Announcing v(Great-Horned Owl)

A user-interface overhaul, an order-of-magnitude expansion to species tagging, and the first release published under Project Kestrel LLC. Kestrel's main GUI and Analyze Folders dialog have been completely redesigned for clarity and simplicity, and a new regional bird catalog brings searchable, fuzzy-matched coverage of all ~11,250 global bird species — up from the 500 labels the ML model produces.

Major Changes

• Regional bird catalog — ~11,250 species, fuzzy search, 4-letter codes, sci-name toggle.
  • Species and family comboboxes now search a bundled global catalog built from the IOC World Bird List (v15.1, CC-BY 3.0) and IBP-AOS Alpha Codes (66th AOS Supplement, 2025) — expanded from the 500 labels the ML model produces.
  • Intelligently search through all your regions' bird species and families while typing the name of the tag.
  • New Species & Region settings section with a multi-region picker (defaults to North America) and a Show scientific names toggle that renders the Latin binomial in italics under each species pill and shows the scientific family name on family pills.
  • New keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+R and Ctrl+Shift+R + Tab help you label your scenes without leaving the keyboard.
• Redesigned Analyze Folders dialog (3-column layout).
  • New layout: Queue Builder (add folders + recents chips + dialog-local tree), Settings (critical knobs always visible, advanced collapsed), Queue Summary + Start (live counts, warnings, per-folder list).
  • Dialog state is fully independent from the main sidebar tree, so picking folders to analyze no longer disturbs what you're browsing.
  • New recents row with a chip strip of recently-queued folders, persisted across sessions.
  • Live local-rate time estimates use a new perf-samples history (GPU vs CPU tracked separately).
• Redesigned home page — less cluttered, segmented controls.
  • Old three-button header replaced by a single + Load Folders… button, recents chips, empty-state hint, and a clean Clear / Select All ↔ Select None segmented strip at the bottom.
  • Sidebar footer is now a segmented strip (Settings | Feedback | Tutorial | Donate); the zoom widget (slider + buttons) has moved to the bottom status bar where it belongs.
  • In-progress folders are now marked with a lightweight ⌛ hourglass emoji instead of the old purple-background-and-italic-text styling.
• Homepage simplified — search/filter/sort moved to a sticky top bar.
  • The two large "First time" / "Returning" welcome cards are gone — the welcome panel now focuses on the What's New banner and the rotating tip carousel.
  • Search, confidence, sort, and grouping/multi-subject toggles moved out of the sidebar into a new sticky timeline filter bar above the timeline, with a ⚙ More ▾ popover for less-used options.
• New Folder Actions dropdown and Clear Kestrel Data confirmation.
  • Per-folder actions menu in the scene grid for re-analysis, removal, and clearing analyzed data.
  • Clear Kestrel Data is now gated by a typed-confirmation dialog before the .kestrel/ folder is removed.

Minor Changes

• macOS USB-drive crash fix — Sony A1 users on macOS-mounted exFAT/NTFS drives no longer see a wall of "Unsupported file format" errors. The pipeline now skips macOS AppleDouble (._*) companion files and all other dot-prefixed files (.DS_Store, etc.) at every enumeration site.
• macOS ONNX null-cascade fix — when a CoreML GPU promotion failed mid-analysis, every subsequent image used to crash with an AttributeError. The resilient session now restores the previous session on rebuild failure, and the provider coordinator forces a clean CPU rebuild after a failed GPU promotion.
• Windows 64-bit shutdown-watch fix — switched WNDPROC callbacks to pointer-sized types so 64-bit LPARAM values stop throwing OverflowError: int too long to convert on every affected Windows session.
• Removed clunky "Loading Kestrel Analyzer…" overlay that briefly appeared on analysis start.
• Tightened scene-card layout to reduce visual noise and increase information density.
• API cleanup — removed redundant logging on every settings get/save; new get_bird_catalog_meta, search_birds, and lookup_birds bridge methods (catalog cached on the bridge instance).
• 700+ new lines of test coverage for the bird catalog, settings, folder inspector, and config helpers.
• Project Kestrel LLC — the Microsoft Store appxmanifest PublisherDisplayName is updated from "Project Kestrel" to "Project Kestrel LLC" this release, reflecting the new corporate entity.

Known Issues

• Re-queueing a pending folder ignores new analysis options — If a folder is already in the queue (pending or running) and you change its per-folder options (e.g. "Delete existing analysis data first" or "Skip if already analyzed") and click Start again, the new options will be silently dropped. Workaround: remove the folder from the queue first, then re-add it with the desired settings.

Feedback? Please visit projectkestrel.org/contact or use the in-app feedback feature!