Every tool, fix and change, in the order it shipped.
Dates are commit dates from the project repository, not marketing dates. Where a change fixed a bug, the bug is named. Where a number is quoted, it was measured. Newest first.
Image effects, a background generator, and a cleaner author line on 48 pages
New tool: Image Effects. Bayer and Floyd-Steinberg dither, halftone, duotone, film grain, ASCII art and pixel art applied to your own photo on your device, with a live thumbnail of every effect, a Shuffle button, hold-to-compare, and a settings link that carries the treatment but never the photo. Measured at 2000 × 1333 in headless Chrome: every effect between 1 and 112 ms. Nothing is uploaded, and the byte counter on the page shows it.
New tool: Thumbnail Background Generator. Eight styles (glow, mesh, burst, grain, stripes, bokeh, waves, duo) drawn on your device from a seed, at platform sizes from 1280 × 720 to 4K. Every background is unique and can be reopened from a link; packs of 6, 12 or 24 download as a ZIP with a manifest that holds the reopen link for each file. Measured in headless Chrome on a software GPU: every style renders 4K in under 10 ms. Nothing is uploaded, and the byte counter on the page shows it.
Fix: thirteen Instagram and TikTok preview pages declared their own page title as the author in structured data. They now name ThumbCrafted. All 35 guides gained a visible byline with the published date already carried in their schema.
Effects reach the editor. The Filter panel has a More effects button that sends your photo to the effects tool and brings it back treated, with your text and shapes restored. It sends the base photo rather than the flattened design, so the treatment lands on the picture and not on your title.
Fix: a share link that carried the photo loaded nothing at all, and had done since share links shipped on September 3. Two separate faults, both silent. Links carrying only the layout were never affected.
Editor: a Surprise me button on the empty state, a Shuffle in the floating panel, and /editor?starter=random pick a random starter layout in a random colour scheme; press again for another. Every saved template now has a Link button that copies a share link carrying the template, no server involved.
Under the hood: the site's analytics counts every history.replaceState as a page view, so the generator writes its seed link to the address bar only when you click Copy link. Documented in the bug log so it does not recur.
Match BG colour, reachable where phones can actually use it
BG Fill gained Match BG colour: it reads the photo under the fill and states the share of the image it sampled, instead of guessing. On phones the control first shipped inside a panel that closes the moment a fill is created, so nobody could reach it; it now lives in the long-press element menu. The general rule that came out of it is in the bug log: a control that only appears while a panel is open is not shipped if the flow that creates its target closes that panel.
Inbound bridge from yank.info
A card built on yank.info can open in the ThumbCrafted editor as a locked base layer, with your text and cut-outs on top. The first edit sends a single beacon back so the bridge can be measured.
Landing pages, share by URL, and a name defence
YouTube Thumbnail Maker and Thumbnail Maker (eight platform sizes) are two new pages built to stand alone, with the four-part promise stated where the search lands: free, no watermark, no signup, and nothing uploaded, measured.
Share by URL: the editor can pack a design into the part of a link after the #, which never reaches a server. The photo travels only if you confirm, downscaled, with the added size stated first.
Name defence: the homepage FAQ now answers whether ThumbCrafted is the same as ThumbCraft (thumbcraft.io). It is not, and the two are unrelated.
Not shipped, on purpose: Spanish and Portuguese versions of the thumbnail maker exist on disk but are held back from the index until a native speaker has reviewed them.
On-device AI: 4x upscaler, prompt editing with your own key, and proof
A new /ai hub groups the tools that run models on your device. Upscale image 4x runs a compact Real-ESRGAN model (4.9 MB, self-hosted) in the browser; it times the first tile and shows the estimate before committing to the rest. Measured: 512 × 384 in 5.7 s on eight threads. Edit with a prompt sends your image from your browser straight to Google using an API key you hold; it is the one tool on the site that sends an image anywhere, and it is labelled as such.
The byte counter: on every on-device tool, the page now counts request bytes leaving it from the moment you pick a file to the moment you download, and prints the number beside the tool. On the on-device tools it reads zero. On the prompt editor it correctly reads non-zero, to Google.
Mobile editor: crop, captions, and the long press
Crop on mobile now previews your edits and overlays survive the crop (previously it cropped the original photo). Closing the caption panel keeps the caption instead of deleting it. The long press that opens the element menu was tuned in three steps from 2.5 s to 1.62 s, drag starts immediately, and the menu no longer fires while an element is being dragged.
Magic eraser, seven converters, and three ways to take the tools with you
Magic eraser: tap to select by colour, fill from the background sampled around the selection, and read a measured verdict on whether the patch will show before committing. No model, and it says so. The same selector is a Magic mode in the editor.
Seven new tools: AVIF, BMP and TIFF converters, SVG to PNG at any size, split image, Instagram grid maker and carousel maker. Every export on the site is now counted, per tool and format, so what people actually download can be measured.
Distribution: a PWA install with an Android share target, a public link builder, and a Chrome extension that puts Thumbnail Autopsy on YouTube Studio and watch pages with one activeTab permission and no host permissions, verified in a real browser.
Eleven tools in a day, and the site opened to AI search
Search: robots.txt now allow-lists every named AI search and training crawler by name, and llms.txt was rebuilt as a citable summary of the site. One H1 per page, metadata brought within limits, and a "Just added" strip on the homepage for the newest tools.
Fix: the chart maker shipped dead in production the first time because the build's minifier rewrote a string it should not have. The build now checks its own output, so a step that rewrites shipped code cannot pass silently again.
Mobile Quick Text
A fullscreen, keyboard-aware text entry on the mobile editor with a live preview, so typing a title on a phone no longer fights the on-screen keyboard.
Whole-codebase bug audit
A two-day audit across the editor and mobile editor (July 13 to 14) fixed a batch of long-standing defects, including mobile shapes ignoring the picked colour. Twelve commits in the month, all fixes.
Background remover edges, and the guide pages' double header
The bright halo left around background-remover cut-outs was traced to the colour un-mix at the true edge and fixed separately from regions the model wrongly kept, which need a coverage decision rather than a colour threshold. Guide pages lost a stacked second navigation header. 131 commits.
Desktop editor layout, the how-to-use modal, and the mobile redirect
The desktop editor's canvas and preview were restored to their intended layout after a regression, the how-to-use modal's action row was fixed, and the mobile redirect that a rollback had dropped was restored. 148 commits.
Launch
ThumbCrafted Beta v0.9 went live on April 1 with the desktop editor, and the mobile editor followed the same day: shapes, text, captions, colours, undo and share. 717 commits in the first month, most of them on the mobile editor and the first 35 guides.
How this page is made
Each entry's date is the commit date in the project repository, and the wording describes what the commit changed, checked against the bug log where a fix is involved. Nothing here is scheduled or projected. If a tool is named, it is live; if a number is quoted, it was measured on the page or in a test that is kept with the code. The list is edited by hand rather than generated from commit messages, because a commit message written for the developer is rarely the sentence a user needs.