Pixchive v1.5.0 Release Notes

Release date: June 2026
Upgrade path: From v1.1 to v1.5.0

Pixchive v1.5.0 is a major product step forward that evolves the app from a simpler image browser into a more complete comic-plus-gallery experience with smoother interactions, modern Material You styling, stronger media tools, and a far more polished navigation flow. A structured release note format with grouped sections such as Added, Changed, Fixed, and Removed is widely recommended because changelogs should be curated for humans rather than copied from raw commit history.

Highlights

• Expanded Pixchive into a more complete comic and gallery app with modern Material 3 and Material You inspired interactions across browsing, viewing, search, and settings.
• Introduced major gallery capabilities such as All Images mode, global search, recycle bin support, rename tools, richer metadata, multi-selection, and persistent pinch-to-zoom layouts.
• Improved smoothness and stability through paging, background-thread work, optimized thumbnail loading, recomposition fixes, memory improvements, and ANR prevention work.

Added

New features

• Added a full All Images gallery mode so users can browse their device photos in one date-grouped stream instead of only folder-based views.
• Added global image search with real-time suggestions, dedicated search results, and smoother transitions across gallery screens.
• Added a recycle bin workflow with restore and permanent delete support.
• Added rename support for both images and folders with a dedicated rename dialog.
• Added multi-selection support for folders and images with long-press activation and bulk actions.
• Added select-all actions for folders and images.
• Added direct share utilities for single and multiple images.
• Added image information surfaces across the app, including detailed metadata and EXIF-focused information dialogs.
• Added a custom Home option to make the home screen more dynamic.
• Added live scrubbing previews for folder images to make fast-forward style browsing feel more interactive.

Viewer and browsing tools

• Added immersive mode support in the image viewer for a cleaner edge-to-edge experience.
• Added shared element transitions from grid items into the image viewer for smoother opening animations.
• Added a premium gallery viewer flow with pan, zoom, double-tap behavior, subsampling, and pager-based image navigation.
• Added gallery media actions such as Share, Copy to Clipboard, Edit, and Move to Trash from the image viewer.
• Added a toggleable blur setting for the viewer background with persistence through app settings.
• Added persistent pinch-to-zoom grid sizing so gallery cell preferences remain saved across navigation and app restarts.

Settings and personalization

• Added six new app color palettes inspired by your broader design system direction.
• Added theme selection for Light, Dark, and System Default modes.
• Added a transparent navigation bar option.
• Added language selection support with first-language guidance.
• Added gallery view settings to control field visibility on folder and image cards.
• Added a rotary sort wheel and expanded sorting support for filename, date, size, resolution, path, and file type.

Changed

UI and design

• Replaced standard DropdownMenus with Material 3 bottom option sheets throughout the app to improve mobile usability and match a modern bottom-driven interaction pattern.
• Upgraded image details from a dialog into a premium Material 3 modal bottom sheet with grouped metadata presentation.
• Refreshed the Comic Reader screen so it visually aligns better with the gallery image viewer.
• Updated folder and image cards in both grid and list modes with richer metadata, clearer hierarchy, and more polished Material-styled layouts.
• Refined Home Screen browsing with a HorizontalMultiBrowseCarousel for history cards and dynamic entry points into the gallery.
• Changed comic section grid density from 6 to 4 columns for better readability and touch comfort.
• Updated multiple top bars, overlays, and system navigation surfaces to better support transparent and edge-to-edge layouts.

Navigation and structure

• Refactored gallery browsing into a unified pager-based flow between Albums and Photos, with saved default-tab behavior and better state restoration.
• Merged and cleaned screen structures such as FolderViewScreen and related folder flows to simplify the browsing experience.
• Refactored settings into clearer dedicated folders and improved the overall project organization.
• Implemented type-safe navigation and improved route handling across the independent gallery architecture.
• Reworked gallery navigation so Albums and All Images behave as synchronized parallel browse modes without backstack clutter.

Performance and responsiveness

• Integrated Paging 3 and moved heavy file I/O work off the main thread to improve responsiveness.
• Optimized grid image loading, thumbnail fetching, and memory handling to reduce lag, stutter, and out-of-memory risk.
• Reduced unnecessary recompositions in gallery lists and grids for smoother scrolling behavior.
• Improved thumbnail and grid rendering behavior to better support pinch-to-zoom transitions and dense browsing views.
• Swapped older blur and image viewing approaches for more stable native or better-optimized alternatives.

Fixed

• Fixed a misclick issue in AllImagesScreen.
• Fixed saved preference behavior for restoring the default browse screen between Albums and Photos.
• Fixed the top bar title in ImageFolderScreen so it now shows the actual folder name instead of a generic label.
• Fixed Window and system UI state leaks in the media viewer.
• Fixed lag and stutter when navigating back from the image viewer to image browsing screens.
• Fixed grid selection issues and improved long-press selection behavior.
• Fixed pinch-zoom grid issues where cells were cropped or scrolling broke during zoom transitions.
• Fixed storage explorer overlay and layout issues around top bars, bottom bars, and selection sheets.
• Fixed settings-sheet mapping issues so grid column selections persist correctly.
• Fixed ANR and database lock contention during folder sync by reducing write pressure and improving cancellation safety.
• Fixed optimistic deletion flows so removed media updates immediately across gallery views.
• Fixed various unresolved references, syntax issues, and compile-time problems in settings and image viewer flows.
• Fixed the issue where favorite images were not showing correctly.

Removed

• Removed excessive zoom behavior from AllImagesScreen for a more controlled browsing experience.
• Removed horizontal and vertical scroll bars from ImageViewScreen for a cleaner full-screen viewer.
• Removed older drag-select behavior for now to avoid unstable interaction patterns before a future reintroduction.
• Removed legacy video-player oriented UI, models, overlays, and dependencies while transforming the experience into image-first gallery components.
• Removed older duplicate or overly heavy gallery files that were adding unnecessary complexity to list and grid layouts.

Architecture and developer improvements

• Built an independent gallery architecture in multiple phases to keep the standard device gallery separated from the SAF-based comic reader flow.
• Introduced gallery-specific domain models, repository flows, dedicated ViewModels, and cleaner screen routing to improve maintainability.
• Refactored media actions, settings sheets, selection helpers, and gallery components into more reusable and modular structures.
• Improved real-time MediaStore observation so the UI reacts faster to device media changes.

Suggested release summary

Pixchive v1.5.0 transforms the app into a richer comic and gallery experience with modern Material 3 design, global image search, All Images mode, recycle bin support, smarter viewer tools, persistent pinch zoom layouts, and major smoothness improvements throughout the app. This kind of backward-compatible feature-heavy jump is consistent with a minor-version release under semantic versioning, especially when the update adds substantial capability without being framed as a breaking rewrite.