kept both copies.
• The Folder Share Server now leaves its console reachable after a restart. On a machine running the sharing service, a reboot brought the service up, made the folders reachable - and left nothing on screen: no icon next to the clock, no window, and no hint that a Share Manager existed. The manager's own "Start at Windows logon" is off by default, which is right for the ordinary edition where the manager is a tool you open, and wrong for the server edition where that icon is the only way back in. It is now switched on by itself the first time the manager runs on a machine hosting the service - once per account, and never over a decision already made: if you have ever switched that entry off, or on, in Windows own startup list, it is left exactly as you set it. Separately, if Windows has switched the entry off, the settings now say so. Windows does not remove such an entry, it keeps it and quietly refuses to run it, so the checkbox went back to being unticked and read as "you never turned this on" - the same picture as never having asked for it, which is how a machine ran for weeks with a live share and no console. The "Startup" section now names that state on its folded summary line and explains it under the checkbox, and ticking the box again restores it.
• Updating the Folder Share Server through winget no longer fails before it even starts. Setup looked for a running Share Manager and refused to go any further while it found one - and on this edition that manager sits in the tray from logon, which is the whole point of it, so it practically always did. Run by hand, that was a prompt asking you to close a program which closing only returns to the tray. Run unattended - which is what winget upgrade is - the prompt was answered "Cancel" on your behalf, and the update stopped with an error before a single file had been touched, every time. The check was also looking too early: it runs before the step that actually clears the way, and that step already stops the service, the manager and the sharing worker, in that order. It is gone, and an update now waits on that orderly shutdown instead.
• Reinstalling the Folder Share Server no longer changes the sharing port. The shared folders, the identity paired to your phones and the password all survived a reinstall, which is why the port going missing was so hard to see: everything looked untouched, but the number your router forwards had quietly become a different one, and connections from outside stopped arriving. Two separate things did it. Every install, not just the first, copied the state left over from the non-service edition over the state the service was actually running on, rolling the port (and the share list and the counters) back to whatever they had been at some earlier point; that copy is now made once, when there is genuinely nothing to keep, and after that the running state is left alone. Separately, the sharing service gave up on its own port after a single attempt - which it can lose to its own previous copy for a fraction of a second during an upgrade - and rebound elsewhere. It now retries for about two seconds first, which is all that race ever needed.
• "Internet access works" no longer claims more than it checked. Pressing "Test internet access" dials your router's external address from this same PC, so the request turns around inside the router and never reaches the internet: it proves the forwarding rule points here, and says nothing about whether your provider lets an incoming connection in. It reported a green "Internet access works" anyway - which could sit directly under the honest line saying the outside world got no answer. It now says what it actually found ("the server answered on the external address, but the check never left your network") and points at the only conclusive test: the phone with Wi-Fi off, on mobile data. The genuinely external check, made from outside by the sharing service itself, is unchanged and is still what the "Internet access" section reports.
• The sharing window no longer guesses "there is no forward on the router" when it knows there is one. When the port had been opened automatically (UPnP) and the outside check still got no answer, the window blamed the missing router rule - the one thing it could see was not missing. It now names the likely cause in that case: incoming connections blocked further upstream, at the provider. The old wording stays for when there really is no forward.
• Changing a sharing setting no longer resets the connection limit and the "local network only" switch. Whenever the sharing service had to move to a new port, it wrote the new number into its settings file by replacing the whole file, so both of those choices silently went back to their defaults.
• A shared folder whose subfolders the sharing service cannot read no longer fails silently on the phone. A phone opened a shared folder holding 758 files and got an empty list. Nothing on the PC was wrong as far as the PC could tell: the shared folder itself was readable, and every check the Share Manager made looked at that folder and no further. Four folders deep inside it had been created by another program with cut-down permissions, and the account the sharing service runs under - which is not the account you are signed in as - could not open them. Three things changed. Adding or switching on a shared folder now looks inside it as well, lists any folders that will not be visible on the phone, and offers to repair them in one step; the check is time-limited and says plainly when it did not get to the end, rather than reporting a clean result it never finished. The access code (QR) is no longer offered for folders that cannot be served - it is held back entirely when none of the chosen folders can be read, and when only part of a tree is affected the code is still shown with the number of folders that will not open stated next to it. And the repair now reaches the whole tree: permission is re-applied at every folder inside a share that had inheritance switched off, which is where the original grant had always stopped without anyone noticing.
• The sharing service now records a folder it was refused, and tells the phone the real reason. A refused folder produced a generic "failure" that a phone cannot act on - it reads the same as a broken connection, which is why the client gave up on the entire folder scan instead of skipping one folder - and it was written to no log at all, so the PC held no trace of what had happened. The service now answers "permission denied", which is what actually happened, and writes one line naming the folder and the operation to its own log. The rest of the shared folders keep working throughout, as they always did.

Added

• A music file now gets a screen of its own (64-bit program). MP3, WAV, M4A, WMA and OGG used to travel through the video path and show a black rectangle - the file was playing, but the window had nothing to say about it. Audio is now its own kind of file: the embedded album cover fills the window when the file carries one, and when it does not, a wave-and-particle animation stands in for it. Along the bottom sits a plate with the title, the artist and the album as the file itself spells them, plus the plain facts underneath - codec, bitrate, sample rate, length and size. A new "Audio behaviour" section in Settings decides the rest: what happens when the track ends (next file, stop, or repeat), whether the transport panel stays visible instead of hiding itself, whether the visualiser is drawn at all, and a sleep timer of up to three hours that stops playback and says so. The 32-bit program for Windows 7/8.1 is unchanged.
• Video and audio can each be left out of browsing entirely (64-bit program). Sorting a folder of photographs that happens to contain a few clips meant stepping through those clips. Settings -> "Video behaviour" and "Audio behaviour" now each carry "Take video/audio into account when paging through files": switch one off and files of that kind are neither shown in the current folder nor counted in N/total, so the loop is only what you came for. Both are on by default, which is exactly the behaviour that existed before. The same two pages also expose the preferred audio and subtitle track language as a plain setting instead of only remembering the last one you picked with A or V; when a file has no track in that language the player still chooses for itself.
• An animated picture can now be turned into a real video (64-bit program). With an animated WEBP, APNG or GIF on screen, a new toolbar button - and a "Replace with video.." entry in the picture's middle-click menu - converts it into an MP4 next to it and deletes the animation. The result is ordinary H.264 video, so it has a seek bar, a pause, hardware decoding and full colour, none of which an animation has - and the 256-colour GIF the program builds internally to play an animated WEBP stops being what you keep. The video encoder (FFmpeg, free software under the GPL, about 110 MB) is not bundled: the first conversion asks whether to download it, names its size and its licence, and a No simply cancels - nothing is remembered as broken. Because the original is deleted permanently, past the Recycle Bin, the program says so before it starts, names both file names, warns when a transparent picture is about to be flattened onto black, and offers a "Do not ask again" box that Settings -> "Files and system" can switch back on. Nothing is deleted until the video exists at its final name: cancelling, a failed encode or a read-only folder all leave the animation exactly where it was, and an existing name.mp4 is never overwritten - the new file becomes name (2).mp4.
• A destination folder that does not exist yet is created on the first transfer (64-bit program). Sorting into 2026-08/best used to mean leaving the loop, making that folder in Explorer, coming back and finding your place in the list again - the program had never once created a destination. Now, when only the last folder of a destination is missing and the one above it answers, the first move or copy makes it and says so. Only the last one, and only when its parent is really there: a mistyped share name is refused, never built. Settings -> "Files and system" -> "Create a missing destination folder" switches it off, and a missing destination is then simply reported as not found. The 32-bit program for Windows 7/8.1 is unchanged.
• A ZIP or CBZ archive can now be opened and closed from a menu, and its cache limit actually works (64-bit program). Right-clicking the folder box now offers "Open archive..", and, while inside one, "Close archive" - the entry points the archive feature always meant to have alongside drag-and-drop and the command line; the file-open dialog gained an "Archives" filter group too. Settings -> "Files and system" grew three archive rows: how much disk space one open archive's temporary extraction may use, the ceiling on a single entry, and the ceiling on how many entries a huge archive shows - and the cache one is no longer just remembered, it is enforced: the least-recently-used extracted pages are dropped once the budget is reached, always sparing the page on screen and its immediate neighbours, so browsing never stalls even with the limit set low. 7z, RAR and CBR are still not opened yet.

