v1.3.2 build 40 minor 7 min

MetaScope 1.3.2 (Build 40)

Reorganized Tools menu, on-device Enrich from Descriptions, Launchpad preview of the v1.5 workflow shell, deeper vocabulary work, and a long list of UX fixes.

New

  • Tools Menu Reorganization: Every app feature now lives in a single Tools menu with seven labeled sections (Discover, Edit, Search & Compare, Keyword Rules, Transformation Rules, Profiles & Templates, Batch & Export). Consistent keyboard shortcuts across the menu with Settings › Keyboard Shortcuts mirroring the structure.
  • Enrich from Descriptions (Pro): On-device NLP reads your description and caption text and extracts people, places, and organizations into proper IPTC fields (Persons Shown, Location Shown, Creator). Scan and preview, then accept or reject per suggestion. Configurable entity types, confidence threshold (30–95%), and optional geocoding validation. Runs entirely on-device via Apple's Natural Language framework.
  • Launchpad (v1.5 preview): A tile grid replaces the empty-state screen, with Open Folder and Copy Metadata as primary tiles and a dimmed Workbench teaser. Opens automatically when no folder is loaded, or on demand from Tools › Show Launchpad (⇧⌘L). Fully toggleable in Settings › Interface › Launchpad.
  • Vocabulary Categories as Filter: Categories graduate from label-only groupings to a functional filter across the Vocabulary Browser, the Batch Keyword Editor, and the metadata info panel keyword section. Filter state is session-sticky per vocabulary.
  • Hierarchical Vocabulary Tree UI: Hierarchical vocabularies display as interactive trees with expand/collapse chevrons, descendant counts, and file-match badges. Per-vocabulary Expand / Collapse All controls keep neighboring vocabularies undisturbed.
  • Per-user Synonym Embedding for Built-in Vocabularies: Pick None, Synonyms, or All Variants per built-in vocabulary as a personal override. The bundled JSON stays untouched so App Store updates never clobber your preferences. Batch Keyword Editor previews the expansion inline before Apply.
  • Paste Keywords: Paste a delimited list (semicolon, newline, pipe, or comma auto-detected) into a new or existing vocabulary. Merging folds case-insensitive matches into synonym lists.
  • Copy Metadata Workspace: The Copy Metadata sheet accepts files via drag-and-drop on Source or Target panes, adds a Presets menu for field selections, a draggable Source/Target split that persists, and a larger default 1100×760 window.
  • Library Bundle Protection: Apple Photos, Lightroom, Aperture, Music, and TV libraries are now treated as opaque packages. A .photoslibrary opens a dedicated Info Panel with a Browse in Photos Environment CTA. Other library bundles get a Reveal in Finder action.
  • Rebuild Thumbnails: Right-click any image, video, or folder to drop the cached preview and regenerate from source. A content-aware cache also auto-refreshes thumbnails when a file is re-encoded at the same path.
  • Maximize-preview Toggle: A centered chevron on the horizontal split between info panel and inline preview snaps to a near-maximized preview and restores on second click. The split position persists across relaunches.
  • Photos Multi-select: Shift+Click range selection in both grid and list, matching the file browser. Toolbar Export Original honors the full multi-selection.
  • External Drive Sidebar: Quick Access and Favorites treat disconnected drives identically with an orange badge and live mount/unmount detection. Clicking a disconnected entry shows a clear Drive isn't connected alert instead of a misleading permission prompt.

Improvements

  • ExifTool 13.55: Five point releases of format and camera improvements in one jump, including enhanced Apple Live Photo video, improved QuickTime metadata track extraction, expanded Sony lens database, Adobe XMP tag additions, UTF-16 handling, DJI drone GPS, and Canon/Nikon decoding polish.
  • Photos XPC stability: Heartbeat prevents photolibraryd death during idle, simplified one-shot recovery replaces the old retry loop, and lazy activation keeps cold launches from touching Photos until you actually use it.
  • Favorites Path Subtitle: Each favorite row shows a compact home-collapsed, middle-truncated path so folders that share a basename are easy to tell apart.
  • Metadata Profiles Settings pane polished to match the rest of Settings visually.
  • Settings › Keyboard Shortcuts reorganized with clean sections that mirror the Tools menu structure, Refresh and New Folder moved out of Edit.
  • Open in Viewer Window icon and label unified across the main toolbar, Photos toolbar, small image preview, small video previews, and Settings › Interface › Pop-out Viewer.
  • Info Panel Batch Export: Selecting 2+ Photos scopes export operations to exactly your selection via a new Batch Actions section on the Import/Export tab.
  • Photos thumbnail retry drains the slot queue properly, so a slow iCloud download no longer stalls the rest of the grid.
  • Apply Keyword Rules gains a dedicated ⌃⌘K shortcut for symmetry with ⌃⌘T / ⇧⌘T for Transformation Rules.

