8 posts tagged with "photo mangement"

The past year has been an important one for Starsky. What started as a powerful self-hosted photo and media management tool continued its transition into a more mature, robust, and scalable platform. From foundational breaking changes to long-term stability improvements, 2025 was less about flashy features and more about getting the core right.

Looking back over the releases from 0.6.7 through 0.7.6, several clear themes emerge: modernization, resilience, better tooling, and preparing Starsky for the future.

A Major Milestone: The 0.7 Line​

The release of Starsky 0.7.0 marked the most significant shift this year. It wasn’t just another version bump—it represented a conscious decision to evolve core assumptions and clean up long-standing technical debt.

Smarter Imports and Structural Changes​

One of the biggest breaking changes was the new import structure, enabling smarter, rule-based imports with conditional logic, structure definitions, and color classes. This change laid the groundwork for more predictable, extensible media organization and was important enough to deserve its own dedicated blog post.

While breaking changes are never easy, this one clearly signaled that Starsky is designed for the long term—not frozen by backward compatibility at the cost of clarity.

WebP as the Default Thumbnail Format​

Switching the default thumbnail format to WebP was another bold but forward-looking move. It improved performance, reduced storage usage, and aligned Starsky with modern web standards. The beta period helped iron out platform-specific issues (notably on macOS), leading to a stable rollout.

Backend: Stability, Performance, and Observability​

Much of the work this year happened quietly in the backend—but its impact is significant.

Reliability Improvements​

• Better exception handling (ZIP files, HttpClient timeouts)
• Improved database concurrency handling
• Reduced timeouts and safer background jobs
• More predictable temp file behavior

These changes don’t add new buttons to the UI, but they make Starsky feel solid. Fewer edge cases, fewer surprises.

Thumbnail Generation Grows Up​

Thumbnail generation saw continuous attention:

• Background jobs for small thumbnails
• Native QuickLook and Shell thumbnails on macOS and Windows
• Better logging and diagnostics
• Fixes for race conditions and stale thumbnails after renames

This culminated in a system that is both more performant and easier to reason about when something goes wrong.

Front-end and Desktop: Modernization Without Disruption​

On the front-end side, 2025 was about staying current without reinventing everything.

• Dependency updates across the board
• Migration work leading up to React 19
• Code style consistency improvements
• UX refinements like better input defaults and clearer error handling

The Electron-based desktop app followed the same philosophy: frequent dependency updates, fewer surprises, and better alignment with the web app.

The Quiet Wins​

Some of the most meaningful improvements were small, targeted fixes:

• GPX parsing edge cases
• Slug handling for special characters
• Regex timeouts
• WebSocket update reliability
• Better defaults and clearer error messages

Individually minor, collectively transformative. This is the kind of work that turns a promising tool into one people rely on daily.

Looking Ahead​

With 0.7.6 still unreleased and focused on correctness rather than features, Starsky feels like it’s entering a new phase: one where the foundation is strong enough to support bolder ideas again.

After a year of:

• breaking old assumptions,
• modernizing the stack,
• tightening security,
• and improving stability,

Starsky is better positioned than ever to grow—without losing its focus.

If 2024 was about momentum, 2025 was about maturity.

Here’s to the next chapter.

Version 0.7.0 is a major update focused on smarter imports, improved performance, and breaking changes to configuration. Here’s what’s changed since v0.6.8:

We’re excited to introduce a powerful new feature in Starsky that gives you more control than ever over how your photos are imported, organized, and tagged. With the new ImportTransformation and Structure Rules, you can now define conditional logic that applies different folder structures and metadata depending on image format or origin.

This does mean a breaking change in v0.7.0 or newer to how the folder structure is defined, so let’s walk you through what’s new and how you can use it.

2024 has been a transformative year for the Starsky project with significant updates and enhancements across various components. Below is a summary of the key updates and improvements:

We're excited to unveil our latest release, Version 0.6.0, packed with exciting updates and enhancements to elevate your user experience! Let's dive into the key highlights of this release:

As we bid farewell to the year 2023, it's essential to reflect on the strides made in the ever-evolving landscape of technology. This year has been marked by continuous improvement, innovation, and a relentless commitment to enhancing the user experience. In this blog post, we'll delve into the notable updates and advancements encapsulated in the various releases of version 0.5.x of our software.

So it was high time to optimise the time-consuming process of photo management. I really enjoy going out and taking pictures. But when I get home, it’s time to properly organise all those photos. That task is typically something we postpone, but it is nice to share the photos and experiences. I have developed a piece of software for this process and in this blog I will tell you what I have improved in this in 2022. This year it really started for the project. The first blog post about the project is a fact. In addition, a demo can also be viewed at demo.qdraw.nl

I really enjoy going out and taking pictures. But when I get home, it's time to properly organize all those photos. That task is typically something we put off, but it is nice to share the photos and experiences – for example on this blog and various social media channels where I regularly post something. So it was high time to optimize the time-consuming process of photo management. In this article, based on my own experiences, I will discuss the solutions I found for the 7 most common problems in effectively managing a photo collection.

1. Quick search, quick find​

Finding that one photo you're looking for can be quite difficult. That's why finding what you've been looking for quickly and easily is a great way to get a lot more done in a shorter amount of time. For example, Spotlight (search) works great on Mac OS, although it is not integrated in the mobile version. When you place a number of keywords in the meta data field in an image, you can search for them later. But also by date, description and information that is stored in the camera. So quick search, quick find

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