Changed

• A destination folder that is switched off, asleep or gone now says so on the first press, instead of on the twentieth timeout (64-bit program). A destination folder was never checked - not when it was read at startup, not when it was picked, not when it was typed in. So sorting into a NAS that had gone to sleep felt like it was working: each press queued a transfer, took the file out of the list at once, and then waited out a full network timeout on its own - and a minute later twenty failures arrived one after another, each putting a file back into the list in an order that had nothing to do with what was on the screen. The folder is now asked once, in the background and with a two-second limit, and a folder that cannot answer produces one sentence that names the key and the reason - no connection, not found, no access, invalid path - with nothing queued and nothing taken out of the list. The answer is remembered, so the twentieth press is as instant as the first, and pressing the same key twice in a row asks again - that is how you say "the NAS is awake now" without going anywhere. The floating recipients panel dims a folder it knows is unreachable and gives the reason in its tooltip, and the destinations table in Settings tints the same rows; neither of them ever checks by itself, so opening either costs nothing. A folder that is fine costs nothing either way, and a folder that dies between the check and the transfer still fails the way it always did - the check makes the common case honest, it does not promise the future.
• A failed file operation says what went wrong instead of quoting .NET (64-bit program). "Operation error: E014 Could not find a part of the path .." is a sentence about the program; it is now a sentence about your folder - not found, no access, no connection, invalid path - with the path named. The exact exception still goes to the log, which is what "Send the logs to the author" collects, and a failure of a kind nobody has classified keeps the old loud wording with its code, so nothing new becomes quiet.
• An animated WEBP, an AVIF or a HEIC opens instantly the second time (64-bit program). These formats have no Windows codec, so the program decodes them itself - seconds of work for a large animation, which is why the "Loading.." badge exists - and until now it threw that work away the moment you moved to the next file. Going back, reopening the file tomorrow, or opening it in a second window paid the full price again, every time. The result is now kept on disk and reused whenever the file has not changed, so the badge appears once per file instead of once per view, and walking a folder forwards fills the cache for the walk back. Settings -> "OCR and translation" shows how much space it uses, empties it on request, and sets its limit (512 MB by default; 0 switches it off and restores exactly the old behaviour). JPEG, PNG and BMP are not cached - Windows opens those in milliseconds and there would be nothing to save. The 32-bit program for Windows 7/8.1 is unchanged by either of these.

Fixed

• FILE / F4 now opens the file you picked. Choosing a file in that dialog could leave the previous picture on screen as though nothing had been selected. The dialog took a shortcut through the program's own file-opening path and skipped the step that makes the chosen file the current one, so the display could still resolve the old entry. It now goes through exactly the same route as a file opened from the command line, dropped onto the window, or picked from the recent list - which also means a file on a sleeping network share no longer freezes the window while it is checked, a file still being downloaded is opened by itself once it unlocks, and a failed open leaves the picture you were looking at untouched instead of emptying the window. Both programs.

Added

• A HOW TO section on the site, and five new guides in it. The site had three guides and no place that listed them; there is now a "HOW TO" block on the front page, on every one of the twelve translated pages, in both READMEs' usage sections and inside each guide, so any one of them leads to the rest. Five guides were written for what had none: the whole key map with zoom, full screen and the slideshow; the first-time setup - default viewer, interface language, and what happens to a file when a name collides or a folder has no Recycle Bin; recognizing and translating the text on a picture, with the translator that runs on your own PC; the image editor - draw, crop, and save over the original or beside it; and reading a ZIP or CBZ as if it were a folder. The guide pages are in English and Russian.
• The program can now reopen the file you were watching, and pick a video up where you stopped (64-bit program). Settings -> "Files and system" -> "Resume the last file", off unless you switch it on. With it on, starting the program without a file opens the exact file that was on screen last time, with its whole folder listed behind it, so the arrows, the slideshow and the N/total counter work straight away - and a video carries on from the position it was left at, which the program has always remembered during a session and until now threw away on exit. The "Open at startup" row above it was never able to do that: it restored the *number* of the file inside the folder, so deleting, renaming or re-sorting anything earlier in the list reopened a neighbour instead. If the file has since been deleted or renamed, or sits on a drive that is switched off, the window simply stays empty - no dialog and no red line for something you never asked for - and the remembered path is kept, so the same file opens again once that drive is back. Opening the program by double-clicking a file always wins over the memory, a page inside an archive is never remembered (it does not exist by the next start), and clearing the history clears it too. The 32-bit program for Windows 7/8.1 is unchanged.

Changed

• The Folder Share Server now sits in the same Start-menu folder as the rest of the program. Its installer used to make a second folder of its own, so a machine with both editions installed showed "Fast Media Sorter Folder Share Server" standing on its own next to the "Fast Media Sorter for Windows" folder that holds the viewer, the Share Manager and the uninstaller. The server's shortcut and its uninstaller moved into that same folder, and the old folder is removed when you upgrade. Nothing else about the two editions is shared - each keeps its own entry in "Apps & features", its own install folder and its own winget package, so updates still go to the right one.

Fixed

• The recipients panel over the picture is back (64-bit program). The floating list of destination folders - the one you click instead of pressing a digit - stopped appearing in 26.8.13 and has been missing from every version since. It was made see-through in that release so the picture shows through it, and Windows refuses to create a see-through panel *inside* another window at all: the panel was never built, silently, and switching the setting on did nothing. It is now a small window of its own, which Windows composes properly - so it is see-through as intended, it floats over a playing video as well as over a picture, and it follows the program when the window is moved, resized or minimized.