Fixes

  • Crash fix (release blocker): Scrolling large RAW folders aggregated from nested subfolders could exhaust the file-descriptor budget and crash on a thumbnail decode trap. Two unguarded races in the thumbnail loader are now closed atomically.
  • GPS Longitude hemisphere flip: ExifTool read path now prefers the raw GPS value and applies the hemisphere reference cleanly, so re-selecting a file no longer flips W ↔ E.
  • Custom Metadata Fields persistence: Four stacked bugs resolved on custom XMP-ms field creation (property name input freeze, single-character name validation, missing ExifTool config declaration, field alias group prefix).
  • Small-preview +/− buttons now actually zoom the image, not just the percentage label.
  • Arrow keys in Photos browser: arrows navigate, Shift+Arrow extends the selection, matching the filesystem browser.
  • Escape no longer beeps anywhere in the app.
  • Cmd+W with the popout viewer frontmost closes the popout, not the main window.
  • Batch Date Operations: Large selections no longer stall the preview. Capped evaluation with Evaluate More / Evaluate All controls. Preview Changes stays visible after a date op.
  • Photos-mode empty-state flash during seed eliminated.
  • Photos thumbnail deadlock from cooperative thread pool starvation resolved.
  • Filter popover: Escape dismisses cleanly without publish-during-update warnings. Enter in a value field runs the search.
  • Vocabulary Browser: Disclosure chevrons in tree rows now have proper hit targets. Settings › Keyword Rules › Suggestions sheet no longer triggers a layout-recursion warning.
  • Favorites sidebar: FavoriteFolder IDs are stable across launches. Add Folder sheet matches the section it was opened from. Unreachable volumes no longer auto-remove favorites silently.
  • Vocabulary Manager: Folder scan default, vocabulary dedup, and synonym autocomplete staleness after edits all fixed.
  • Apply Profile shortcut collision with Vocabulary Browser resolved (Apply Profile is now ⌥⇧⌘P, Vocabulary Browser ⌃⌘V).
  • Tools menu items are clickable on first open, no more grayed-out items the first time you pull down the menu.

MetaScope 1.3.2 (Build 40)

April 2026, Build 40

A code health and vocabulary depth release. The menu architecture is reshaped around how you actually work, the v1.5 workflow shell gets a first preview with Launchpad, a new Pro intelligence feature auto-populates IPTC fields from the free-form text you’ve already written, and a long list of UX papercuts (plus one release-blocking crash from the April beta round) are cleared.

Tools Menu, Reorganized

Every feature entry point now lives in a single Tools menu with seven labeled sections: Discover (Launchpad, Analytics), Edit (Edit Metadata, Edit Keywords, Copy Metadata, Enrich from Descriptions, Set Rating), Search & Compare, Keyword Rules, Transformation Rules, Profiles & Templates, and Batch & Export. File is trimmed to window creation and Open Folder; Window is just system window management. Every Tools entry has a consistent keyboard shortcut, and the Settings › Keyboard Shortcuts panel mirrors the new menu exactly.

What’s New

  • Seven labeled sections in one Tools menu with no duplicates
  • Every feature reachable by keyboard shortcut, 20 reserved bindings documented in Settings
  • Apply Keyword Rules gains a dedicated shortcut (⌃⌘K) for symmetry with ⌃⌘T / ⇧⌘T for Transformation Rules
  • Settings › Keyboard Shortcuts reorganized into clean sections with Refresh and New Folder moved out of Edit
  • Tools menu items are clickable on first open, no more grayed-out items the first time you pull down the menu

Writing → Metadata: Enrich from Descriptions (Pro)

A new NLP-powered workflow reads your description and caption text and extracts people, places, and organizations into proper IPTC fields (Persons Shown, Location Shown, Creator). Everything runs on-device via Apple’s Natural Language framework, nothing leaves your Mac.

