Usher 2.4.1 is out now, with a fix for a stuck dialog issue that could hang Usher, and a new feature for those who want to link to a specific spot (deep linking) in one of their Usher files.

The hanging bug would cause a discoverable “power user feature” dialog to become non-dismissible, leaving force quit as the only way out. This used to work fine, but some recent macOS update must have broken it. We have fixed it again, so if you’re lucky enough to find that dialog, it won’t crash Usher :).

The deep link feature allows you to link to any specific spot in any video (that Usher can play natively) using a URL syntax in either standard URL form or Markdown format. You can access deep linking from the menu bar or the playback bar; check out the release notes for a quick how-to.

And here’s a bonus for reading the blog post: Those deep links will open and start the video playing at the chosen spot; if you want them to open paused, change play to open in the copied URL.

Usher 2.4 is out, with quite a few new and shiny things, but also with fixes for two crashing bugs we found, one of which only affects macOS 26.4.

The shiny new stuff includes some interface updates for macOS 26’s appearance, and the ability to set thumbnail spacing via a slider in Usher’s Appearance panel in Settings. If you work with animated GIFs, Usher will now temporarily convert those GIFs to regular movie files, so you can crop and use other Usher tools, just like you do with movies. (Just as with movie files in Usher, the original GIF isn’t altered; this just makes working with them in Usher much easier.)

On the important fixes side, we found two crashing bugs: One when cropping a file with a custom aspect ratio (which could happen in any macOS version), and the other when changing from the Library menu to another menu in macOS 26.4. Both of those have been corrected in Usher 2.4.

You can read about this, and other changes (yes, there are more!) in Usher’s release notes. As always, you can update by checking for updates within Usher, or just by downloading a fresh copy of the app from our server—you won’t lose your settings.

Usher 2.3.1 has been released; check out the release notes for all the details. There is one key item that you should be aware of, even if you don’t read the release notes: There’s been a change in Usher’s renaming rules.

In the past, Usher could rename filenames including their extensions, but as of 2.3.1, the extensions are untouchable. We determined that it was too easy to accidentally modify (or remove!) extensions from files while renaming within Usher, and that could have catastrophic results. If this change affects you, please let us know your use case, so we can consider it in possible future changes to Usher’s renaming features.

Beyond that, there are changes in duplicate search and sorting logic, as well as rewritten help, which you can now also browse on the web.

As always, you can update by checking for updates within the app, or by downloading a fresh copy from Usher’s web page (you won’t lose your settings).

Usher 2.2 is out, with a number of changes as detailed in the release notes. Most notably, Usher can now tell the difference between files that are simply unavailable (due to an unmounted volume) and those that are truly missing. We also fixed rotated movie playback on macOS Monterey, and improved full screen mode for those of you using notched displays.

As always, you can update from within the app, or by downloading a fresh copy of the app (you won’t lose any settings) from the Usher web page.

Usher 2.0 is out, and available now for both new customers and those upgrading from previous versions. The normal price is $20 for a new user and $10 for an update, but for the next two weeks, new users pay just $14, and updates are only $6.

Either type of purchase includes at least a year of updates; after that, it will cost $10 to update to the most-current version at any point in the future—and that purchase will also include another year of updates. More details on our evolutionary update model are provided in this blog post.

What’s new in Usher 2? Way too much to even try to list here; a read-through of its release notes shows just how much we’ve added, improved, and fixed in this release. We spent a lot of time and effort improving scrolling speed when browsing large collections, and have added many new view modes to help you browse your collection. But really, those are the tip of a very large iceberg of new features and improvements.

If you’ve never used Usher, download the trial version today and test it out for a full month to see everything that it can do.