Release
Archyv 1.4.0
Your edit files now travel with your photos.
If you develop your photos in Lightroom, Capture One, DxO PhotoLab, RawTherapee or Apple Photos, your edits do not live inside the photo — they live in a separate small file sitting beside it. Archyv used to move only two kinds of those files, and only for stills. Everything else was left behind.
That meant you could rename a batch of photos and quietly lose your develop settings: the photos got new names, the edit files kept the old ones, and your editing software could no longer match them up. Videos were worse — their companion files were always left behind, and Archyv never said so.
Twenty-four kinds of edit file now travel with the photo they belong to — through renaming, sorting, transferring, and deleting a duplicate — and they come back if you undo the run.
Three things come with that:
- Archyv now tells you when a file cannot travel, and why, in words you can act on. Silence was the original problem.
- Both renaming screens list what will move before you commit, counted, so you can see it is right first.
- If anything in a group fails, the whole group is put back. A batch can no longer stop half-renamed.
What to do: nothing. But if you have renamed or moved photos with a previous version and your editing software has since lost track of your edits, the edit files are most likely still sitting in the original folder under the old names.
Overwriting a photo no longer strands its edits
When File Transfer was set to overwrite, it replaced the photo at the destination but left that photo’s edit file behind — now sitting beside a completely different photo that never owned it. Later, that photo could show the wrong develop settings.
The edit file now goes with the photo it belongs to, the run log names which photo it went to the Trash with, and undoing the transfer brings both back together.
A long freeze on large selections is fixed
Starting any process that writes to your files begins with a check that they are not read-only. On a large selection — particularly on a network or cloud drive — that check could stall for a very long time without finishing or reporting an error. It was measured freezing for 88 minutes on a folder of 449 files on Google Drive.
That is fixed, and the progress text during those two checking stages now says what it is actually doing in plain language.
Finding photos works on more of your metadata
Three separate problems all produced the same misleading result — a search that completed successfully and found nothing, when the photos were there:
- Fields that hold several values are now matched on all of them. A photo with two subject codes was findable by the first and invisible by the second.
- Six fields with fixed lists of values are now findable at all. The list offered values that could never match what Archyv actually reads back from a file, so picking a perfectly valid one returned nothing.
- Values that live only in a companion file are now searchable. Seven fields were read from the file beside your photo and then discarded. Keywords, City, Country and Title already worked this way, which is what made the gap so confusing.
When a search finds a photo because of a value in its companion file, the Metadata Editor now shows you that value and names the file it came from, so a match no longer looks like an empty field. Hovering the line explains it.
The list of found values beneath the search box is now labelled Filter, so it is no longer mistaken for the search box above it.
Scene is now two fields
The single Scene field was doing two unrelated jobs: holding a standard six-digit IPTC scene code on photos, and a free-text slate label such as “Reel 4 Take 2” on video. Because both were stored under the same name, reading one could show the other, and saving one could destroy the other. Video Scene Names were shown under the wrong label in Metadata Review.
They are now separate:
- Scene Code — photos and videos, chosen from the standard IPTC list, and can hold several values.
- Video Scene Name — video only, free text, no list.
Both appear in the Metadata Editor, Metadata Review, Quick View, and as search filters.
What to do: if you have used Scene before, check which of the two fields your values are in. Nothing is changed on your files until you save.
Renaming and pattern editing
- Answers you type for missing values now belong to the pattern you typed them for. Previously they could be reused by a different pattern that happened to share a variable name, or the question could be skipped entirely so a fallback was used without asking — either way producing a filename you did not intend.
- Arrow keys and clicking to position the cursor work again in the Filename Templates editor and the Manual Renaming pattern field. They had stopped responding, with an alert sound on every key press.
- Two pieces of text typed as separate blocks stay separate when a pattern is saved and reopened, instead of merging into one. Your filenames are unchanged.
Other fixes
- Location on video no longer loses half of itself. Editing latitude and longitude together could save one and silently discard the other, while reporting both as stored.
- The same photo now always sorts to the same camera folder. Where a file recorded its camera in more than one place, the folder it landed in could differ between two runs of an unchanged photo.
- A watermark keeps its settings when you switch it off. Turning a watermark off and saving discarded the whole configuration — text, font, position, opacity — so turning it back on gave you empty fields.
- The import dialog for a name clash works properly. It drew incorrectly and ignored the mouse; only Esc closed it.
- Editing metadata one file at a time returns you to your files when you press Finish, instead of leaving you on the editor screen.
- Warnings about companion files now appear while you are looking at the folder, and name the folder they came from — rather than turning up at the start of the next unrelated run.
New
Release Notes, in the Help menu, opens the release-notes page so you can read what changed in any version without waiting for an update prompt.
Licences
A licence check that could not save its key no longer leaves an out-of-date key behind that could later delete a valid licence. This completes the licence persistence work that began in 1.3.5; if your licence has been forgotten in the past, that was fixed for everyone at the end of July and needed no update.