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ETCH Weekly Update (Mar 7, 2026) - Better Image Navigation and Smoother Story Editing

This week focused on making story creation and image workflows smoother, clearer, and more reliable for everyone. We shipped a new in-image mini navigation experience, improved story management tools, and tightened up several image-generation edge cases. We also continued stability work behind the scenes so common actions trigger fewer unexpected side effects.

New Features

  • In-image mini navigation: Story images now include a mini navigation experience to make moving through image layers faster and more intuitive.
  • Richer image details: Generated images now keep more metadata (like model/settings context), helping with visibility into how images were created.
  • Improved story management controls: Sorting and filtering on the Manage Stories page were expanded and refined for easier browsing of larger story lists.
  • Field length guidance while editing: Text and prompt fields now show character/word counts to help avoid prompt-length surprises.

Quality Improvements and Fixes

  • Unpublished image visibility fixes: Public gallery behavior was tightened so unpublished images are handled correctly.
  • Clearer image-generation errors: Prompt-limit and generation failure messages are more actionable when something goes wrong.
  • More reliable image modal behavior: Popup close interactions were improved for a smoother viewing flow.
  • Longer polling window for image generation: Background polling now waits longer before timing out, improving reliability for slower generations.
  • Reduced unwanted image rebuild side effects: Several settings/view fetches now use a read-only path to avoid triggering accidental image regeneration.

Journal Highlights (Past Week)

  • A full retrospective was recorded for work since the MCP version-bump fix, covering mini-nav rollout, story sorting updates, metadata persistence, and node-image stability improvements.
  • A focused investigation resolved noisy nodeImages rebuild behavior by improving read-only fetch behavior and regeneration checks.
  • MCP/root-resolution reliability was improved, and logging noise around IFID-based module lookups was reduced.
  • Additional journal work documented new image generation metadata for cost/timing persistence.
  • v0.7.8.1 release notes were also documented in the weekly dev journal stream, including gallery visibility improvements, prompt-limit feedback, and image layer settings fixes.

Try the updated image mini navigation and the improved Manage Stories controls this week, and share feedback on anything that still feels slow or confusing. Next week’s focus is continued polish for image workflows, including interaction quality and reliability.