Photos becomes Media, and a page about safety

Today's OScar changelog starts with a rename. Photos learned to play videos, and a tool that holds both deserved a name that fits both. So Photos is now Media. The rest of the day went to the things around your files: where they live, how they're kept safe, and a website that explains it with a bit more colour.

Photos is now Media, and it plays videos

Drop an MP4, MOV or WebM into Media and it lands beside your photos, up to 10 GB a file. Big files go up in pieces, so one slow moment doesn't start the whole upload over. While it uploads, OScar reads the date the clip was recorded and grabs a frame from it as its picture in the grid, with the length in the corner.

Open a video and it plays right in the lightbox. Nothing is re-encoded: you watch exactly the file you uploaded. The one catch is the iPhone's HEVC format, which Safari plays and some other browsers don't. When that happens, the lightbox shows the picture and a Download button instead of a black box.

With videos in, "Photos" stopped being the right word. The tool is called Media everywhere you read it now, and its address moved with it, to /tools/media on the site and to "media" inside your projects. Old links still work; they hop over to the new address on their own.

A new home for your pictures, and faster grids

Behind the scenes, every photo and video moved to new storage built for big files. You shouldn't notice the move itself. You should notice that a folder of a few hundred photos fills in faster, because the little thumbnails now load straight from storage instead of queueing up one by one behind the app.

Versions for photos and videos

Documents has kept old versions of a file for a while. Media does too now. Edited a photo somewhere else, or trimmed a clip? Open its info drawer and press Upload new version. The new file takes the old one's place, and the old one stays listed underneath, thumbnail and all. Restore brings it back if you change your mind, and the version you swap out is kept too. Uploading a different file with the same name into the same folder offers Replace as new version as well.

A page about keeping your data safe

People are going to trust OScar with their notes, their papers, their photos and their passwords. That deserves a straight answer to "is it safe?", so the site has a new Security page. It covers two-step sign-in and the app lock, the Vault that only you can open, files that are never public, data kept in Europe, and how the backups work, in plain words.

The backup part is the one I'm proudest of. Your data is copied every day, encrypted before it leaves, to a second company. Every copy is restored into a test database and counted against the real one, because a backup nobody has tried to restore is only a hope. Your files are copied every night too, and the copies are locked so that nobody can change or delete them for 30 days. That includes me.

The page took a few rounds of polish today: softer wording in the Vault section, sections that fade into each other instead of stopping at a hard edge, and a "Your data stays yours" part with drawn icons and three sticky notes making three promises. No selling your data, no ads, and no AI trained on your stuff.

Storage: one set of add-ons, and no surprises

Storage add-ons are simpler now: one set of sizes and prices beside every paid plan, whether you use a single tool or all of OScar. They're on the pricing page, now laid out as a tidy little price list instead of a scatter of pills.

I also settled what will happen if an account ends up holding more than its plan allows. The short version: nothing vanishes quietly. You'll get an email and a banner, then reminders, and only after a month are the extra files put out of reach. Even then they're held, not deleted, so they're still there when you make room or add space.

A more playful website

The site had started to feel a bit stiff, so it got crayons. Each tool page lost its big screenshot and gained a short "in short" summary, doodles in the tool's own colour and its features as numbered sticky notes. The tools page has a new section for the business tools that come with OScar Business. The About page has coloured cards, more doodles and a "made in Sweden" note. Then I went over every page on a phone and evened out the gaps, so the space under a card matches the space beside it.

Small things

• In Notes, Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on a Mac) a note to select it straight away, no Select button needed.
• Invoices now has the little green grid button that takes you back to your project. Invoices works across projects, so it goes back to the project you were in last.
• Folder pickers and Move dialogs show your folders as the same tree as the sidebar, with icons that fold open.
• Translate shows the home menu in the sidebar, like the other home tools.
• Settings lost its Overview switch. The sidebar and the overview itself already cover it.
• Security moved up in the footer, under "What it is".

Next up is still payments. Once checkout works, sign-ups open, and all of the above gets to meet more people than me.