What’s New

  • Tools › Enrich from Descriptions… (⌥⌘E), per-field actions in the metadata editor, and a right-click selection command
  • Scan, preview, apply workflow with per-suggestion accept or reject
  • Configurable entity types (persons, locations, organizations) and confidence threshold (30–95%)
  • Optional geocoding validation for location entities
  • Settings at Settings › Intelligence

Launchpad, a Preview of v1.5

The empty-state “No Folder Selected” screen is gone. In its place sits the Launchpad: a tile grid that opens common metadata tasks with a single click. A prototype preview of the full workflow shell arriving in v1.5.

What’s New

  • Open Folder as the primary tile, Copy Metadata directly alongside it, and a dimmed Workbench Coming in v1.4 teaser
  • Opens automatically when a window has no folder loaded, or on demand from Tools › Show Launchpad (⇧⌘L) and the new toolbar tile
  • Settings › Interface › Launchpad lets you disable it entirely or keep only the menu and toolbar entries
  • Toolbar editor includes a new Discover group with a Launchpad visibility toggle

Vocabulary Work, Grown Up

Vocabulary categories go from label-only groupings to a functional filter you can apply across three surfaces. Hierarchical vocabularies get a proper tree UI. The Vocabulary Manager gains full import and export plus paste-keywords ingestion. The synonym-embedding mode for built-in vocabularies is now a per-user choice.

What’s New

  • Vocabulary Browser: Category menu narrows the term list to one category plus a collapsed “Other” bucket
  • Batch Keyword Editor: Compact scope picker narrows autocomplete to vocabulary and category
  • Metadata info panel: Filter menu plus a Group toggle (off by default) for category-grouped chip display
  • Filter state is session-sticky per vocabulary, switch between vocabularies and each one’s filter is preserved
  • Hierarchical vocabularies display as interactive trees with expand/collapse chevrons, descendant counts, and file-match badges
  • Per-vocabulary Expand / Collapse All chevrons in each vocabulary header, open everything in one vocabulary without disturbing the others
  • Keyword usage badges on hierarchical parent rows show how many descendants and files match each branch
  • Synonym embedding for built-in vocabularies: Pick None, Synonyms, or All Variants per built-in vocabulary as a personal override. The bundled JSON stays untouched so App Store updates can never clobber your edits
  • Batch Keyword Editor preview shows a Will also embed N variant(s) on Apply row beneath the canonical chips when expansion is on
  • Paste Keywords: Paste a delimited list (semicolon, newline, pipe, or comma auto-detected) into a new or existing vocabulary. Merging folds case-insensitive matches into synonym lists
  • Full import and export for .txt, .md, .csv, .json

Copy Metadata, Grown Up

The Copy Metadata sheet is no longer a one-shot dialog.

What’s New

  • Accepts files directly via drag-and-drop on the Source or Target pane, or via Add Files… buttons, no pre-loaded folder required
  • Right-click a file and Copy Metadata… opens the sheet with that file as Source
  • Draggable split between Source+Fields and Target Files, position persists
  • Presets menu in the Fields to Copy header: save, apply, rename, delete field selections
  • Default window size 1100×760

Library Bundle Safety

Apple Photos, Lightroom, Aperture, Music, and TV libraries are now treated as opaque packages. Double-clicking Photos Library.photoslibrary in MetaScope no longer descends into the bundle.

What’s New

  • Selecting a .photoslibrary opens a dedicated Info Panel with a Browse in Photos Environment CTA that switches the window to native Photos mode
  • Other library bundles (.lrlibrary, .lrcat-bundle, .aplibrary, .musiclibrary, .tvlibrary) get a Reveal in Finder action
  • Library bundles show the real Apple and Adobe app icon during cache warmup
  • Defense in depth: double-click, breadcrumb, goBack/goForward, sidebar favorites all respect the package guard

Small but Nice

A pile of small UX refinements that add up:

