What's new
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Find the people in your photos. Switch it on in the settings, then use the new people button above the gallery to search a folder. Photos of the same person end up in one group, you give the group a name, and from then on you can filter and search by it. Everything happens on your machine and nothing is sent anywhere.
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People management has a place of its own, reached by a button in the gallery: a wall of faces rather than a list of names, because you recognise a person by the face. One click opens a group and shows every photo in it. Point at a face and an eye shows you the whole picture it came from.
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Correct a face the recognition got wrong. One button next to the face takes it out of that person, and only that photo changes. Faces you take out collect in one Unknown group, and typing the right name on one of them sends just that face where it belongs.
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Names suggest themselves while you type, in the info sidebar and in the people area. Typing an existing name a second time is how one person quietly becomes two.
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Say how small a person may be before the recognition stops caring. Measured against the shorter edge of the photo, so the same setting means the same thing on every picture: at a street festival, the third row in the background stays out of your people list.
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Photos know where they were taken. With the new place file installed, coordinates in a photo turn into a place and country name you can search for. This works entirely offline, no address is ever looked up over the internet, and there is no map view.
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Search by person and place, on their own or together with keywords, stars and everything else a saved search offers. The people, places and keywords buttons narrow each other down instead of replacing each other, and both new menus have a search field. Person and place also show up in the info sidebar of the viewer and the editor, so a picture on screen says who is on it and where it was taken.
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Country names follow the language of the program, and the place search finds either spelling.
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HEIC, HEIF and AVIF now really open, not just as thumbnails: until now the tile appeared but the large picture stayed blank in the viewer and the editor. On macOS nothing has to be installed for it any more, because the system reads these formats itself. Thanks to amaztony for this one.
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Applying edits and saving is faster, most of all on large photos. A picture is no longer copied several times over before anything is even changed, so exporting and saving a full-size photo starts noticeably sooner. The result is pixel for pixel the same as before.
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The colour mixer pulls its weight. Saturation in a colour band did far less than the same number on the main saturation slider, and a band only had its full say on one exact hue, so foliage and sky always got a diluted mix of two sliders. Colours now respond about as strongly as the main slider does, and nothing burns out on the way.
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The coarse colour noise slider is usable again. It used to lock the program up for seconds on a preview and the better part of a minute on a large photo.
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Pick several layers with a rubber band in the adjustment tools too - Adjust, Colour, Details, Effects and Filters are exactly where you work on a set of layers, and until now each one had to be clicked separately.
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The wheel sets the brush size in the brush and the repair brush, like the [ and ] keys.
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No more right-click menu on the editor canvas - the menu in the bottom bar has the same entries. On the picture the right button pans, and one button doing both meant guessing after every press whether it had been a drag. In the filmstrip the right-click stays.
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Tidying up folders now separates two things. Thumbnails only throws away pictures the program draws again by itself; catalogue data throws away what it knows about the photos, such as rating, label and keywords. Either one per folder or both, for a single folder or the whole library, and each asks first and says how much is about to go. Your photo files are never touched.
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Middle click on a filter or sort button resets it.
Fixed
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The picture no longer drifts while you paint. If something took the pointer away mid-pan - a context menu, a dialog, another window - panning stayed on, and from then on every mouse move pushed the picture away while the brush appeared glued in place.
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People are recognised far more reliably. On a group photo two neighbouring faces could end up looking identical to the program, which put both in one person and pulled strangers in after them. Two different people now land in one person far less often; the price is that one person may come out as two groups, and typing the same name merges them.
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Detecting faces stays quick on a large library, however many photos it has already been through.
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The Unknown group can no longer be given a name. Naming it handed every face you had ever taken out over to that person in one keystroke. It is a bin, not a person.
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Switching face recognition off deletes what was found. It was meant to, and now does. This is also the way to build the grouping from scratch: off, on, detect again.
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"Detect faces" searches every photo again, so an improved recognition reaches photos that were scanned before. Anything you set by hand stays as it is.
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Photos that were already in the library get their place names, so the place list is not empty on a library that grew over years.
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Smaller things: clicking a person in the filter list now really shows the photos; only named people are offered there, since a list of unnamed entries was nothing to choose from; searching by person or place no longer walks the whole library; the info sidebar stays on the tab you chose when you move to the next photo; the place setting says what it does instead of promising a map; and the search dialog no longer shows its field names in English.