Added

• The settings that were listed but did nothing now do what they say (64-bit program). Five rows in Settings had been storing a choice and changing nothing about the program: they are now wired to the behaviour they name. "Scale of a new image" decides how the next picture opens - fitted as before, at 100 %, or at the scale you last used *in that folder*, remembered for the last fifty folders. "Reduce animation" switches off the halo's growth animation, and is switched on by itself for as long as Windows says animations are off - without overwriting your own choice, so turning the system setting back on brings the animation back. "Interface during the slideshow" hides the toolbar, or the toolbar and the status bar, while a slideshow runs; moving the mouse brings them back for a few seconds without stopping the slideshow, and leaving the slideshow restores them at once. "Interface scale" - a new row - sets the font and control size of the settings window itself, from 90 % to 150 %, and offers to reopen the window so the change is visible rather than promised. And the preferred audio and subtitle languages are drop-downs over the program's language list instead of a box to type a code into; picking Russian now matches a track that calls itself rus, which typing ru never did.
• Keyboard shortcuts can be reassigned (64-bit program). Settings -> "Files and system" -> "Keyboard shortcuts" opens a compact window listing every action the keyboard drives - navigation, the slideshow, rotation, deletion, zoom, OCR, and each of the ten destination folders - with the combination it answers to. Select an action, press the combination you want, and it is taken; the key it was moved off stops doing the old job, which is the part that makes a reassignment real rather than an extra key doing the same thing. A combination somebody else already holds names its owner and offers to swap the two or to leave that action without one. Windows' own combinations cannot be taken, and neither can F11 and Esc - full screen and getting out of it stay where they are. "Reset" puts one action back, "Reset all" puts back the lot, and Esc leaves the capture field without recording anything. A profile that has never opened this window behaves exactly as before.
• "File types", "Recent files and folders" and the OCR cache got the windows they needed (64-bit program). The file-type filter was a text field of semicolons; it is now a dialog with checkboxes grouped into images, video, audio and the remaining supported formats - tick a group or a single format, and leaving everything ticked means "all supported", including formats a later version adds. The history limits sit next to a new "Open the history" button: a window listing the recent files and folders, where an entry can be opened, dropped on its own, or the whole list cleared - and a path that no longer exists is shown greyed rather than quietly disappearing. The OCR cache row now states how much it occupies on disk and offers to clear it, which until now could only be done as a side effect of opening the translation tab.
• Importing settings asks what to do with them, and exporting asks before it includes anything personal (64-bit program). An import used to replace the profile outright. It now reads and validates the file first, lists what would change, and offers Replace or Merge - the second keeping every local choice the file does not actually override, so a file exported from a fresh profile cannot reset the rest. The previous profile is written beside the imported file as a .backup before anything is touched, and a file that turns out to be unreadable changes nothing at all. Export still leaves out folder paths and playback positions by default; a separate, deliberately explicit checkbox includes them and warns what that means. API keys and passwords are never exported either way.
• U now takes back more than one operation, and covers renaming too (64-bit program). Undo used to remember exactly one move or copy, and only that: press it twice and the second press said there was no history. It now walks back through the last 50 operations, most recent first, each file returning to the folder *and the position in the list* it came from. F6 renaming joined them - a mistyped name is one keypress away from being put back, where before it was permanent. A deletion is one of the operations it takes back. Press U after DEL and the file comes out of the Recycle Bin - back into its folder, back to its position in the list, and back on the screen. If the name has been taken in the meantime the file is returned beside it and the status line says under which name; if the folder it came from has since been deleted, that is said plainly and nothing is recreated behind your back. And where there was nothing to bring back, U says why rather than pretending there is no history: the Recycle Bin was emptied in between, or the deletion was permanent for a named reason - your own Shift+DEL, or the network drive that has no bin at all. An operation that failed now leaves nothing behind either: the old history was written before the work ran, so a move that could not complete still offered to "return" a file that had never left.
• DEL now sends the file to the Recycle Bin - and says so honestly when it cannot (64-bit program). Deleting used to be final everywhere, and the question it asked said as much. It now goes to the Recycle Bin on an ordinary disk, so a wrong keypress is one press of U away from being put back - or a trip to Explorer, whichever you reach for first. Shift+DEL deletes past the bin on purpose, the way it does everywhere else in Windows. The honest part matters more than the bin itself. Windows keeps no Recycle Bin at all on a network share or a memory stick - and those are exactly the folders a sorter is opened on. The program checks where the file actually lives before it asks, and the question names the reason: to the Recycle Bin, or permanently *because it is a network drive*, *because it is removable media*, *because the bin is switched off for this drive*, *because the file is larger than the bin holds*, or simply because you held Shift. The line in the status bar afterwards says the same thing as the question did, so "deleted" is never ambiguous about what happened. Nothing about the deletion itself changed where there is no bin - the file goes, as it always did; only the message stopped pretending otherwise. The picture panel (F3) follows the same rule for a whole selection, deciding once for the folder rather than asking per file, and taking the permanent wording when a selection spans places that differ. Deleting inside an archive still refuses, as before. The 32-bit program for Windows 7/8.1 is unchanged: there DEL is still final. The question before a deletion is now its own setting, on Settings -> "Files and system", with a third answer that was not available before: ask always, ask only when the file will not go to the Recycle Bin, or never. That middle one is what a fast sorting session wants - filing away hundreds of pictures with a question in front of every one of them is what made people switch confirmations off entirely, and switching them off meant losing the question in front of the one deletion that cannot be undone. Above it sits a switch for the Recycle Bin itself, for anyone who would rather DEL always be final; turn it off and the program says the deletion is permanent *because you asked for it*, which is the truth. If you had previously ticked the general "no confirmations" box, deleting stays silent exactly as it was - your setting is carried over rather than reset, and from then on the two are independent, so silencing one no longer silences the other.
• A ZIP or CBZ now opens like a folder (64-bit program). Drag a comic or a folder of scans onto the window - or pass it on the command line - and its pictures appear as an ordinary file list: the arrows flip through them, the slideshow runs, zoom, the perspective background and the on-image translation all work exactly as they do on loose files. Nothing is unpacked in advance and nothing is left behind: the program extracts the picture it is about to show plus the next one, into a private folder of its own, and deletes that folder the moment you leave the archive or close the program. If the program is ever killed outright, the leftovers are swept away the next time an archive is opened - so a browsed archive never costs you disk space you have to find and clean yourself. The archive itself is opened read-only and is never modified. Because of that, the file operations - DEL and the 0..9 destination folders - say so instead of acting while you are inside one. Entries that are not pictures or video are ignored, as are the resource forks a Mac adds to every ZIP; an entry that names its way out of the folder (..\..\Windows\...) lands under a safe name inside the private folder like any other, and an entry that would expand a hundredfold is refused before a byte is written. A password-protected or truncated archive gets one plain message rather than an empty window. 7z, RAR and CBR are not open yet - they need a different reading strategy and are the next step; a .zip on Windows 7/8.1 (the 32-bit program) still answers "Unsupported format", as it always has.
• A picture can now be marked up in its own editing window and written back to disk (64-bit program). Until now the program could read images and never write one: R turned the picture on screen and left the file untouched, and circling something before sending it on meant a trip to Paint and back. A pencil button next to the translation buttons - and an "Edit.." entry at the top of the middle-click menu - opens the picture in a separate window. Both appear only for a still picture; a video or a running animation has neither. The toolbar holds a brush, a rectangle and an ellipse, each outlined or filled, with a colour (eight one-click swatches next to the full Windows colour picker) and a line thickness. Hold Shift while dragging a shape for an exact square or circle. Ctrl+Z and the Undo button step back through what you have drawn; Esc during a drag abandons that stroke rather than the window. The line thickness is in the picture's own pixels, not the window's, so the same setting draws the same line whatever size the window is. Closing with unsaved work asks first - and that question is deliberately not silenced by the "no confirmations" setting, which is about file operations rather than about work that exists nowhere else. Cropping is there too - the thing most trips to Paint are actually about. Pick the crop tool and drag a frame: everything outside it dims, so what you are keeping is what you see. The frame then stays and waits - drag it whole, pull any of its eight handles, take as long as you like - because nothing is cut until you say so, with Enter, a double click inside the frame, or the "Apply crop" button that appears only while there is a frame to apply. Esc takes the frame away. Undo puts the picture back at its old size, and the cut itself is exact: the pixels you kept are the pixels that were there, untouched and unresampled, transparency included. Your photo's EXIF is carried over with the recorded picture size corrected to the new one, and the embedded thumbnail - which still shows the *uncropped* frame and is what Explorer would have preferred - is dropped. Save writes over the original; Save as.. puts the result beside it in any of the six formats the program writes (PNG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, WebP). Three things are deliberate about how it writes. Your photo's EXIF - the capture date, the camera, the coordinates - is carried across, which a naive re-save silently erases; the embedded thumbnail is dropped instead, because it is a picture of the file *before* the edit and Explorer and phones prefer it to the real pixels. The result is written beside the original and swapped in, so a share that blinks or a disk that fills leaves the photo whole rather than half of it. And Save is switched off, with the reason in plain words, when the original cannot be replaced - a read-only file, a format the program deliberately does not write (GIF, ICO, WMF), or a file another program is holding - while Save as.. stays available in every one of those cases. Re-saving a JPEG asks once per session before it re-compresses, since that part cannot be undone. Two things this window deliberately does not do. It never zooms or scrolls: the picture is always fitted to the window, which on a 24-megapixel photo means one screen pixel covers about five of the picture's - enough to circle, crop and point at something, not enough to retouch it. And adding text is not there yet; it is the next step.
• The Share Manager now has its own entry in the Start menu. The program that drives folder sharing - and, on a machine running the always-on service, manages it - could only be reached from inside the viewer or by its tray icon. Close that icon, or have the logon autostart not fire, and there was no way left to open it short of hunting down the exe in Program Files. It now sits in the program's Start-menu group next to the viewer itself, and clicking it opens the manager window instead of starting it silently into the tray - which is what clicking a Start-menu item is asking for.

Changed

• The Share Manager's folder buttons now say what they do and switch off when they cannot do it. The button that opens a shared folder's parameters was called "Options.." and stayed clickable with nothing selected, where it silently did nothing; it is now called Edit, in all 13 languages, and is available only while a row is selected. The list also keeps a row selected for you - the folder you added or edited last, or the most recently added one when the window opens - so the button is ready rather than greyed out on arrival. The settings button beside the header was a bare gear icon; it now carries the word Settings next to it.

