thanks dad love you

Hey lads, hydev here, my internet died and it could be a week before it is fixed. I don't have a good solution for my dev logins to talk to the internet, so no release or posts for a bit, will update later!

My internet came back today, and despite the problems, I had a great couple of weeks of work. The manage times dialog can now operate on many files at once, and it can even set incrementally increasing times to files to force particular file sorts. There are also some miscellanious bug fixes and quality of life improvements.

The release should be as normal tomorrow.

Sorry, question here. Is there a way to change a file's hash? To make hydrus associate all of the tags and logs of one file with another?

>>1583
Not in the convenient way you are thinking, unfortunately. 'This file has this hash is core to the whole database, so if you start messing around with ids, I can't promise that some maintenance routine won't notice the problem later and throw a bunch of warnings and errors.

I can do something though. Most of this tech is in the 'duplicates' system, where you can copy tags and ratings and URLs from one file to another, but it is clunky to work with and doesn't copy every possible thing. I plan to keep working on it because we are running into more and more situations where we want clean easy and automatable sharing/duplicating of metadata across similar files.

Here's the general help, if you haven't seen it. You can access all the 'set these files as same quality duplicates' commands outside of the duplicate filter through the normal thumbnail menu when you have multiple files selected, but you'll want to set up your 'default duplicate metadata merge options' in a duplicates processing page first, so your client knows what to merge where in these situations.

https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/duplicates.html

>>1585
Thank for your answering my question.

>>1586
*Thank you for answering my question.

I had a great week. I completely overhauled how file timestamps are stored across the program, adding millisecond resolution so 'sort by import time' is more reliable, and I then added timestamp editing to the Client API.

The release should be as normal tomorrow.

>>1576
Not yet, but in the future I expect to link clients together via the Client API this way. Fingers crossed, you'll be able to browse another client's files as simply as selecting it as the location in the normal file service selector.

The copy service key button is just there because I think I have it set as available for everything. It mostly gets used for weird debug purposes atm.

>>1577
That will be good to have. In the meantime, is it possible to use the same db for both a client and server?
e.g. The client is all set up, I shutdown the client, point a server to the same db folder. Would this cause any problems, especially if I then stopped using the server and booted the client?
If it matters, it's dockerized, I'll probably just make a backup to play with, but I wondered if it's expected for the two to play nice with the underlying database.

Also really like what you're doing with the system predicates.
If this is already possible let me know, but I'd like a way to set custom shorthand for specific system predicates... like system:landscape for system:ratio=landscape, for instance, or something even shorter - it didn't seem like siblings work for system predicates (technically they're not tags anyways, so that part makes sense to me)

I had an ok week. I fixed some bugs, improved some quality of life, and figured out a basic first version of 'system:number of urls'.

The release should be as normal tomorrow.

>>1578
Unfortunately the client and server databases are not compatible. Even if you point both exes at the same directory, the client makes client.db and server makes server.db. They are very different programs and databases and outside of the normal repository syncing, they cannot talk to each other or do each other's jobs, I'm afraid. This has come up before, so some of the discord guys wrote up this document:

https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/youDontWantTheServer.html

I quite like the idea of 'system:landscape' style shorthands. I'm in the midst of fleshing out the system predicate parsing system right now, and there's a ton I'd like to do with it once things are a little less thrown together (I'm rearranging a bunch of system preds, like system:hash last week, so they parse easier). For now, you might like to play with the 'favourite searches' button (the star beside the normal search input text box), which let's you save full searches, or templates of them, for quick loading of quite complicated search setups in just a couple clicks.

>>1579
That page is exactly why I am using the client and not the server.

I believe that page is written from a high-and-mighty misleading perspective, not to mention incredibly lacking in information.

So, my other original question. That page explicitly states that you can run multiple clients without the server and sync files between them.
>Do you want to use multiple clients and have everything synced between them? You don't want the server.

How do you accomplish this without a complex export/import process between the clients?

>>1580
>How do you accomplish this without a complex export/import process between the clients?
Unfortunately, there isn't a good way right now. I plan to, over the next year or two, buff up the Client API and add a way for clients to browse each other. You'll be able to load up another client's file services in the normal search and it'll all just happen over the Client API instead. Once that tech works, I'll be recommending people have a master client that does all the subscriptions and stuff, and then other computers can dial into that one and read its content live.

Although it sucks to say, I know some users who simply set up VPN situations to browse their master client from another machine or tablet.

If you have a relatively slender client, let's say less than 50GB total 'db' directory, another option is simply to have a master client and then FreeFileSync its whole install dir to your other computers once a week, simply cloning it.

birthday and year summary

The first non-experimental beta of hydrus was released on December 14th, 2011. We are now going on twelve years.

