This release is about the layer you built by hand. Every tag, rating, and collection you have added now fits in a single portable file you can carry to a new machine. Alongside that: your own images can stand in for generated renders, bulk actions live in one menu, and archives on network drives are dramatically faster.
New features
- Backup & Restore: Your library is more than the files on disk - it is every tag, rating, and collection you have built up. Now you can save all of it.
- Export your curation: Tags, collections, ratings, materials, colors, printers, groups, and watched folders are written to a single
.modelist-backupfile. Your 3D files are never copied, so backups stay small. - Restore anywhere: Importing a backup replaces your current library and restarts Modelist. Useful for moving to a new computer, or getting back to a known-good state after a big cleanup goes wrong.
- Folder mapping on restore: When a backup comes from another machine, Modelist shows each watched folder and where it should live now. Folders that still exist are matched automatically, and anything else you point at a new location or skip.
- Thumbnails optional: Leave them out and backups stay tiny (previews simply re-render afterwards), or include them with an up-front size estimate before you export.
- Machine-local settings stay put: App preferences are never exported, so restoring a backup never drags another machine's settings along with it.
- Export your curation: Tags, collections, ratings, materials, colors, printers, groups, and watched folders are written to a single
- Sidecar & Group Cover Images: Use your own images as thumbnails instead of the generated render.
- Automatic sidecars: Drop an image next to a model with the same name (
dragon.stl+dragon.png) and it becomes that model's thumbnail. An image next to a ZIP becomes the cover for the whole group. - Group photos: Pick any image as a group's cover, or choose one of the member renders. The sidecar stays available to re-select even after you switch to a render.
- Renders never steal the spot: A model still renders in the background, but your chosen image stays the one on the card.
- Detected on demand: Add a sidecar image long after a file was first scanned, and opening that file's edit page picks it up.
- Automatic sidecars: Drop an image next to a model with the same name (
- Bulk Actions: The multi-select toolbar has been reorganised into a single Actions menu, with new actions inside it.
- Add / Clear Banderole: Set or clear the review ribbon across a whole selection, instead of the all-or-nothing button buried in Settings. Select a group and it applies to every file inside.
- Re-render Thumbnails: Rebuild thumbnails for just the files you pick, rather than regenerating the entire library. Files that previously failed to render are retried rather than skipped.
- A tidier toolbar: Selection controls stay on the row; everything that acts on your selection now lives in one menu, grouped and with Delete clearly separated.
- Duplicate Archives: The Duplicate Finder now spots entire duplicate archives, not just loose files - handy when the same pack has been downloaded twice under different names.
Improvements
- Archives on network drives are fast: Previewing a file inside a ZIP now reads just that one file out of the archive instead of loading the entire archive into memory, and it does that once rather than once per file. On a NAS the difference is night and day.
- Built for big libraries: File list loading is cached and group filters resolve in a single query, so libraries in the tens of thousands of files stay responsive. Search indexing was reworked to use a fraction of the memory it used to.
- Works fully offline: Fonts and libraries now ship with the app, so the interface renders properly with no internet connection.
- Search sees more: Notes and descriptions are now indexed, with formatting stripped so searches match the words you actually wrote.
- Clean shutdown: Background workers and hidden windows are closed properly when you quit, and any temporary files left behind by an unexpected shutdown are cleared at startup rather than accumulating on disk.
- Duplicate Finder handles big results: Opening the results of a large scan no longer locks up the app, results are capped per category with a prompt to narrow things down, and the summary grid lays out evenly. Scans also keep running in the background now, so you can go do something else and come back to live progress.
- Metadata travels with archives: Files extracted from a ZIP now inherit the download and source information from the archive they came from.