The 1.3.0 update is out on both stores, and it is mostly about one thing: making sure the app keeps the promises it makes before it touches your originals. Photos also come out upright now, and colours stay where they were.
ImageForge 1.3.0 is live on both stores — the Microsoft Store approved it on August 10 and the Mac App Store on August 11. It is not a release about new features. Almost everything in it is a case of the app promising something and not quite delivering: a backup announced before it was made, a Cancel button that only looked like it cancelled, a conversion that could quietly overwrite a file you already had. Those are the bugs you fix before any others.
Converting photo.png to WebP used to overwrite the photo.webp sitting next to it. No dialog, no warning and no backup either, because the backup only ran when you compressed in place. Convert now goes through the same sheet as the rest of the app — Keep both, Overwrite or Cancel — and whatever it is about to replace is backed up first. Keep both writes photo1.webp and leaves yours alone.
The warning shown before a batch overwrites your originals is no longer a once-per-session thing either. It fired on the first batch, so this sequence went through in silence: drop files in copy mode, switch the output selector to Overwrite, drop more. Every batch is now checked, and it is checked against what that batch will really do rather than against what the toolbar says.
The reassuring line about a copy being moved to the Trash appeared before the copy was attempted, and if it failed nobody told you. On an SMB share or a FAT32 stick, where moving to the Trash simply does not work, you approved on the strength of a promise that was never kept and your originals were gone. The backup now runs first. If any copy could not be made, ImageForge tells you how many and leaves Cancel as the default instead of overwriting.
This one was worse than it looked. Cancel marked the rows as cancelled while the engine carried on compressing in the background and, in overwrite mode, carried on replacing your originals. The engine now checks for cancellation before each file and, above all, immediately before writing to disk. A file that was already being compressed may finish compressing, but it is not written.
Two long-standing annoyances, on both platforms. Portrait photos from a phone no longer come out lying on their side: the orientation your camera recorded is applied to the pixels, losslessly, instead of being thrown away with the rest of the metadata. And colour no longer drifts on wide-gamut displays, because the ICC profile survives in JPEG, PNG, WebP and TIFF. While we were in there, lossy JPEG came out roughly 3–8% smaller at the same quality.
Removing EXIF and GPS data was offered for PNG and never actually carried out. Now it is: text chunks, XMP and location data go, colour information stays. And an optimized SVG can no longer walk off with the contents of a local file, something a malicious SVG could manage by referencing one so it ended up embedded during optimization.
Most of 1.3.0 is shared, since both apps run the same Rust engine, but each side has its own fixes.
On the Mac, dragging a .png and a .jpg together onto the Dock icon used to open ImageForge with an empty list, because macOS splits a mixed drop into several separate calls. On Windows there are keyboard shortcuts at last — Ctrl+O to add files, Ctrl+K to convert, Esc to cancel the running batch — and re-processing a file no longer piles up -min1, -min2, -min3 copies: it replaces its own output.
A backup you were told about but never got is worse than no backup at all.
1.3.0 is free on both stores, like every version before it. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is analysed, and the app works with the network switched off. Pro is still a one-time purchase. If you already have ImageForge, your store will have updated it for you.
Free on the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store — the same on-device engine on both.