I had a great two weeks finishing up the last stage of the import options migration, which splits the old file/tag/note import options into smaller parts, unifies the defaults system, and makes it easy to save and load favourite templates. There's also some misc fixes and quality of life work in other systems.
This is the big migration that I have been prepping for recently. The old system of file/tag/note import options is now split into seven: prefetch/file filtering/tag filtering/locations/tags/notes/presentation. It sounds intimidating, but it is all the same UI you are used to, and all the rules work basically the same way, but some bugs are fixed and some complex things are easier to do. Everything in your existing importers and defaults will update automatically and you do not have to do anything. Feel free to just update and generally ignore it until you need it.
If you want to dive in, there's some special new help here: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/getting_started_import_options.html
There are three main changes: First, the splitting of the options into smaller pieces. The stuff that says 'where files should go and what to do with them' (location import options) and 'where tags should go' (tag import options) no longer handle 'ignore these files' (file filtering import options) and 'blacklist these tags' (tag filtering import options), and the advanced stuff that does 'fetch metadata even if url/hash recognised blah blah blah' and 'show these files in UI' is similarly extracted into their own things (prefetch and presentation import options). This means you can load up a new downloader page and give it a new blacklist and not accidentally override your tag parsing settings. Everything is easier to mix-and-match, and with careful setting up of the defaults you can define a nice global ruleset for import destinations and tag parsing while tinkering with more specific blacklists on URL Classes or whatever you need.
Second, the defaults are now all managed in options->import options. Before, the default file, tag, and note import options were handled in different areas of the UI and you could only differentiate them in a few ways. Now you can say 'by default, all subscriptions get imported to x local file domain, and they only present new files', or 'all import folders should use this tag blacklist and also ignore webp' or whatever you prefer, and it is all clean and in one place. There is a new 'stack' defaults system that is a more complicated version of the 'URL Class rules overrule post/watcher defaults', which the help will introduce you to.
One note on the update: if you have a downloader that has custom, say, tag import options, but the tag filtering component is the same as your defaults, your updated downloader will get 'default' for the tag filtering import options. If a subscription or URL Class entry seems to have disappeared or slimmed down after the update, this is actually decluttering going on and no behaviour will change.
And third, the UI around here has a new 'favourites' system. It is now simple to create an import profile that says 'import files to x location and tag this way, and add these y additional tags', and then load that up in a couple clicks on any importer. You can also copy/paste any set of import options as one block, and for sophisticated users there are some advanced paste actions to allow for careful merging of different sets of options. Also, the 'edit subscriptions' dialog has a new column to show when a sub has custom import options set up--it is much easier, now, to review and just spam out the custom import options you want on subs.
Thanks for your patience as I worked on this the past few months. I am happy with the technical side, but I am afraid this new system is not super user-friendly. If you poke around, I would be interested to know what works well, what doesn't, and what was just confusing in the help, UI, or otherwise. I have fixed a variety of edge-case import option bugs through all this work, but I would obviously like to hear any reports of problems with the new system, too.
Once this system has had time to breathe, I would be open to adding some sort of 'rating import options' so we can finally start adding ratings in various ways on import. Now I am handling 'n' items here, rather than '3', adding a new type will be much easier.
Files with duration now have a 'approx bitrate: 1.4MB/s' line in their detailed file info. Very simple size / duration calculation, and just a bit of fun.
The 'main window' shortcut set has a new 'page: rename current' shortcut action.
Some missing Referral URL assignment on posts that generate multiple sub-files is fixed!
Importing of cookies.txt is fixed!
This was a big thing, and I think I have two more weeks until my summer break, so I'll just work on small stuff.
