Sometimes, app updates are not about a single new feature but focus on raising the bar for the overall user experience. We call these quality-of-life updates. This year's first major PostLab release is such an update.

PostLab 26.1 is all about improved syncing, speed, and insights.

Every time you save changes to one of your projects or libraries, PostLab is there to ensure your local working copy is in good standing. Then, your changes are synchronized to the Team Bundle that lives on your shared or cloud storage.

Up to now, PostLab would unlock a project when its changes were saved locally, as it’s your cloud provider that’s doing the syncing between your team members’ computers. Five years ago, when PostLab Classic exclusively integrated with LucidLink, this sufficed.

With the new PostLab philosophy of being storage-agnostic, we wanted to support a much wider range of cloud providers. However, each provider turned out to have a bit of a different approach to syncing, as we remarked upon in Feb 2025:

Time to get around those differences once and for all.

Guardrails

For starters, in this update, we’ve added guardrails so that a project is unlocked only after synchronization with the Team Bundle is complete. This will prevent unwanted alerts and errors and provide a smoother collaboration experience. While this might seem obvious, it’s not that trivial - even when using shared storage with low latency and ample bandwidth, we’ve seen that some NASs prioritize one thing over another. For example, you might no longer see traffic between the NAS and the client, but the filesystem does not yet reflect the changes - the NAS is still busy calculating things. These new guardrails take such situations into account, ensuring every team member is always on the same page.

Sync Status

While making locking more secure is obviously a good thing, we wanted to level up a bit more while at it. As not all cloud providers are created equally, we actively test each provider for compatibility and reliability with PostLab, and as such, we have certified a handful of providers for use with PostLab. These providers are confirmed to be of a high-enough standard to support the heavy needs of a team working remotely on the same production. Currently, those providers are…

• Box

• Dropbox

• LucidLink

• Suite Studios

• and Synology’s Drive app

For all these providers, we’ve implemented active sync monitoring. This monitoring is reflected in PostLab with the new Sync Status:

Upon saving changes in PostLab, team members are shown a clear progress indicator for their outgoing changes to Team Bundles. PostLab now tells you what’s happening under the hood and when a sync is done. Other computers that work in the same Team Bundle won’t show that there’s an update available until your PostLab has confirmed that everything’s done.

On a proper connection with low latency and good speed, this will, as always, be a fast process. For those connections that have more hiccups than you like, this new feature will surely save your day.

Team Bundles

We’re seeing a lot of teams with much larger Team Bundles than we ever expected to see. While it’s a testament to how integrated teams are with their PostLab workflows, big Team Bundles do have an impact on speed - mainly visible when opening bundles. These last couple of months, the PostLab team has developed a more efficient way to open bundles, resulting in a massive speed jump across the board.

The Attic

We’ve also rethought how backups of discarded changes are handled. To make sure all team members can address situations where someone else accidentally discarded work, Team Bundles include an Attic (hat tip to Avid). The contents of the Attic are automatically cleaned out after ten days. Some very prolific teams still collected a bit too many digital cobwebs in that period of time, so we added some optimizations, which results in smaller Team Bundles for everyone - smaller footprint, faster loading 💪

Maestral

If you’re a Dropbox-based team, have a look at Maestral. Maestral is an open-source Dropbox client that provides much more control than Dropbox's own menubar app. For professional video creators, Maestral is a great solution, giving you more flexibility and reliability at no extra cost. PostLab fully taps into Maestral’s API, giving you more detailed info on what’s going on with Dropbox under the hood.

Update!

PostLab 26.1 is available in-app and is free to all of you with a license eligible for updates and support. Not sure? Check the License Manager.