Fixed

• The frame around a photo blinked off between pictures (64-bit program). With the animated halo on, every press flipped the background to flat colour first and only then grew the new frame across it - so the frame went out and came back on each file. The frame that is on screen now stays there and dissolves into the new one as it grows, so nothing goes blank between two photos. Once the growth has finished the picture is identical to what it always was, down to the pixel - only the way it gets there changed.
• The "Tracks" button sat in the toolbar of an empty window (64-bit program). It is meant to appear only while a video with something to choose between is playing - more than one soundtrack, or any subtitles - and to disappear again over the next picture. It did both, but only from the first video onwards: before anything had ever been played, the button was simply there, on an empty window and over still pictures, and clicking it opened an empty menu. It now starts collapsed like the other buttons that depend on what is on screen.
• A brief network hiccup used to shred the file list of a perfectly healthy folder (64-bit program). Sorting off a network share or a NAS, a few seconds of the connection dropping was enough: every file the program failed to read was thrown out of the session's list before anything asked *why* it had failed. So one press of Space removed one file, the automatic skip moved to the next, that one failed for the same reason and was removed too, and the chain ran until the program announced "No readable files in this folder" - about a folder in which every file was fine. The list and your position in it came back only by re-reading the folder, and any file you had passed was silently no longer there to go back to. A failed read is now classified before anything touches the list. A file that will not decode is still dropped, exactly as before - that is what the skip is for. But a dropped connection, a share that stopped answering, a file another program is holding open, or a read that takes so long it has to be abandoned all leave the list untouched: the program says what happened, stops skipping instead of running down the folder, and keeps the file. When the share comes back, the next press carries on where you were, with all your files still in the list. The same question is now asked in the one other place that removed entries - the check that runs when moving to the next file, which on a dropped share is the one that fires first. The 32-bit program for Windows 7/8.1 is unchanged.
• Switching folder sharing to the always-on Windows service could leave every shared folder unreadable while the app reported that sharing was working. The service runs under its own Windows account rather than yours, so every shared folder has to be granted to that account - a step the Share Manager performs when you pick a folder, and when you make the switch from inside the app. The Server edition's installer had no folder list to pass on, and that was read as "there are no folders yet": true for a first installation, but not for the case that installer explicitly supports - installing over an ordinary installation that was already sharing. There the folder list came across with everything else, the service started, published all of it, and had permission on none of it. On the phone every folder refused to open; on the PC the Share Manager showed the green "Sharing from this PC is on" with the internet address next to it, and nothing anywhere said what was wrong. Three things change. The installer now grants the folders it has just migrated, before the service starts, so the share never comes up in that state. Every start, restart and repair of the service grants whatever the share list holds, so an installation that already came up without those permissions heals itself instead of staying broken until somebody finds the right button. And the app no longer calls that state working: while any shared folder is unreadable by the service, the status line says so instead of turning green, the folders in question are marked in the list and explain themselves on hover, and opening the Share Manager offers to put it right with one administrator prompt.
• Two rows in Settings -> "Files and system" showed their internal names instead of a caption. The rows that export and import your settings to a file read settings_export and settings_import - in every one of the 13 interface languages, right next to correctly translated buttons. Both now have a proper name and a line explaining what they do: the export deliberately leaves personal data out, and the import saves your previous profile beside the file it reads.
• "Start with Windows" could stay ticked while Windows was quietly refusing to honour it. Switching a startup item off in Task Manager - or in Settings -> Apps -> Startup - does not delete the entry a program wrote. Windows leaves it exactly where it is and records a veto beside it, then skips it at every logon. The Share Manager only ever read the entry itself, so it reported autostart as on: the setting looked right, the entry was right, and no tray icon appeared at logon, morning after morning, with nothing anywhere to point at. The checkbox now reports whether the program will actually start, so a veto shows up as unticked; and ticking it lifts the veto instead of rewriting an entry Windows had already decided to ignore.
• The longest caption in the Settings window was cut off when the window was wide enough to show two columns. "After copying or moving" needed four pixels more than it was given, so its last letters were clipped at a specific range of window widths. The gap between a caption and its control was wider than the row's own margin; it now matches, which gives every caption in every language those pixels back.

Changed

• Setup's "turn folder sharing on" checkbox is no longer greyed out when you install without administrator rights. It used to be disabled with a note telling you to enable sharing later from the Share Manager, because switching sharing on writes a Windows Firewall rule. But that rule is the *only* part of the installation that needs administrator rights, so withdrawing the whole option was too blunt. Tick it now and everything installs as usual; at the very end Windows asks for approval once, for that one rule. Decline it and the program is still completely installed - it says so plainly and points at where to switch sharing on later, which takes the same single prompt. Unattended installs are unchanged: that page is never shown there, so nothing is ever enabled - and no prompt ever appears - unless a person ticks the box.
• Setup's options page no longer runs off the bottom of the window. The recommended companion project (doc-html-translate) took a heading, a paragraph and a bare winget command line at the end of that page, and on an ordinary display the text was cut off mid-sentence - so what the reader actually saw was a truncated advertisement with the link below the edge. It is now a single link in the same list as the two Android links above it.

Fixed

• On a PC that has the separate Server edition, uninstalling the ordinary app could offer to remove a service that is not its own. Both now stage their worker in the same machine folder, so the path alone no longer identifies whose service it is; the ordinary installer now recognises its own role by the absence of the Server edition and leaves that product's service alone.

Added

• Round-the-clock folder sharing no longer needs a second download. Serving folders after a reboot, with nobody signed in, meant installing a separate Server edition - a different package for what is the same program doing the same job under a different host. Now the Share Manager can make the switch itself: "Manage hosting.." -> "Switch sharing to a Windows service..". One administrator prompt performs the whole move and says beforehand exactly what it will do: your folders, settings and the host key move into the machine-wide store, the service is registered and started, a firewall rule is added, and the folders you already share are granted to the service account - which is a separate account from you, and the step most easily forgotten when it is left for later. The host key is never re-issued, so phones that are already paired keep connecting. Coming back is the same window's "Return to the User edition..". The separate Server edition remains, unchanged, for machines that are set up without ever opening the app; the Microsoft Store version cannot register services and says so, pointing at the installer from the site.

Fixed

• Installing through winget left you with the bare viewer - no offline video codecs, no OCR language models, and no folder sharing at all. The installer offers those three as optional parts, and then refused to write any of them unless Setup was running with administrator rights. An unattended install never is: winget starts the package silently and without elevation, which is exactly the case that was being excluded. So you downloaded the full package - around 370 MB - and what reached the disk was the two viewer programs and nothing else. The codecs and the OCR models at least healed themselves by downloading on first use, but the Share Manager and its sharing worker had no such path: the button reported that the program should be reinstalled, and reinstalling it the same way produced the same result. None of those parts ever needed administrator rights - they are ordinary files, and a personal install writes them into your own folder like everything else. They now install in both cases, and the components page in the wizard is a free choice in both as well, instead of being locked to "viewer only" without administrator rights. Administrator rights are still asked for exactly one thing, and only if you want it: turning folder sharing on, which adds a Windows Firewall rule - that stays a deliberate choice, in the wizard or later in the Share Manager.
• On a machine running the always-on sharing service, the app could never be updated again through winget. The installer refuses an unattended install when it finds that service, so the state of a working server is not changed without a word - but it applied that to updates as well, and winget passes no flag to say otherwise, so winget upgrade failed every time, for good. An update of an installation that is already on the machine now proceeds: it replaces viewer files and touches nothing the service owns. A first unattended install still stops, so a deployment script cannot quietly add a second sharing host to a server.
• Removing the app no longer leaves a sharing server running with nothing to manage it. If folder sharing was switched to the Windows service, uninstalling now offers to take that role away too, in the same step. Say no and it keeps serving exactly what you published; either way your settings and the host key stay, so a later reinstall does not mean re-pairing the phones.

Changed

• When the sharing component genuinely is missing, the program now offers to fetch it instead of saying "reinstall". Sharing is an optional part of the installer, so a perfectly healthy installation can be without it - a compact install, a cleared checkbox, or any of the unattended installs described above. "Please reinstall" was both vague and, for the most common cause, wrong: reinstalling the same way brought back the same gap. The message now says which component is missing, explains that running the full installer over the current version adds it with your settings kept, and offers to open the download page.

