What changed from v0.4.50 to v0.5.00

New alignment and geometry options

• APAP parallax handling adds a locally varying warp option for scenes where one global transform is not flexible enough.
• Homography is now part of the modular transform branch alongside Translation and Affine.
• Cylindrical projection is available as an optional projection path for wider horizontal sweeps, with safe defaults so older behavior stays unchanged until you enable it.
• Transform guidance changed: the old rotation-lock concept is gone because Translation and Affine now cover those intent choices more directly.

New engine workflow

• Simple engine is now available as a separate engine choice based on cv2.Stitcher_create.
• Engine selection is exposed in the Basic and Advanced panes, and the CLI now supports an engine parameter as well.
• Auto engine reset behavior was corrected so re-selecting Auto restores the same canonical baseline used at startup.
• Simple engine timeout can now be configured, including a default timeout preference for new sessions.
• Status bar behavior changes while the Simple engine runs: it shows elapsed time instead of placed-panel counts.

Blending and seam behavior

• Seam-aware ghost guard now uses a content-aware seam path for high-risk overlaps instead of relying only on the older narrowed-feather fallback.
• Ghost guard rollout gating now resolves to internal modes: content-aware for riskier panorama-style cases and feather for more stable subjects such as solar and lunar work.
• Seam diagnostics continue to record localized seam traces so difficult overlap regions are easier to inspect.

Workflow and UI improvements

• Input panel actions: you can now exclude an image from the current run from the context menu.
• Output panel actions: the context menu can now copy the current preview to the clipboard, taking the current zoom and tone-mapped preview into account.
• External viewer shortcuts: double-clicking input or output images opens them in the system viewer.
• Panel-only layout toggle: double-clicking the Input or Output header row switches between the normal layout and a panel-only view.
• Natural sort fix: filenames that begin with mixed numeric and character patterns sort more predictably.

Settings and advanced-control changes

• Settings files were reviewed and updated to JSON version 1.1.
• Developer mode now acts as a hidden context flag that shows or hides expert-only controls.
• Eleven internal tuning controls are now hidden from normal users even in Advanced mode unless developer mode is enabled.
• Session resolver now derives additional parameters used later in automatic tuning.

Architecture and internal cleanup

• RunController and worker orchestration moved from the core package into the app package so the CLI does not depend on GUI-side orchestration code.
• Matcher hardening and several bug fixes improved robustness across the newer alignment paths.

Where to go next

If you want to understand the newer geometry options, read How It Works next. If you want to know which changes matter most for a current problem, go to Troubleshooting.