Cropping is faster
Cropping used to download the entire original image into your browser before it could do anything. The bigger your image, the longer the wait — 4K renders and upscaled images routinely run to tens or hundreds of megabytes, which is painful on a phone or a long-haul connection.
The cut now happens on our servers; your browser only sends the position of the crop box. The image already lives next to the server, so it reads once, cuts once, and writes once.
While it runs you get a "generating" node on the canvas that fills itself in when it's done — the same experience as generating an image, so you can carry on with something else while you wait.
Upscales keep their full resolution
Upscaling, background removal and annotation now all work from the original image.
Until now they read the compressed copy the canvas uses for fast previews. Upscaling was hit hardest: a 5504×3072 image doubled should give you 11008×6144, but came back at 3200×1786 — smaller than your own original. These now start from the original, so an upscale gives you the full resolution.
Grid split and combine
Images produced by grid split and combine are now registered in your asset library too, so you can reference and manage them like any other material.