Added

• Share Manager: a click on the enlarged QR code now also saves it as a picture and puts it on the clipboard. Until now the code could only be looked at - to get it to someone you had to photograph the screen or save the .fmscfg file and explain what to do with it. Now the same left click that enlarges the code also writes it as a PNG into Pictures\Fast Media Sorter\ and refreshes the clipboard, so Ctrl+V in Telegram, WhatsApp, Word or an email pastes the code as an image, and Ctrl+V in Explorer or an attachment area drops the file itself. Nothing is taken away: the click still steps the zoom, and repeated clicks overwrite the same file instead of leaving five copies. The picture is the code's own clean square - at least 512 pixels, never smoothed, with its white margin kept - regardless of how far the window happens to be zoomed. Ctrl+C copies without writing a file and Ctrl+S writes without touching the clipboard. Since the code is the key to your folders, the first save says so once, and if the Pictures folder cannot be written the picture goes to a temporary folder and the window tells you where.
• The halo around a photo can now appear at three speeds, and by default it is twice as fast as before (64-bit program). When "Perspective background ▸ Dynamic halo ▸ Animated" is on, the halo grows out of the photo's edge every time a new picture opens. That growth used to take a fixed third of a second, which on a fast sorting run meant the background was still catching up when you had already moved on. A new "Halo animation speed" drop-down sits right under the Animated checkbox with three choices: Slow is exactly the old timing, Medium is twice as fast and is what you get now, and Fast is four times as fast. Only the arrival changes - the halo looks identical once it has settled, at every speed, and window resizing and zooming still draw it instantly as before. The setting is remembered, and changing it applies to the next photo rather than jolting an animation already under way.

Changed

• The translation plate now takes its colours from the picture underneath it (64-bit program). It used to be the same nearly-white rectangle with black text on every image, which on a dark page or a coloured panel was the most obvious blemish the feature had. The program now samples the paper and the ink from the area the text occupied and paints the plate in those, so a translation over a dark comic panel stays dark and one over a yellowed page stays on paper. Heavy display lettering, where the strokes cover more of the box than the background does, would fool a naive reading into painting everything inside out, so the decision is made from what surrounds the block rather than from the block itself; and if the pair it finds would be too faint to read, it falls back to plain dark-on-light or light-on-dark rather than producing a pretty, unreadable plate. Your overlay transparency setting still applies exactly as before. The 32-bit program keeps the old light plate.
• Zooming and resizing a picture full of translated text got noticeably lighter. Choosing the size of the overlay text used to walk down from 200 pixels one pixel at a time, measuring the text at each step, for every block, on every single frame - up to about a hundred and ninety measurements per block whenever the window was resized or the picture zoomed. It now tries about nine sizes instead, stepping down by eight per cent from the size of the original text.

Fixed

• A speech balloon comes out as one plate again, and a heading is no longer glued to the paragraph under it. One balloon regularly broke into two or three plates. The program measured the empty space between the recognized boxes, and a line set in small capitals has no descenders, so its box is visibly shorter than the line and the space beneath it looks like a paragraph break. The translator then got three fragments instead of one sentence, so it was not only the layout that suffered but the translation itself. Lines are now grouped by the distance from the top of one line to the top of the next, which does not care how tall the ink happens to be, and a line joins a plate only if it is set in roughly the same size - which is what keeps a headline from being swallowed by the text below it.
• A screenshot or a form no longer arrives as one plate covering most of the picture. When separate areas of a page are set in one size, at one spacing, in one column - a list of accounts, a form, an application window - nothing about any single line says where one area ends and the next begins, and the whole page was coming back as a single plate covering four fifths of the image with the original completely hidden behind it. Such a plate is now split into one plate per line. Nothing is thrown away in the process: every recognized line still gets its translation, and an ordinary paragraph or a large dense inscription is left as the one plate it should be.
• A long translation no longer loses its tail, and the text no longer spills outside its own plate. If the translation did not fit, the end of it was quietly cut off and nothing said so. The program now first reduces the text size, then lets the plate grow downwards - never past the edge of the picture and never into the plate below it, so plates cannot overlap - and only if neither is enough is anything trimmed. Separately, on a block less than eighteen pixels tall the text used to be drawn taller than the plate it belonged to, above and below it, straight onto the picture: the plate and the text now occupy one and the same rectangle, so that cannot happen.
• Fewer plates of nonsense. A block is now dropped when it is a run of consonants with no vowel anywhere, or a bare web address, e-mail or file path - text the recognizer produces from a texture or a watermark rather than from writing. Japanese, Chinese and Korean are judged by their own rule instead, and scripts that do not write vowels at all - Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari - are not held to a rule written for European alphabets.
• Share Manager: "Manage hosting.." -> the button that opens the Server edition's page no longer lands on "page not found". The address it opened spelled the project name in capitals where the real one does not, and web addresses are case-sensitive, so the one link that explains the always-on edition led nowhere.

Added

• A separate "always-on" edition of folder sharing for machines that have to stay available. Until now your folders were reachable from the phone only while you were signed in and the Share Manager was running - fine for a normal PC, useless for a machine whose whole job is to serve files. The new Folder Share Server edition is a separate download (from the website, the GitHub release, or winget install --id SerZhyAle.FastMediaSorter.Server) that installs a Windows service instead: it starts with Windows, serves with nobody signed in, keeps going through a log-off, and restarts itself if it ever fails. It asks for administrator rights once, during installation, and tells you exactly what it does with them - registers the service, creates a protected folder for the host key and password, and adds one firewall rule for the sharing program. Nothing is published until you choose the folders; the service never guesses. Install it only if the machine really is meant to stay up - on an ordinary PC the regular version is still the better choice, and it needs no administrator at all.
• Switching between the two is safe both ways, and your phone does not notice. The server installer takes over the setup you already have - the folders, the password, the port and, most importantly, the host key your phone remembers - so paired phones keep connecting without being paired again. Going back is one button in the Share Manager ("Manage hosting.." -> "Return to the User edition.."). If anything about the key cannot be verified, the switch stops before the service is created rather than quietly issuing a new key and breaking every phone. Both editions work on one and the same folder list and settings, so whichever one is serving, you see the same thing.
• The Share Manager now says exactly what is running, and can fix it. A new "Manage hosting.." window separates the four things that used to look identical when a phone could not connect: whether the service is *installed*, whether it is *running*, whether SFTP is actually *serving*, and whether any folders are chosen at all. It also names who is answering right now - the Windows service or the program's own background process - and shows the shared settings folder both of them use. When the service is installed it gains Start, Stop, Restart and "Repair the service registration", plus a button that gives the service permission to read the folders you picked (it runs under its own account, so a folder inside your user profile is invisible to it until that is granted). Only what the program itself added is ever taken back.
• Every package now carries THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt next to the licence - the copyright notices and licence terms of everything the program bundles: the VLC playback engine, the image decoders, the Tesseract OCR engine and its language models, and the dozen Go libraries inside the folder-sharing component. It was only ever a repository fact before; now it installs with the program, in the installer, the portable archive, the Store version and the Server edition alike.
• New in Settings ▸ Files and system: "Allow launching in new windows" (64-bit program). It is off by default, so reopening a file still sends it to the existing window unless you explicitly enable it. When enabled, every new launch is a separate process and gets its own viewer window; the first window keeps the shared settings and position, while additional windows clearly say so and never overwrite them. The 32-bit program keeps its existing single-window behaviour.
• "Send the logs to the author" on the Settings -> About tab. When something misbehaves, one button now packs the program's logs into an archive and opens a new mail with the file already attached, addressed to the author, with a short template to fill in. Before anything happens you are shown what went into the archive - the log, the Share Manager log if there is one, and a report with the version, Windows details and your settings - and you can open the archive and look at it. The program itself never sends anything anywhere: the mail leaves only when you press Send in your own mail program, and if the machine has no mail program that accepts attachments, the archive is copied to the clipboard and shown in its folder so you can attach it by hand. Your translation API key is never written into the report, and a log that has grown for months contributes only its last two megabytes, so the mail stays sendable.