  • Favorites path subtitle: Each favorite row shows a compact home-collapsed, middle-truncated path (e.g. ~/…/Batch-001/Export) so folders that share a basename are easy to tell apart
  • Maximize-preview toggle: A centered chevron on the horizontal split between info panel and inline preview snaps to a near-maximized preview. Click again to restore. The split position persists across relaunches
  • Rebuild Thumbnails: Right-click any image, video, or whole folder to refresh the cached preview from source. A new content-aware cache auto-refreshes thumbnails when a file is re-encoded at the same path
  • Open in Viewer Window icon and label unified across main toolbar, Photos toolbar, small image preview, small video previews, and Settings › Interface › Pop-out Viewer
  • Info Panel Batch Export Section: When 2+ Photos are selected, export operations scope to exactly your selection
  • Photos multi-select: Shift+Click range selection in both grid and list, matching the file browser. Toolbar Export Original honors the full multi-selection
  • Photos thumbnail retry drains the slot queue properly, no more stalled iCloud downloads holding up the rest of the grid
  • External drive sidebar: Quick Access and Favorites now treat disconnected drives identically (orange external-drive badge, live mount/unmount detection). Clicking a disconnected entry shows a clear “Drive isn’t connected” alert instead of a misleading permission prompt

Under the Hood

  • ExifTool 13.55: Five point releases of format and camera improvements in one jump. Enhanced Apple Live Photo video, improved QuickTime metadata track extraction, expanded Sony lens database, Adobe XMP tag additions, UTF-16 handling, DJI drone GPS, Canon/Nikon decoding polish
  • Photos XPC stability: Heartbeat prevents photolibraryd death during idle, simplified one-shot recovery replaces the old retry loop, and lazy activation means cold launches don’t touch Photos until you actually use it
  • Metadata Profiles Settings pane polished to match the rest of Settings visually
  • Settings › Keyboard Shortcuts reorganized with clean sections; Tools subsections mirror the menu structure

Stability & Fixes

  • Crash fix (release blocker): Scrolling large RAW folders aggregated from nested subfolders could exhaust the file-descriptor budget and crash on a thumbnail decode trap. Two unguarded races in the thumbnail loader are now closed atomically, with a defensive guard before any range construction in the embedded-thumbnail path
  • GPS Longitude hemisphere flip on re-selection: ExifTool read path now explicitly prefers the raw GPS value and applies the hemisphere reference cleanly, so re-selecting a file no longer flips W ↔ E
  • Custom Metadata Fields persistence: Four stacked bugs resolved on custom XMP-ms field creation (property name input freeze, single-character name validation, missing ExifTool config declaration, field alias group prefix)
  • Small-preview +/− buttons now actually zoom the image, not just the percentage label (pinch-to-zoom always worked; the buttons now follow suit)
  • Arrow keys in Photos browser: arrows navigate, Shift+Arrow extends the selection, matching the filesystem browser
  • Escape no longer beeps anywhere in the app
  • Cmd+W with the popout viewer frontmost closes the popout, not the main window
  • Batch Date Operations: Large selections no longer stall the preview. Capped evaluation with Evaluate More / Evaluate All controls. Preview Changes stays visible after a date op so you can re-run without closing the sheet
  • Photos-mode empty-state flash during seed eliminated
  • Photos thumbnail deadlock from cooperative thread pool starvation resolved
  • Filter popover: Escape dismisses cleanly without “publish during update” warnings. Enter in a value field runs the search
  • Vocabulary Browser: Disclosure chevrons in tree rows now have proper hit targets. Settings › Keyword Rules › Suggestions sheet no longer triggers a layout-recursion warning
  • Favorites sidebar: FavoriteFolder IDs are stable across launches. Add Folder sheet matches the section it was opened from. Unreachable volumes no longer auto-remove favorites silently
  • Vocabulary Manager: Folder scan default, vocabulary dedup, and synonym autocomplete staleness after edits all fixed
  • Apply Profile shortcut collision with Vocabulary Browser resolved (Apply Profile is now ⌥⇧⌘P, Vocabulary Browser ⌃⌘V)

Requirements

  • macOS 15.4 Sequoia or later
  • Apple Silicon or Intel Mac
  • macOS 26 Tahoe for Liquid Glass styling and Writing Tools on metadata fields

Get MetaScope

MetaScope is available on the Mac App Store. Free tier includes 5 edits per day. MetaScope Pro unlocks unlimited edits and all professional features.

Download on the Mac App Store