IacobIonut01/ReFra 5.0.0

5.0.0-50004 Release

on GitHub

What's new in 5.0.0

ReFra 5.0 is a major release headlined by full cloud media support. Your self-hosted server library now lives alongside your device photos in one unified timeline, with a powerful new backup & restore wizard, fresh editing tools, and a wave of performance work.

New Features

• Cloud media & Immich integration — Connect your self-hosted Immich server and browse your remote library directly inside Gallery. Cloud assets merge into a single unified timeline with smart local/remote deduplication and per-thumbnail sync indicators. Includes email/password and API-key sign-in with encrypted credential storage, multi-server support, full-quality streaming, EXIF display, favoriting, server albums, recognized people (with name/birthday editing), map browsing, CLIP-based smart search, and shared-link management. ownCloud groundwork is also in place.
• Cloud photo backup — Pick which local albums to back up to your server with checksum-based deduplication to avoid re-uploads, separate Wi-Fi/cellular rules for photos and videos, background scheduling, and an upload details screen.
• Backup & restore wizard — Export and import your settings, favorites, cloud server configs, and vaults as a single archive, with optional password encryption. Vault backup is off by default and authenticates each selected vault with its own credential before it's included.
• New editor effects & filters — A new Effects tab adds Posterize, Edges, and Borders with live preview, while the Colour tab gains GPU-accelerated Hue and black & white tools and the Filters grid gets a one-tap Negative preset.
• Flexible date grouping — Group your media by day, month, or year, configured independently per screen (Timeline, Favorites, albums, locations, and cloud archive), with per-screen date-separator toggles.
• Album sections — Automatically organize albums into collapsible Common, Apps, and Other sections based on where they're stored, with manual "Move to section" overrides. Off by default.
• Save motion photo as video — A Google Photos-style "Save as video" action exports the embedded clip from a motion photo as a standalone MP4 in your Movies folder.
• Android Advanced Protection — On Android 16+, enabling device-wide Advanced Protection automatically force-enables sandboxed image decoding and stronger metadata isolation. Your preferences are preserved and restored when it's turned off (#900).
• Location detail sheet — Tapping a photo's location opens a bottom sheet with a larger map preview, the media thumbnail, and quick actions to open it in app or in an external map.
• Improved APNG & JXL support — Better animated APNG playback and JPEG XL image handling.
• Hide favorite button — New separate setting to hide the favorite button next to the search bar.

Performance

• Smoother timeline scrolling — Vendored scrollbar module, optimized grid rendering, a new MediaCellState to cut per-cell recompositions, and image loading paused while fast-scrolling via the scrollbar thumb.
• New viewer image pipeline — Replaced Glide with a Sketch preview+full painter pattern in the media viewer and story cards, plus grid-click prefetching for flicker-free transitions.
• Faster startup — Prevented the ignored-albums flash on restart and optimized startup work.
• Reduced blur lag — Lowered media viewer bottom-sheet blur lag.

Improvements

• Cloud media is deduplicated across search and location flows
• Calendar-day difference is now used for timeline date grouping
• Migrated build scripts to Gradle plugins and added a Google Play variant
• VaultPasswordUnlockSheet can show an optional subtitle naming the vault

Bug Fixes

• Fixed file-descriptor-backed resource leaks
• Fixed horizontal mirroring of panorama images
• Fixed video continuing to play (background audio) when the app loses focus
• Fixed album content not showing in the picker for timeline-only hidden albums
• Fixed custom album thumbnails not appearing in the picker's album tab
• Fixed inconsistent status bar icon colors in the media viewers
• Fixed Settings summary text overlapping with the switch
• Fixed duplicate StoryCard keys and consecutive video playback in the story viewer
• Fixed several vault UX issues (deferred creation, confirmation dialogs, touch blocking)
• Fixed a duplicate-key crash in the viewer pager by deduplicating media by ID
• Fixed grid pinch-zoom conflicting with scrolling
• Fixed back navigation from StandaloneActivity via taskAffinity (#886)
• Fixed ContentObservers not refreshing after move/copy by notifying the Files URI
• Fixed a vault decryption temp-file leak that caused large storage bloat
• Fixed copy/move to write into SD card folders instead of internal storage
• Fixed trashing of external storage media when using MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE

Variants

Downloads

Standard (NoML)

Offline (NoML)

Offline (WithML)