Changed

• Copying is now something you ask for at the moment you sort, not a mode you switch on beforehand (64-bit program). To copy a file instead of moving it you used to open Settings, tick "COPY mode (files are not moving)", sort, and then remember to untick it - and if you forgot, the next hundred files were copied instead of moved, or the copy you expected turned out to be a move. That checkbox is gone. Now a digit 1..9 or 0 moves the current file into that folder, and Shift + the same digit on the top row copies it there - the folders and the keys are the same, only the action differs. The same choice is everywhere the old one was hidden: the floating recipients panel gives every folder a narrow "copy" zone beside the row (the row itself still moves, and the delete row stays one action), both media menus now show "Move to" and "Copy to" side by side instead of whichever one the mode happened to be in, and in the recipients table in Settings a double-click on the key number moves while Shift + double-click copies. In the thumbnail panel (F3) the same pairing applies to the whole selection. The keys are the top-row digits on purpose: with NumLock on, Windows lets go of NumLock while Shift is held, so Shift + a numpad digit never arrives as a digit at all - the numpad keeps moving files, as always.
• New in Settings ▸ Files and system: "Go to the next file after copying", on by default, in the place the old copy-mode checkbox occupied. On, and a copy behaves like the fast sorting run you already know - the next file comes up at once. Off, and the same file stays on screen after being copied, which is what you want when you are filing one picture into several folders: Shift+1, Shift+3, Shift+7 and it lands in all three. If the copy fails, the program comes back to the file it failed on instead of leaving you on the next one.
• The 32-bit program is unchanged: it keeps the old copy-mode checkbox and behaves exactly as before.
• The website's translated pages moved to one address prefix. Each of the twelve translations used to sit at its own top-level address (/de/, /zh/, /ar/ ..); they now live together under /lang/ - /lang/de/, /lang/zh/, /lang/ar/ and so on. Nothing about the pages themselves changed, and every link on the site, in the language switcher and in the search-engine metadata already points at the new addresses. Only an old bookmark or an outside link straight to /de/ stops working; the entry page and the switcher take you to the same page as before.

Fixed

• The Share Manager button works on a machine that has the Server edition, and updating the viewer no longer leaves such a machine not serving. Three faults in the same seam. The button looked for the Share Manager only next to the viewer's own exe - but a machine with the Server edition installs the manager in its own folder and deliberately does not get a second copy beside the viewer, so a perfectly healthy setup was told to "reinstall the application". It now also finds the one the Server edition recorded, exactly as the Server edition's tray menu already finds a normally installed viewer. Second: Setup stops the sharing service before replacing files (its worker holds them), and nothing ever started it again - every viewer update quietly left a server machine unreachable until the next reboot. A service set to start Automatically is now started back; one its owner set to Manual or Disabled is left alone. Third: uninstalling removed only the firewall rule *named* by the installer, while the rules Windows itself writes when it asks "Allow access?" - named after the program - stayed on the machine for ever, one per install location, outliving the files they point at. Uninstall now also deletes every rule aimed at the executable being removed.
• With "keep on top" switched on, the windows the program opens no longer hide behind it. Settings opened *behind* the pinned viewer - the button looked dead, because the window it opened was there all along, just underneath. Windows keeps a window above the one that opened it only within the same layer, and "keep on top" moves the viewer into a layer of its own, so anything opened afterwards started underneath it. Now every window the program opens - Settings, the thumbnail panel (F3), the folder and file pickers - joins the viewer in that layer, switching "keep on top" on or off moves an already-open window with it, and the whole set steps aside together when the program has to show you something outside it (the Ollama installer, your mail program with the log archive attached), instead of only the main window stepping aside and the Settings window covering it instead.
• Folder Share Server: a folder you add is served straight away, and a folder shared for writing really is writable. Two halves of the same problem. The service runs under its own Windows account rather than yours, so a folder you can obviously open may be invisible to the thing that actually serves it - and the fix was a button in the "Manage hosting.." window, which nobody has any reason to look for after simply adding a folder; until you found it the phone got a folder it could not open, with no explanation anywhere. Now the permission is granted at the moment you choose the folder: the program checks first and stays silent when nothing is missing, so the single Windows confirmation appears only when it is actually needed, and declining it says what it costs instead of failing later on the phone. The second half: that grant only ever gave read access, so a folder marked writable let the phone browse and download and then refused every delete, move and upload. It now follows the folder list - read for a read-only folder, read and write for a writable one - and switching a folder to writable afterwards re-applies it instead of quietly leaving the old read-only permission behind.
• Share Manager: "Check access from the internet" stops being permanently grey on a share that works. The button was disabled for the duration of every operation, as buttons are - but unlike the others its enabled state is worked out from the sharing status rather than set in one place, and nothing re-asked for it once the operation finished. So on a share that had just been started - exactly when you want to check that the outside world can reach it - the button went grey and stayed that way until the program was restarted.
• Share Manager: "Open Fast Media Sorter" in the tray menu works in the Server edition. That package installs the Share Manager on its own, and the menu item only ever looked for the viewer in its own folder - so on a server machine it did nothing at all, silently. It now finds a normally installed viewer wherever it is, and when there really is none the item is simply not shown.
• The program survives being left open for days, and stops growing while it sits there. A code audit of everything that only goes wrong after hours or thousands of files found and fixed a set of problems you could never reproduce in a minute of use. The worst three: the thumbnail panel (F3) no longer builds a card for every file from the start of the folder up to wherever you are standing - open it at photo ten thousand of a fifteen-thousand-file folder and it opens at once, instead of decoding ten thousand images and running the program out of window handles until it had to be restarted; a folder that goes unreachable mid-session no longer crashes the program - when a network drive drops, the viewer used to skip through the remaining files until it ran out of stack and died instantly, taking with it every setting, recent-folder entry and reading position changed since launch; and the log file next to the program stops growing for ever - it used to gain a line for every single image you looked at, a megabyte or two a day, and nothing ever trimmed it.
• Your settings are no longer lost if the program does not close normally. Destination folders for the number keys, the recent files and folders lists, the position in the folder and every option were written only when the window was closed cleanly - so a crash, a power cut or ending the task threw away everything changed since the last proper exit, even days of it. Editing a destination folder now saves it immediately, and everything else is written a minute after it changes.
• Closing the program while files are still being moved no longer loses them silently. Sorting keys pressed during the "finishing file operations.." wait were accepted, reported as done and then discarded - the file stayed where it was while the program said it had been moved. Those keys are now refused with a clear message. If the transfers need longer than the fifteen seconds the program waits, it asks whether to keep waiting instead of closing regardless, and a move between two different disks or network shares is now staged through a temporary name, so an interrupted transfer can no longer leave a half-copied file under the real file's name.
• The window stops freezing on a sleeping network drive. Reading a folder, opening a file passed from Explorer, waiting for a file that is still downloading, and checking whether an image can be translated all used to run on the same thread that draws the window, so a share that had gone to sleep froze everything for as long as Windows took to give up - up to four minutes on the 32-bit program when a second copy was launched with a network path. A picture that cannot be read within twenty seconds is now reported as unavailable instead of holding the program hostage, and the errors that used to appear as pop-up dialogs - one per file when a key was held down - now go to the status line.
• Automatic translation no longer bogs the program down over a long session. Switching pictures while OCR was running left the abandoned recognitions running to the end anyway, queueing up behind each other; they now stop as soon as their picture is gone. Both translation caches are now kept within a size limit - including the megabyte limit the settings window offered, which until now was displayed and saved but enforced by nothing, so the cache kept growing regardless of what you set it to.
• Share Manager: "Share this folder with phone.." now works when the manager window is already open. The folder was quietly discarded in that case - nothing was added, nothing was said - so the feature appeared to work at random depending on whether the window happened to be closed. The manager also no longer wedges permanently if its background component stops responding: every request to it now has a time limit, and it stops polling a component that is not there.
• iPhone photos really do open now: HEIC, HEIF and AVIF were announced but did not work in the installed program. The library that decodes them was built, but it was left behind when the package was assembled - so the feature worked when the program was run from the developer's build folder and failed everywhere else. Nothing about the feature changed; it is simply in the package now. This affected the installer, the portable archive and the Store version alike, from the release that introduced the formats.
• The program no longer ships a log file from the machine it was built on. Every package carried a current.log left over from testing, with the build machine's own folder paths inside it, and installed it next to the program - so your own log began with someone else's sessions. It is excluded from all four packages now.

