Version History

The spectrogram views a recording needs are now pre-rendered when you add it to your catalog, so newly added recordings open instantly in both the browser and the enlargement view instead of rendering on first use.

A new command tidies your media catalog and sweeps cached previews that no longer belong to it, reclaiming disk space. Removing a photo or recording from the catalog now frees its cached previews automatically.

Asking for a species list when your Sighting Filter names just one species now opens that species' Individual window — its dates, locations, and media — instead of a one-row list.

Re-reading technical data from your files now honors both the Sighting and Media filters, so you can refresh a chosen subset rather than the whole catalog, and each item keeps its rating and notes. The confirmation names the scope it acted on.

The Community Sightings Explorer has a new slider that sets how many days of eBird history the Notable Community Sightings, All Community Sightings, and Notable Sightings Map reports cover — anywhere from a single day to a full month, in place of the fixed three-day window.

Double-click an enlarged photo to snap it back to best fit after zooming with the scroll wheel, and press the space bar in a recording enlargement to start or pause playback wherever the keyboard focus sits. In the Media filter, setting only the top of a rating range now fills in the bottom for you.

Find results now show the terms you searched for, the Manage Photos and Manage Recordings windows label their confirm button "Save", and enlarged photos open at their final size instead of resizing after they appear. Windows users no longer see a flash when clicking a spectrogram, and the Yearbirder icon now appears in the main window's title bar. This release also brings a range of smaller stability and correctness fixes across the media views.

Yearbirder now catalogs your bird recordings alongside your sightings and photos. Import your WAV files and the app reads their embedded recorder timestamps to match each one to a checklist and species — and a single recording can be assigned to several species at once. Add, browse, rate, filter, map, and rename your recordings just as you do your photos.

Every recording appears as a spectrogram. Open one in the enlargement view to zoom both the frequency (kHz) and time axes and adjust the contrast, then play it back with a cursor that tracks the sound in real time so you can follow a song note by note. High-quality playback resamples to your output device's preferred rate.

Because different audio hardware introduces different latency between what you hear and where the playback cursor sits, a new per-device calibration lets you align the two once. Yearbirder remembers the setting for each output device.

Plot your recordings on an interactive map with spectrogram previews, or play them back in sequence on an animated map. The Audio Species Gallery shows your best recording per species, and new recording charts track your totals, year-to-date pace, accumulation, and family breakdown.

Beyond species, region, date, and season, you can now filter recordings by rating, duration, sample rate, bit depth, channels, and recording device.

The Browse Photos and Browse Recordings windows share a new media-card design, with instant sorting by species, date, rating, or taxonomy. The enlargement view has a redesigned details pane showing the full sighting, media, and technical information at a glance.

A new caching system pre-renders photo thumbnails and recording spectrograms and stores them on disk, so browsers, galleries, and maps open dramatically faster — and stay fast between sessions instead of rebuilding every preview from scratch.

Open browsers, maps, charts, and lists now update on the fly when you delete, re-tag, or edit a photo or recording — no need to close and reopen them.

Species lists now show photo and recording icons next to each species you've captured, so you can see your media coverage at a glance. Media Notes are now searchable, and photo-to-species matching includes a banding-code fallback for more reliable results.

The Community Sightings Explorer now uses a drill-down region tree — country to state to county — in place of the cascading dropdowns, making it easier to navigate to any region in the world.

Resolved Windows-only issues that could produce stretched or mis-rendered text and brief flashes during startup.

This release also brings many smaller refinements across the app — polished layouts and typography, smoother window behavior, and a wide range of stability and correctness fixes.

Resolved a Windows-only issue where all Community features (Community Sightings Explorer, Notable and All Community Sightings, Regional Taxonomy, Hotspot Map) silently failed to contact the eBird API in the installer build due to SSL certificate handling in the bundled runtime.

Resolved a Windows-only issue where sightings maps, hotspot maps, animated maps, and choropleth maps displayed dots and region outlines correctly but showed a plain grey background instead of the map tile layer.

A new Community menu consolidates the reports that contact eBird's servers: Regional Taxonomy, Notable Community Sightings (Past 3 days), All Community Sightings (Past 3 days), Hotspot Map, and Community Sightings Explorer. All community features require a free eBird API key (set in Preferences).

A new Community → Hotspot Map command displays all public eBird hotspots in the selected region as bubble markers, with each bubble sized by checklist count. Also accessible from the Community Sightings Explorer. Requires an eBird API key.

The former "Regional Species" report has been renamed Regional Taxonomy and moved to Community → Regional Taxonomy. When a specific eBird location is selected in the Sighting Filter, the report now queries that exact location's species list instead of falling back to the county level. Private eBird locations are automatically detected and labelled "(Personal Location)" in the report header.

