Version History

Shaded region maps for Europe — 13 country maps shaded by their own administrative regions, joining the US, Canadian, Indian and British maps.

Photo and Recording statistics — two new submenus under Photos, Birding Statistics and Technical Statistics, providing an array of charts to analyze the effects of camera settings. Recordings gains a matching Birding Statistics submenu.

Safer media catalog — compacting now lists which media does not match sightings, and gives the user the choice of removing or keeping it. Backup runs the same check.

Trip Report — the Dates tab lists species seen only on the selected date, and trip map location dots show their species on hover.

Alpha-code filename matching — photo and recording filenames now match on four-letter alpha codes, including both valid forms for hyphenated names: COWP and CWPI both find Common Wood-Pigeon.

Fixes — switching off a Bluetooth headset no longer crashes playback; Individual’s By Year and By Month lists carry their counts; Manage Photos redraws its Remove and Skip boxes; maximized windows are no longer shrunk by new content.

Seasonal Date sort — orders photos and recordings by where in the year they were taken, ignoring the year.

Dates on grid cards — Browse Grid shows each item's capture date beneath the species name.

Sort direction — Ascending and Descending move to the right-hand end of the browse banner, away from the sort keys.

What's New in the app — a What's New item joins the User Guide menu, showing the notes for the version you are running.

The guide on the web — the complete user guide now lives at yearbirder.org/guide.

Trip Report — Big Report is renamed Trip Report, on the Reports menu and the toolbar.

Itinerary tab — retells a trip in the order you birded it — checklists grouped by date, each stop showing its time, location, protocol, duration, distance and your comments. The Map tab numbers locations in the order you first birded them.

Redesigned Trip Report PDF — a title block, summary strip, banded sections, striped tables, the Itinerary as its own section, and page numbers throughout.

Better species guesses from file names — file names are read word by word, weighting the words that tell the birds on that checklist apart. Typos are forgiven, and ties are left to you rather than guessed.

Confidence coloring — Add and Manage Photos and Recordings color a suggested species green for an exact match, amber when only part of the name matched or a typo was corrected.

Search by banding code — type b: in Name Search followed by a four-letter code — b:OSFL finds the Olive-sided Flycatcher.

Fixes — several interface refinements: slimmer drop-down arrows, Sighting Filter date fields matching the menus above them, and small result sets opening a window sized to fit.

Microphone rigs — define your rigs in Preferences → Recording Gear, each a recording device paired with a microphone, then assign one to your recordings. The Media Filter gains a Microphone setting, and Recording Enlargement lists it below the recording device.

Correct a wrongly named device — assigning a rig sets both the recording device and the microphone, overriding whatever the file claims. Your audio files are never modified.

Better species guesses from file names — a banding or eBird code now outranks a chance word match, and short fragments of a species name no longer count as a match.

The Explorer remembers where you were — the Community Sightings Explorer reopens on your last region and past-days setting, and a My County button jumps to your home county.

Hotspot dots open their sightings — clicking a dot on the Hotspot Map opens an All Community Sightings report for that hotspot. The same fix revives click-through on the species maps.

Sort dates by day of year — right-click any date column header and choose Sort by day of year (seasonal) to order rows by where each date falls in the year. Available on every date column in the Species, Locations, Checklists and Find Results lists, and on the Date tab of Date Totals.

Street maps from Esri — the previous tile service began stamping "API KEY REQUIRED" across every map. Street maps now come from Esri, the same provider as the satellite view. No key needed.

Edit a photo's assignment in place — the photo Enlargement right-click menu gains Edit species or location assignment…, which opens Manage Photos on just that photo.

Fixes — returning from another app now takes you back to a full-screen photo or recording rather than the main window; window and table borders meet cleanly at their corners; Preferences gains the same thin border as every other window; clearing the filters no longer leaves a stray highlight.

Sort in either direction — Browse Cards and Browse Grid gain Ascending and Descending buttons beside the sort options, for both photos and recordings.

Spectrograms on the recording growth curve — hovering a point on Recorded Species Growth Over Time shows a spectrogram of each species first recorded that day; clicking opens those recordings in a Browse Grid.

My County and My Patch, always at hand — the buttons sit at the top of the Sighting Filter whether or not you have set them, and clicking an unset one offers to take you to Preferences.

Fixes — lists now open with the sort arrow visible on the column they are sorted by, and the Rename Media window's Cancel button is relabelled Close.

Browse your photos as a grid — Photos → Browse Grid shows the photos matching your filters as thumbnails, four columns wide — built for large result sets.

Browse your recordings as a grid — Recordings → Browse Grid lays recordings out as spectrograms, three columns wide, each keeping its own Play button and scrubber.

Two browse views — the original browsers are renamed Browse Cards. Both views share the same sorting, Slideshow button and live updates, and the two windows are independent.

Grids reflow to your window — widen or narrow a grid and it re-lays its cells without reloading a thumbnail or re-rendering a spectrogram.

Fixes — on macOS the app icon now matches the size and rounded-square shape of every other app in the Dock.

Instant previews for new recordings — spectrograms are pre-rendered when you add a recording, so it opens instantly rather than rendering on first use.

Compact catalog and cache — a new command tidies the media catalog and sweeps cached previews that no longer belong to it. Removing media now frees its cache automatically.

Single-species filter opens the Individual window — asking for a species list when the filter names just one species opens that species' Individual window instead of a one-row list.