Added

• The website now has a page in each of the 13 languages. Every language gets its own address (/de/, /zh/, /ar/ and so on) with its own search-engine metadata, so a search in German finds the German page rather than the English one. The three-language entry page stays where it was and now links to the other ten. Ukrainian is uk everywhere - on the site it used to be ua while the app and the README already said uk; if you had picked Ukrainian on the site before, your choice carries over.
• The interface now speaks 13 languages. English, Russian, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Chinese. On a fresh install the program follows the language your Windows interface is in and falls back to English if it has no translation for it; your existing choice is kept and never overridden. The language button on the toolbar stopped being an EN/RU toggle - it now shows the current language code and drops a list of all thirteen with their flags, and the same list is on the Settings window. Arabic and Urdu are written right to left; Hindi, Bengali and Chinese switch to a font that can draw them. Only English, Russian and Ukrainian are proofread by the author - the other ten are machine translations, and corrections through the issue tracker are very welcome. The setup wizard itself stays English. On Windows 7, 8.1 and 32-bit Windows the program keeps English and Russian only: the font Windows needs for Hindi and Bengali does not exist there, and offering a language that renders as empty boxes would be worse than not offering it.
• The picker for the OCR and translation languages now names each language in its own script - Deutsch, Ελληνικά, 中文（简体）, العربية - instead of naming all 33 of them in the language the interface happens to be in. A Greek user recognises "Ελληνικά" whichever interface language is selected.
• The Share Manager speaks the same 13 languages, and the two programs share one choice: pick a language in either and the other one is in it too the next time it starts. Its picker is in the tray menu ("Interface language") and at the bottom of its window, so it is reachable even when the manager is only a tray icon. Because its windows are built in one pass, switching the language rebuilds the window rather than relabelling it - what is on screen simply reappears in the new language. The step-by-step router port-forwarding guide stays in English, Russian and Ukrainian: it is a long hand-written document, and every other language opens the English version rather than a page that does not exist.
• Share Manager: "Open the manager window at startup". Off by default, and it decides for every plain start of the program - the one Windows makes at logon, a double-click on the program itself, a start right after installation: unticked you get the tray icon alone (with a short note saying where the program went), ticked the window comes up with it. Opening the manager on purpose is unaffected and always shows the window: the viewer's "Share Manager.." button, "Share this folder with phone..", and the tray icon.

Changed

• Share Manager: the QR code window can now be made bigger. Each click on the code doubles the window, then fills the screen with it, then returns to the size it opened at - handy when the phone is held across the room or its camera struggles in dim light. The window can also be dragged to any size: it stays square, so the code always fills it, and it is drawn with sharp edges instead of blurred ones at large sizes. Closing it moved to Esc, the close box or a right click on the code, since the left button now zooms.

Fixed

• Eight drop-downs in the settings window were in Russian for everyone. In the previous release the option lists on the settings pages - where the recipients panel sits, how a new picture is scaled, slideshow order, what a click on a video does, what happens when a video ends, what to do about a name collision, where to go after a file operation, and what to open at startup - had never been given English text at all, so they showed Russian whatever language the rest of the window was in. They are now translated like everything else.
• Share Manager: text no longer overflows its buttons and boxes at 125-200% display scaling. The windows were laid out in 96-DPI pixels while Windows rendered the text up to twice as large, so captions were cut off, addresses were shortened to "192.168.1.100:54.." and the "Share" button sliced its own label in half. Every Share Manager window now scales with the display, including the folder list's columns and the drawn button icons - and follows along when the window is dragged to a monitor with different scaling.

Added

• The viewer now comes as two programs in one folder, so it runs well on both new and old machines:
  • Fast Media Sorter (FastMediaSorter_LITE.exe) - the new 64-bit build on .NET 10. It replaces the previous program in place and keeps all your settings. What it fixes right away: animated WEBP images open everywhere (the app decodes them itself, instead of relying on the Windows "WebP Image Extensions" codec that server editions of Windows don't have), and video always plays through the built-in VLC engine - the retired Internet Explorer component is gone, so playback behaves the same on systems that no longer ship it. Nothing to install: the .NET runtime is inside the program.
  • FastMediaSorter_x86.exe - the same viewer as a lean 32-bit build, for older and 32-bit versions of Windows that the new one cannot run on. Both are built from the same sources and share one set of settings and one set of adjacent libraries (codecs, OCR and translation models) - each automatically picks the right ones for its own bitness. They are one application: starting one while the other is open just brings the open window forward with your file, instead of opening a second window. Sorting, browsing, OCR and translation work the same in both. The 32-bit program is the sorter as it has always been; the additions marked "64-bit program" below are the ones the modern runtime made possible, and Android folder sharing is now 64-bit only (see Removed).
• Zoom, on the grey keys (64-bit program). The grey + and - on the numeric keypad zoom the picture at the mouse cursor, so you magnify the thing you are pointing at rather than the middle of the screen; grey / fits the picture back into the window and grey * shows it at actual size (100 %). Drag a zoomed picture with the left button to pan it. Only the grey block is used: the keypad's 0..9 stay with sorting and the arrows stay navigation. The mouse wheel still flips through files as it always has - if you would rather it zoomed, there is now a "Wheel zooms" checkbox in Settings ▸ Viewing.
• Choosing the audio track and subtitles (64-bit program). A film with several audio tracks or subtitle tracks used to play whichever one the file listed first, with no way to change it. A cycles the audio track, V the subtitles, and a "Tracks" button appears in the toolbar only when the file actually offers a choice. Your pick is remembered by language, not by position in the file, so once you choose Russian audio the next episode comes up in Russian too. (VLC's own audio-track key is B, which is "previous file" here - hence A.)
• iPhone photos open now: HEIC, HEIF and AVIF are supported (64-bit program). These are the formats phones actually produce - iPhones save HEIC by default, and AVIF is increasingly what the web serves - and until now the sorter could only list them with "Unsupported format". The program decodes them itself, so nothing needs to be installed: no Store "HEIF Image Extensions", and no paid "HEVC Video Extensions" codec that HEIC normally demands on Windows. Sideways phone shots come up the right way round (the EXIF auto-rotate setting applies, as with JPEG), they can be OCR-translated and zoomed like any picture, and "register as default image viewer" now claims these formats too. The 32-bit program still reports them honestly as unsupported - the codecs simply do not exist on the old Windows versions it is for.
• "Open URL.." - play a video straight off a network address (64-bit program). Right-click the file-selection button and paste an address: smb://, sftp://, ftp://, http(s)://, nfs:// and rtsp:// all play without downloading the file first. Ordinary Windows network paths (\\server\share\film.mkv) worked before and still open the usual way. Video only, on purpose: an image address is refused with a clear message, because the picture features (zoom, OCR translation, the perspective background) all read a decoded image from disk.
• "Share this folder with phone.." is reachable again, and the folder box's right-click menu gained "Select folder.." and "Select file.." (64-bit program). The menu was attached to the folder box but never appeared where anyone would click - on the path itself: an editable box like that hides a standard Windows text field inside, and the field answered the right-click with its own Cut/Copy/Paste. The command was only reachable from the small "Folder:" label beside it, which read as "it doesn't work". Every item now carries a tooltip saying plainly what it does.
• Sorting no longer waits for the file to travel (64-bit program). Moving or copying a file now happens in the background, always, and the next file appears at once - press the hotkeys as fast as you like and they all queue up and run in order; when several are still in flight the status line shows how many. This matters most when the destination is on a network share, where the file has to cross the wire: the window used to stand still for the whole transfer (that was the "use an independent thread for file operations" checkbox, off by default), or, with the checkbox on, refuse the next press until the previous one finished. Both are gone. If an operation fails, the file returns to the list where it was, and closing the program waits for the queue to finish so a transfer is never cut in half.
• Moving onto an existing name just works (64-bit program): the file is saved as name (2).ext, Explorer-style, and the status line says so. It used to fail and stop the run - a daily event when sorting photo sessions where the same names arrive from different cards.
• A file on a sleeping network share no longer freezes the window (64-bit program). Checking whether it can be opened now happens in the background - the status line says "Checking availability" and you can keep browsing a local folder meanwhile. The retry logic itself is unchanged (it still tells apart "gone", "still downloading" and "the share hiccuped").
• Video controls in the 64-bit program. Video there is played by the built-in VLC engine, which draws the picture and nothing else - so there was no way to seek or change the volume, only a right-click to pause. A control bar now sits along the bottom of the video with play/pause, a seek bar, the running time, mute and a volume slider. It appears when you move the mouse over the picture and slips away a couple of seconds later, the way the old player's bar did; while the video is paused it stays put, so there is always something to press. (The 32-bit program already had this - its video runs through the Internet Explorer component, which draws its own controls.)
• "Dynamic perspective" - a halo around the photo (64-bit program). A new checkbox under "Perspective" in Settings ▸ Viewing. The perspective bars normally run at full colour all the way out to the edge of the screen; with this on, they fade into the background colour the further they get from the photo, so the picture sits in a glow instead of between two solid slabs. Off by default, and it does nothing unless "Perspective" itself is on. Under it sits "Animated": leave it on and the halo grows out from the edge of each new photo to the edge of the screen in about a third of a second; turn it off and the same halo is simply drawn at once. Either way the picture ends up looking identical once it has settled, and resizing the window or zooming never replays the growth - only a new photo does.
• The middle mouse button opens a menu for the picture (64-bit program). It used to do exactly one hidden thing - rename - which is the weakest possible use of a whole button: nobody finds it, and it is one action out of the dozen the program can perform on the picture in front of you. Middle-click now offers all of them: rotate either way, fit to window, actual size, translate the text on it (when OCR translation is on), full screen, next/previous file, rename, move to a destination folder, delete, and copy the file path. Rename is still there, so nothing is lost. The right button on a picture is untouched - it stays "previous file", as it has always been.
• The mouse now runs the video (64-bit program). Click the picture to pause or resume it - where every video player has put it; it used to be the right button, which nobody tries first. A double-click still leaves full screen and no longer disturbs playback along the way. Right-click the video and you get everything the program can do to it, in one menu instead of scattered across hotkeys, the Settings window and a toolbar button that only shows up sometimes: pause/resume, mute, repeat, the audio track and subtitles, full screen, next/previous file, rename, move to a destination folder, delete, open in your default player, and open a URL. Items you cannot use are simply not there - a video playing from a URL offers no rename or delete, and the track lists appear only when the file actually gives you a choice. Repeat now takes effect on the video you are watching, not just the next one: it picks up where it was, to the second, instead of starting over.