The Notable Community Sightings and All Community Sightings menu items and their corresponding buttons in the Community Sightings Explorer now include "(Past 3 days)" to make the reporting window explicit.

When a specific eBird location is selected, the All Community Sightings report now shows All-time List and Map buttons in the header, opening the Regional Taxonomy and Hotspot Map respectively for that location — even when no checklists have been submitted in the past three days.

The Explorer now includes a Hotspot Map button alongside the existing Notable and All Community Sightings buttons.

Press Cmd-P (Mac) or Ctrl-P (Windows) to show or hide the Photo Filter panel without using the mouse.

Corrected several bugs where Life, State, County, and Year badges on the Notable Community Sightings and All Community Sightings reports showed incorrect results, including cases where the wrong region's data was used to evaluate firsts.

A new Reports → Community Sightings Explorer… window lets you browse Notable and All Community Sightings for any region in the world — independently of the Sighting Filter. Pick a country from a live eBird API list (United States and Canada sorted to the top), then optionally narrow to a state/province and county. Click Notable Community Sightings or All Community Sightings to open the corresponding report for that region. Requires a free eBird API key.

In both Notable Community Sightings and All Community Sightings, species common names are now clickable blue links. Clicking a name opens an Individual Species window showing your full sighting history, location breakdowns, monthly patterns, and photo thumbnails for that species. If the species is not in your own data, clicking it does nothing. Hybrid species remain non-clickable.

Life-bird species now appear in correct taxonomic position in the All Community Sightings report. Previously, species you had never recorded anywhere sorted to the bottom of the list instead of their correct taxonomic position.

The All Community Sightings header no longer shows a separate Reports count. Since the eBird API returns one report per species, that number always equalled the species count and provided no additional information.

Community → Notable Community Sightings (Past 3 days) queries the eBird API for species flagged as notable in the selected region over the past three days, sorted taxonomically. Colour-coded badge bubbles mark Life, State, County, and Year firsts relative to your own data. Click + to expand each species' checklist entries; duplicate entries (same location, time, and observer) are removed automatically. Hybrid species appear in grey without badges. Requires an eBird API key.

Community → All Community Sightings (Past 3 days) shows every species reported in the selected region over the past three days, one row per species showing the most recent sighting. An All Locations button opens a new window listing all sightings of that species across the region. The same taxonomic ordering, badge bubbles, and filter bar from Notable Sightings apply here too. Requires an eBird API key.

Community → Regional Taxonomy generates an interactive species checklist for the currently selected region using live eBird API data. Seen species are marked with a checkmark; unseen species appear in grey. When a media catalog is open, a blue dot marks each species you have photographed. Filter buttons let you focus on seen, unseen, photographed, or not-yet-photographed species. Requires a free eBird API key.

A new field in Preferences stores your personal eBird API key, required for community reports. Get a free key at ebird.org/api/keygen.

A new animated map that plays back the first sighting of each species under the current filter. Unlike the Animated Lifer Map (which always shows life lifers), this map respects your active filter, so you can watch your county firsts, year firsts, or any filtered species list accumulate chronologically.

During playback of either animated map, a tooltip tracks each newly plotted species, showing its name, rank, date, and location.

Resolved a crash that occurred in the Animated Sequence Map with large photo collections.

A series of fixes prevents accidental data loss when opening, switching, or closing media catalogs. The app now guards against overwriting an existing catalog when a new eBird data file is opened.

Adding photos without a catalog open now prompts you to create one before saving. If you cancel, your in-progress work is preserved and you can try again.

Closing the Manage Photos window or the media catalog while changes are pending now asks whether to save or discard, rather than silently discarding.

Opening a different media catalog while Manage Photos is open is blocked to prevent conflicts. Switching catalogs with unsaved changes prompts to save first.

Legacy CSV media catalogs must now be converted to the .jsonl format before they can be used. The app guides you through the conversion and will not open a CSV without it.

Declining "Set as default catalog?" now correctly preserves the previous default. The Preferences dialog always shows the stored default rather than the currently open catalog.

The Photos menu, Close eBird Data File, and catalog-related File menu items are now shown and hidden based on what is actually open, reducing clutter.

The Species Name Format picker now includes eBird Species Code (e.g. gretit1) alongside Common Name and Scientific Name.

When adding photos to the catalog, filename matching now checks eBird codes, BBL banding codes, common names, and scientific names as substrings, handling arbitrary filename patterns from any camera or workflow. Previously only whole-word token matching was used.

Photo EXIF timestamps are now matched to the checklist whose window (start time + duration) is closest, so a photo taken mid-checklist correctly matches that checklist rather than the next one to start.

The filter panel is now labelled Sighting Filter to distinguish it from the Photo Filter.

Photo-related charts are now named Families & Orders by Photos, Total Photos, New Species Photographed Each Year, and Photographed Species Growth Over Time.