jAlbum 37.1 continues the focus on performance improvement you saw with the v37 release by significantly enhancing the support for RAW images. How about this:
- Roughly twice as fast RAW processing
- RAW support is now also available for arm-based Linux and M-series Macs
- More stable RAW processing, fixing old crash bug with certain RAW files
- More accurate RAW processing, handling RAW images that were previously incorrectly rendered
At the core of the improved RAW support lies an updated native code library called LibRaw. We’re now using the most current version (v24). The earlier version we used goes back to 2016 with the introduction of jAlbum 13.1. You can imagine that there’s been some development since then… Apart from being 20% faster, more accurate, more stable, and supporting more RAW formats, we’ve also been able to compile this code for all platforms and CPU architectures we support. (We previously only supported Intel CPUs).
But it’s not only the library itself we’ve updated. The integration code for jAlbum is also rewritten, now utilizing your CPU cores far better. Due to concurrency issues, the previous integration code limited parts of the RAW image reading process to one single CPU core. This limitation is now gone, unlocking the full potential of your CPU cores. For example, we now see over 2x performance gain on a 10-core CPU. With more CPU cores, the gain is naturally even higher. Perhaps the most dramatic improvement can be seen on Mac, where users requiring RAW support were previously confined to running the Intel version of jAlbum as the M-version lacked RAW support. A gallery built in 11.7s (64 RAW images) now builds in merely 2.6s. That’s a speed gain of almost 4.5x.
The new integration code also uses a faster API for interfacing with native code (Java “FFM” vs. “JNA”). However, this new API is unavailable for our “compatibility” Mac version, which allows jAlbum to run on OS X “High Sierra.” We recommend updating your Mac OS.
No time to wait. Get jAlbum 37.1 here.