Greetings from Europe's coziest winter capital Tallinn, Estonia!

We are very excited to share with you today a major design update for Cryptee Photos, and tons of small improvements to our platform across the board. But first, some big news.

Apple has been hit with a €500mil fine by the EU for their violations under the Digital Market's Act (DMA). As you may know we are massive fans of the DMA, and we've been making plenty of trips to Brussels this year to advocate for a better web as much as we can. So as you can imagine, today was a big festive day for us!

Now that this is out of the way, without further ado, let's talk about our big design update!

CRYPTEE PHOTOS REDESIGNED

We have redesigned Cryptee Photos and added some amazing new features. We think the new design is even more minimalistic and clearer — yet packed with even more features. We think we've made things simple enough that you will easily be able to navigate around, but let's take a look at what has changed!

GALLERY VIEW

We have redesigned the way your albums look and removed bezels to let your cover photos do the talking.

The top navigation bar now takes up half the space, yet still maintaining all the functionality. To achieve this we've moved a few things around.

To begin with, we now have a large "+" button on the top right corner, which you can use to upload photos, create new albums, and summon hidden albums. It looks like this :

We also had to move the favorites button. We thought that our favorite moments and memories deserve more, they deserve to take the spotlight, and not just be hidden away behind a boring button.

We realized we could perhaps use this opportunity to showcase different favorite photos each time you open the app to remind you of your favorite moments.

So starting today, on the very top of your gallery view, you'll find a "favorites" section, which will feature a few of your favorite memories each time you open the app.

ALBUM CONTENTS

To make room for a few big new features coming up soon, we decided to redesign how your photos and album details appear as well.

You'll notice that when swiping through photos they will load faster, and when scrolling down in your gallery you'll notice the thumbnails will appear faster and smoother. We've improved the performance and animations to make this experience as smooth as possible.

We also wanted to make the navigation bar take up less space, so we decided to hide away all the actions you can take until after you select photos. In the past these actions were sitting up there taking tons of space. So starting from today, when you select photos, you'll be presented with our new selection popup that sits at the bottom, closer to your thumb to make selections even easier.

But that's not all, we've added one more feature to Cryptee Photos.

HEIC/HEIF support

You can now upload HEIC/HEIF photos taken on your favorite fruit-branded phones and tablets to Cryptee Photos. Cryptee will store the original HEIC/HEIF file for you, and even generate an easy to share jpeg version you can easily download and share with your friends.

What took us so long?

HEIC/HEIF is a surprisingly complex format that can only be opened by Apple's Safari browsers on desktop and mobile.

All other browsers, neither Firefox nor Chromium-based browsers like Vivaldi or Chrome can open HEIC/HEIF files natively. This meant that we had to ship a compatibility layer that works on these red browsers that don't support HEIC.

What does this mean?

It means that if you're uploading HEIC files on your Mac using Chrome or Firefox, your uploads will be slower, and they will use more memory + processing power, since these browsers will be using our home-made compatibility layer.

So if you're planning on uploading hundreds and thousands of HEIC photos from your Mac to Cryptee, we recommend doing so using Cryptee in Safari. < a painful sentence to write, given our complex past with Apple ... we know... >

OTHER NEW FEATURES AND ADDITIONS

Welcome "Inconsolata" & 22px

Cryptee Docs has a new monospaced font, Inconsolata. We realized it was long overdue since it was requested by many of you savvy users of Cryptee this year.

We've also added a new font size : 22px, which comfortably sits between 20px and 24px, making text more comfortable to read.

Special thanks to our user Tony for requesting this particular combination. "Inconsolata 22" is our team's new favorite font combination now.

Docs Search

Cryptee Docs search should feel a bit faster now! We've also made it possible to paste stuff into the search box and start searching without any additional keystrokes. — again, thanks for catching this one Tony!

Autocomplete Traps

Some of our users reported that their browsers' autocomplete / autofill gets really really excited when they open Cryptee Docs, and try to fill the search box with their email address for Cryptee or other random things, even though our search box is very clearly labeled as a search box in the code. Which then would trigger the search, and result in our users getting confused about why the hell the left sidebar kept sliding off.

To address these types of strange autofill issues, we've added hidden autocomplete/autofill traps throughout Cryptee Docs. It seems to do the trick on our test devices. So please let us know if you experience any strange behavior after this update that may or may not be related.

Performance Improvements

This update includes numerous small and large bug fixes and massive speed improvements across the board and we think you'll definitely notice the smoother performance. ESPECIALLY when uploading photos.

We've managed to make uploading photos take up 2-3x less memory, making large uploads a breeze even on slower tablets. Go ahead and give it a try. Use your $50,000 Hasselblad medium format camera to upload a 400megapixel photo on your kid's $50 Android tablet. It should still work. It's a promise.

One last thing.

I would like to personally thank Jesper, who reported at least 50 bugs since the beginning of this year, and officially earned multiple honorable titles such as "The Pest Controller", "Exterminator" and "Error Archeologist". Thank you Jesper for helping us keep Cryptee pest free. So this update features tons of bug fixes courtesy of Jesper.

And that's all for now folks!

If you're enjoying Cryptee, please consider subscribing to one of our paid plans to support us. Help us defend your rights, privacy and security.

All the very best from Estonia, Europe,

John Ozbay