Changed

• A security update to the image library the 32-bit program uses for WEBP (ImageSharp 2.1.8 to 2.1.13), which closes four published vulnerabilities. Nothing changes in how the program looks or behaves. The 64-bit program was never affected - it uses a newer line of that library.

Removed

• Android folder sharing is no longer offered in the 32-bit program, and setup no longer installs it on Windows 7/8.1. This is a correction, not a cut: the Share Manager that the button opened is itself a 64-bit .NET 10 program, so on exactly the machines the 32-bit viewer exists for, Windows refused to start it - the entry point led nowhere. OCR and translation stay in the 32-bit program, because unlike sharing, they work there. Sharing is unchanged in the 64-bit program.

Fixed

• The perspective background and dynamic colour no longer flicker during a fast slideshow. They switched off below a 2-second interval, which was still fast enough for the per-photo GDI+ work to visibly lag behind the flips; the cutoff is now 5 seconds, and an interval exactly at the cutoff is now included instead of falling just short of it. A pass over the viewer's core - browsing, file operations, slideshow, video and window state. All of these apply to both programs.
• Starting up reads the folder once, not twice. Restoring the last folder walked the whole directory just to check the saved position, then read it again properly. On a big folder over the network that was a second of frozen window spent to learn nothing.
• Pressing "random" on the first file of a folder no longer re-reads the whole folder - it used to take "I am on file number 0" to mean "the list is not loaded yet".
• Renaming no longer mangles the file. Renaming "photo.jpg" to "photo2" wrote photo2.jpg.jpg to disk and then dropped the file out of the list entirely - it vanished from the viewer while sitting right there in the folder. The name you type is now the name on disk. Renaming a file with the same name as a neighbour says so plainly instead of showing an error code, and renaming a playing video works (the player lets go of the file first).
• No more blank screen after moving a file. With "use an independent thread for file operations" ticked, moving a file blanked the screen and left it that way until you pressed something, and copying didn't move on to the next file. Both now behave exactly like the non-threaded mode.
• Files the app cannot display (HEIC, AVIF, SVG) say so. They were listed and counted but never shown: the previous picture stayed on screen while the counter and the file name had already moved on - so DEL or a move hotkey acted on a file you couldn't see. They now report "Unsupported format" honestly, and the app no longer registers itself as their default handler. The screen they land on is properly empty as well: the background is drawn from the picture on display, so with no picture to draw it from, the previous file's coloured bars and tint simply stayed up - browsing into one of these files left a black rectangle still framed by the colours of the photo before it. The same goes for a folder that turns out to be empty.
• Broken files are skipped again. Skipping past an unreadable file was always the intent, but never actually happened - the screen just kept the previous image. Now a missing, empty or corrupt file is passed over automatically, in the direction you're going (paging back used to bounce you forward), and it leaves the list instead of waiting for you on the way back.
• Failed operations no longer lose the file from view. A move or copy that fails (a name clash in the destination, a lock, a network glitch) used to remove the file from the list anyway. The file now stays, and undo won't offer to "return" something that never left.
• Undo undoes what was actually done. After moving a file, switching to copy mode and pressing U deleted it at the destination - the only copy left - instead of moving it back. Undo now reverses the operation that happened. Undoing the move of a folder's last file no longer crashes, and a second file operation pressed while the first is still running is refused with a clear message instead of breaking the first one.
• Sequential slideshow reaches the end of the folder. It used to park on the last file for good - the timer still running, the file re-read from disk on every tick - instead of returning to the start.
• Pressing S (or I / F5) again really does halve the interval, as documented; only the toolbar button did before.
• Random slideshow no longer slows browsing down afterwards. Stopping it with the mouse left preloading switched off for the rest of the session, so every step decoded from scratch.
• Random is random. The random slideshow replayed the same files in the same order in every session.
• Fast browsing shows the right picture. Under a fast flip on a slow folder, the preloaded image could appear under the wrong file's name - and a delete then acted on the file you weren't looking at.
• Jumps (Home/End, arrows, +-10/100/1000 clicks) keep the counter and the picture in step, even when a jump can't be carried out at that moment.
• N opens "jump to file number" again (it was unreachable), cancelling that dialog no longer reports an error, and a key press with a toolbar button focused no longer does its action twice.
• The file counter after opening a single file from Explorer counted every file in the folder, not just the media - so it announced the wrong total, End could break navigation, and DEL could empty the view.
• Video: switching away from a video while the player was still starting no longer lets the old video jump back over your picture a second later; two videos in quick succession no longer start two independent players (which left the first file locked); a folder with a video that only VLC can play (AVI, ZMBV, VP9, MKV) can now be sorted on the 32-bit build too - DEL and move hotkeys used to fail on it.
• Zoom resets for each new file (64-bit build): a zoomed-in shot left the next one shown at a wrong scale with a wrong readout, and left-click stopped browsing until you reset zoom by hand.
• Panning follows the mouse. Dragging a zoomed picture moved it at roughly half the speed of the hand and stuttered; grabbing it again without moving the mouse first made it jump.
• Closing during a file operation froze the window for about five seconds and released resources under the still-running operation.
• The window comes back where you left it on large and multi-monitor desktops (positions past a 1366x768-era limit, or on a monitor left of the main one, were thrown away).
• The last-viewed position is remembered even when you leave a folder on its first file (it used to restore a position from a previous folder).
• Files with "-noback" in the name open. photo-noback.jpg was cut down to photo.jpg - "file not found" - and could not be opened at all.
• Opening a file that can't be reached no longer kills navigation in the folder you already had open; a file that's still downloading is no longer opened minutes later, on top of whatever you moved on to, and is dropped properly if it disappears meanwhile; a corrupt sort setting in the registry no longer crashes startup; file sizes labelled KiB/MiB are now actually computed in KiB/MiB.