PhotoCraft v0.3.0: six UI languages, safer saves, new packages

PhotoCraft v0.3.0 is the first release with a translated interface. According to the release notes it contains 182 commits from 183 merged pull requests, with work from 31 community contributors, and closes 146 issues. It focuses on not losing your work, more Photoshop-style shortcuts and tool behaviour, and builds for more systems.

Highlights

• The interface speaks six more languages: Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Russian and Czech, chosen in Edit › Preferences › Interface › Language. The Type tool gains CJK fonts and IME input.
• Your work is safer. Every document write goes through one crash-safe atomic save (#230), recovered unsaved documents survive a second crash, and preferences are no longer lost when two windows save at once or a save fails.
• New builds: Flatpak bundles for Linux, a FreeBSD tarball, and Windows on ARM64 installers. The Linux AppImage now carries update information with a .zsync file next to it.
• Faster everyday editing: keyboard layer navigation (Alt+[ / Alt+]), number keys for opacity, Alt-click colour sampling with painting tools, New from Clipboard, Free Transform a Copy and Transform Again on a Copy.
• Background jobs show progress and can be cancelled in the app, and agents can wait for or poll them.
• GPU crash-safe startup and device-loss fallback (#252), so a graphics driver fault is less likely to take the app down.

New tools and features

• Painting and fills: the Pencil tool, an Edit › Fill… dialog and a "Rasterize?" prompt (#279); the Gradient tool makes editable Gradient Fill layers with on-canvas handles (#197); a reworked Brush Settings panel; stylus pressure, tilt, rotation and eraser on macOS and X11 (#255); Ctrl+Alt-drag or Alt+right-drag resizes the brush on the canvas.
• Layers: Stamp Visible and Stamp Down (#356); groups expand and collapse; right-click on the canvas lists the layers under the pointer; double-click beside a layer name opens Layer Style; the Move tool has Auto-Select on by default (#330).
• Type: vertical type (tategaki) that lays out, renders, edits and round-trips (#246); PSD manual and optical kerning; the caret lands on the glyph under the pointer and font size changes are live.
• Crop and transform: move and resize the crop frame; Move/Free Transform modifier keys and a sharp full-resolution transform preview.
• Workspace: a reworked dock with splitters, collapse and reorder, where panels never vanish (#139); canvas scrollbars; Alt+scroll zooms around the pointer; menus scroll and navigate by keyboard on small displays; a Preferences Apply button; Color Picker fields accept typed values.

File formats

• JPEG and other formats without alpha composite transparency over white on export.
• Formats without colour profiles are treated as sRGB.
• Truncated JPEGs and multi-frame files open with a warning instead of silently.
• TGA is offered in Save As and Export As (#377).
• EXIF orientation is applied on open (#318).
• Smart Objects and Smart Filters survive PSD save and open (#288); 32-bit PSD exports open in Photoshop (#327); PSD export switches to PSB above the size limit (#431).
• Deeply nested .pcraft files reopen.

Languages

Interface translations arrived in this release: Japanese (#169), Simplified Chinese (#282), Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Russian and Czech. Pick one in Edit › Preferences › Interface › Language. CJK fallback fonts cover Simplified and Traditional Chinese and Korean, and the Type tool accepts IME input. See /guides/language.

Automation (CLI & MCP)

• Stricter, clearer errors: unknown CLI flags are usage errors, <subcommand> --help prints usage, and non-object parameters are rejected (#460, #546).
• Background jobs that agents can wait for or poll; MCP command_batch and serve batch honour each step's wait.
• photocraft-cli batch runs recorded actions, accepts --format .ext, refuses to write into its input folder, and reports inputs that would share an output name instead of overwriting them (#545, #448).
• Headless saves without a path no longer flatten over the opened file (#447).

Fixes and stability

• Automatic UI scaling works on 4K monitors (#225).
• Wayland image clipboard support; pasting an image copied in another app works.
• A compositor deadlock was fixed (#281), and very large (20k+) documents now refresh on the GPU (#187).
• The Linux packages check for their runtime libraries at start-up, and the web build shrank from 26.3 to 18.8 MiB (#237).
• Windows MSI shortcut and taskbar icon fixes; menus no longer cover the menu bar or the taskbar.
• Undo and redo restore the targeted layer, and shortcuts pressed in quick succession all run in order.

Breaking changes or things to know

• CLI scripts may need small fixes. Flags the CLI used to ignore are now errors, --quality is strict, and batch refuses --out equal to --in.
• The Move tool now auto-selects the layer under the pointer by default (#330).
• The Windows portable zip keeps its settings beside the executable in a PhotoCraftData folder (preferences, presets, recovery files) instead of %APPDATA% (#267).
• Honest numbers: this is the first release with a scorecard. At v0.3.0 it counted 60 of 133 settings that do nothing yet, and 3 of 46 performance scenarios within budget. Treat PhotoCraft as early alpha.
• Building from source needs Rust 1.95 or newer (#471).

How to update

The current release is newer than v0.3.0; get the latest build from /download (Windows, macOS, Linux, web). The v0.3.0 files remain on its GitHub release page. Only download from the official GitHub releases.

Full release notes, including the scorecard table and every merged pull request: PhotoCraft v0.3.0 on GitHub.