Like many, I had an imperfect 2023. I've no complaints, but IRL problems from 2022 cut into my free time and energy, and I regret that it impacted my hydrus work time. I had hoped to move some larger projects forward this year, but I was mostly treading water with little features and optimisations. That said, looking at the changelog for the year reveals good progress nonetheless, including: multiple duplicate search and filter speed and accuracy improvements, and the 'one file in this search, the other in this search' system; significant Client API expansions, in good part thanks to a user, including the duplicates system, more page inspections, multiple local file domains, and http headers; new sidecar datatypes and string processing tools; improvements to 'related tags' search; much better transparency support, including 'system:has transparency'; more program stability, particularly with mpv; much much faster tag autocomplete results, and faster tag and file search cancelling; the inc/dec rating service; better file timestamp awareness and full editing capability; the SauceNAO-style image search under 'system:similar files'; blurhashes; more and better system predicate parsing, and natural system predicate parsing in the normal file search input; a background database table delete system that relieves huge jobs like 'delete the PTR'; more accurate Mr. Bones and File History, and both windows now taking any search; and multiple new file formats, like HEIF and gzip and Krita, and thumbnails and full rendering for several like PSD and PDF, again in good part thanks to a user, and then most recently the Ugoira and CBZ work.

I'm truly looking forward to the new year, and I plan to keep working and putting out releases every week. I deeply appreciate the feedback and help over the years. Thank you!

next week

I have only one more week in the year before my Christmas holiday, so I'll just do some simple cleanup and little fixes.

Hey, my dev machine died today (its GPU actually caught fire when I turned it on!), so no release tomorrow. I'll get a new machine over the holiday and restart for the new year, meaning v557 will be on January 3rd.

Thanks everyone, and 𝕸𝖊𝖗𝖗𝖞 𝕮𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖘𝖙𝖒𝖆𝖘!

I had a good week back after the holiday. I fixed some bugs and improved some system:hash predicate parsing.

The release should be as normal tomorrow.

I had an ok week. I fixed some bugs and wrote a system to force a file to be considered a certain filetype.

The release should be as normal tomorrow.

I had a good week. There's some cbz/Ugoira follow-up, nicer system:time parsing, much better boot error-handling, and some improved UI quality of life.

The release should be as normal tomorrow.

I had an excellent week. I fixed some important bugs--including a subscription/watcher start bug, and even more damaged-file rendering issues--figured out transparency for APNGs, and wrote basic recognition and thumbnail generation for CBZ and Ugoira files.

The release should be as normal tomorrow.

I had a great week. I fixed a bunch of bugs--including the recent false-positive I/O error we saw when checking certain gifs for transparency--improved some quality of life, and made the slideshow work much better with videos.

The release should be as normal tomorrow.

I had a great week. I fixed some bugs and added 'system:has transparency' search.

The release should be as normal tomorrow.

Has this been fixed yet? Last time I asked was over a year ago.
These don't show up in the dupe filter unless I manually disband the dupe group, but how did they obtain it in the first place?
Happens regularly but not that often to be a major nuisance.

I had a good week. I ended up working on technical improvements, fixing some issues with deleted file tracking and exposing multiple maintenance timings for customisation. There is also a variety of optimisation that should slightly de-lag very heavy clients.

The release should be as normal tomorrow.

>>1550
I am sorry, I cannot remember this well. Can you say more what is not working right here? It looks like you have a couple of files set as duplicates, and they are showing up in the search result. Have you never set these as duplicates, and they seem to have spontaneously duped together?

Or do you use the duplicate filter, and have seen files like this, but always set 'and delete the other', and so it is odd that this has happened and they remain in your 'my files'? Is that why there is only one pair when you do this (normally expansive) search?

If it is strange that these files are not showing up in the duplicate filter--that is intentional. The duplicate filter only shows potential duplicate pairs. Once those potentials are processed in the filter, they become like this pair--set as duplicates.

As a side thing, I am planning out a thumbnail expansion to give all thumbnails quick knowledge to all of their current file relationships, which should make some of these menus a bit cleaner and more naturally human (e.g. saying 'these two are duplicates' explicitly, rather than having to infer it from everything else going on). Unfortunately, I have to fetch this data on a per-file basis from the database on every right-click, so I can't do all the calculations I'd like.

>>1551
So I avoided using the dupe filter altogether during all this time to make sure it has nothing to do with it and while the frequency of these weird dupes reduced, they continue to appear. Either way, I never encounter them in the filter before they show up here and I always delete the dupes I find.
These weird dupes differ only in compression as they usually involve an image imported (from API) a long time ago and its copy retrieved recently, probably because the server's compression format being updated. They have multiple image urls, some are matching, others different between the two.

So basically these are images that got assigned the same dupe group without going through the filter where I would have deleted one. Instead I have to look for these stealth dupes in a special search query.

>>1558
Thanks. That's very strange behaviour. As far as I know, the client will only ever apply a duplicate pair relationship if you work through the duplicate filter or apply it manually on a selection of thumbnails, either through that menu or with a shortcut. I have no auto-dupe tech yet.

As a side thing, there is some transitive behaviour, so if A is a dupe of B, and you then set B to be a dupe of C, then A will be duped to C also, but of course this needs the triggering B->C relationship set in the first place, which it sounds like you are not doing. Also, duplicate relationships will survive files being deleted and re-imported, if that could be happening here.

If you can figure out a way to reliably reproduce this situation, or you gather any other information that would help me track this down, please let me know.