Refresh respects your filters — re-reading technical data from your files now honors both the Sighting and Media filters, and each item keeps its rating and notes.

Choose how far back community sightings reach — a slider sets the eBird history window from a single day to a full month, in place of the fixed three days.

Quicker ways around your media — double-click an enlarged photo to snap back to best fit; press space in a recording enlargement to play or pause; setting only the top of a rating range fills in the bottom.

Fixes — Find results show the terms you searched for, the Manage windows label their confirm button Save, enlarged photos open at their final size, the Windows spectrogram-click flash is gone, and the Yearbirder icon appears in the title bar — plus a range of smaller stability and correctness fixes across the media views.

Bird recordings — Yearbirder catalogs your WAV recordings alongside your sightings and photos, reading their embedded timestamps to match each one to a checklist and species. A single recording can serve several species. Add, browse, rate, filter, map and rename them just as you do photos.

Spectrograms and synchronized playback — zoom both the frequency and time axes, adjust the contrast, and play back with a cursor that tracks the sound in real time. Playback resamples to your output device's preferred rate.

Per-device audio calibration — align the playback cursor with what you hear, once per output device.

Recordings on maps and in charts — an interactive map with spectrogram previews, an animated playback map, an Audio Species Gallery, and charts for totals, year-to-date pace, accumulation and families.

Filter recordings by audio properties — rating, duration, sample rate, bit depth, channels and recording device.

Redesigned media browsers — Browse Photos and Browse Recordings share a new media-card design with instant sorting, and the enlargement view gains a redesigned details pane.

Dramatically faster media display — thumbnails and spectrograms are pre-rendered and stored on disk, so browsers, galleries and maps open fast and stay fast between sessions.

Live updates when your media changes — open browsers, maps, charts and lists refresh on the fly when you delete, re-tag or edit a photo or recording.

Species list media icons — photo and recording icons mark each species you have captured, and media notes are now searchable.

Explorer region tree-picker — a drill-down country → state → county tree replaces the cascading dropdowns.

Fixes — Windows-only stretched text and startup flashes resolved, plus many smaller refinements across layouts, typography, window behavior and general stability.

Fixes — two Windows-only problems in the installer build: every community feature silently failing to reach the eBird API, and maps showing a plain gray background instead of their tiles.

Community menu — consolidates the reports that contact eBird's servers — Regional Taxonomy, Notable and All Community Sightings, Hotspot Map and the Community Sightings Explorer. All require a free eBird API key.

Hotspot Map — displays every public eBird hotspot in the selected region as a bubble sized by checklist count, from the menu or the Explorer.

Regional Taxonomy — renamed from Regional Species. With a specific eBird location selected it queries that location's species list rather than falling back to the county, and private locations are labeled.

Reporting window made explicit — the Notable and All Community Sightings items and buttons now read "(Past 3 days)".

Single-location All Community Sightings — with a specific location selected, the header gains All-time List and Map buttons, even when nothing has been reported there in three days.

Photo Filter shortcut — Cmd-P on Mac, Ctrl-P on Windows, shows or hides the Photo Filter panel.

Fixes — Life, State, County and Year badges corrected on the community reports, including cases where the wrong region's data was used to judge a first.

Community Sightings Explorer — browse Notable and All Community Sightings for any region in the world, independently of the Sighting Filter. Pick a country from a live eBird list, then narrow to a state and county. Requires a free eBird API key.

Clickable species names — species names in the community reports open an Individual Species window showing your own history for that species.

Fixes — life birds now sort to their correct taxonomic position in All Community Sightings, and the redundant Reports count is gone from its header.

Notable Community Sightings — species flagged as notable in the selected region over the past three days, sorted taxonomically, with badges marking Life, State, County and Year firsts against your own data.

All Community Sightings — every species reported in the region over the past three days, one row each, with an All Locations button listing that species' sightings across the region.

Regional Taxonomy — an interactive species checklist for the current region from live eBird data, marking seen and photographed species, with filter buttons for each.

eBird API key in Preferences — a field for your personal key, free from ebird.org/api/keygen and required by the community reports.

Animated First Sightings Map — plays back the first sighting of each species under the current filter, so county firsts, year firsts or any filtered list accumulate chronologically.

Animated map tooltips — a tooltip tracks each newly plotted species during playback, showing its name, rank, date and location.

Fixes — resolved a crash in the Animated Sequence Map with large photo collections.

Media catalog safeguards — guards against data loss when opening, switching or closing catalogs: adding photos without a catalog offers to create one, pending changes prompt before closing, and switching catalogs while Manage Photos is open is blocked.

CSV catalogs must be converted — legacy CSV media catalogs are converted to the .jsonl format before use, guided by the app.

Fixes — declining "Set as default catalog?" now preserves the previous default, Preferences shows the stored default rather than the open catalog, and the Photos and catalog-related File menu items appear only when relevant.

eBird species code in Rename Photos — the Species Name Format picker adds eBird Species Code (e.g. gretit1) alongside common and scientific names.

Smarter photo-to-species matching — filename matching checks eBird codes, BBL banding codes, common names and scientific names as substrings, handling any camera's naming pattern.

Duration-aware checklist matching — photo timestamps match the checklist whose window they fall within, rather than the next one to start.

Sighting Filter label — the filter panel is labeled Sighting Filter, distinguishing it from the Photo Filter.

Chart names updated — photo charts renamed Families & Orders by Photos, Total Photos, New Species Photographed Each Year, and Photographed Species Growth Over Time.