One Week Into the Live Gallery Beta: A Developer's Notes
A week after launching the Live Gallery beta, an honest look at what's working, what's broken, and what real user feedback has already changed.
7/3/20262 min read
We launched free beta on June 16th. It's been a week, and I wanted to write down what's actually happened - not a polished update, just the real state of things.
Downloads have been steady. Not viral, not explosive, just steady, which honestly is what I wanted. A slow trickle of real users testing real libraries beats a spike of people who download and forget it exists by Tuesday.
The feedback has been the most useful part. One user has been running Windows Live Photo Gallery for almost 30 years, managing family history photos and tagging people across generations so relatives can find them on Ancestry and FamilySearch. He downloaded Live Gallery this week specifically to see if it can replace WLPG for that exact workflow. That's the kind of user I built this for, and hearing from him directly told me more about what the app needs to get right than any amount of internal testing could.
Another user threw 3,500 photos at it straight off a shoot, high resolution files on an NVMe drive, decent hardware behind it. That's a proper stress test, and it surfaced something I hadn't caught: processing speed drops off on larger batches in a way it shouldn't. A couple of people also hit an installer bug where updates got stuck in a loop. Both are now top of my list.
I want to be straightforward about this bit. A beta that never breaks isn't being tested hard enough. The point of putting this out now, capped at 5,000 images, was to find exactly these problems before they show up for thousands of people instead of dozens. So if you reported something this week, thank you. It's more useful to me right now than almost anything else.
What's next?
Fixing the processing speed issue is the priority. After that, working through the smaller bugs people have flagged, and starting to think about the image cap once performance is solid enough to support it.
If you've downloaded and hit something that doesn't feel right, tell me. If you haven't downloaded yet, there's no rush. The beta will keep getting better, and it'll still be here when you're ready.
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