Changelog

What's new in Ritchie Bros. Creative Automation.

    • Fixed A file of exactly the stated size limit now uploads. Photo and file uploads were refusing a file that sat exactly on the limit, so a 10.0 MB photo was turned away on a screen that said 10 MB was allowed. The limit is now inclusive everywhere: exactly at the limit goes through, over it is still refused. This came in with a security update to the upload handling.
    • Fixed Equipment keeps its real color in the AG Guide press PDF. Photos were being converted for print inside the tool, and that conversion visibly shifted the machines: John Deere green went darker and sharper, yellow picked up a green cast, orange lightened, and tire black turned olive. Turning off "Auto-brighten dark photos" made no difference, because the shift was not coming from brightness. Photos now keep their original colours all the way into the PDF, and the conversion for the press happens at the print shop with their own press setup instead of inside the tool, which is both truer and how print shops normally work. The tool's usual preparation still applies: automatic framing, the optional brightness help, and print sizing. Type and brand color are unchanged: black text still prints on the black plate alone and the brand orange still hits its specified build. Guide PDFs are also about a third of their previous size.
    • Fixed AG Guide saved-work search now finds the actual sale across every build. Search by sale name, auction date, checkpoint name, save date, or teammate and matching checkpoints appear immediately with a result count. Selecting a result opens and focuses its build without restoring over the page currently being edited. Existing checkpoints are included, not only saves made after this fix.
    • New Maintenance Agent tab (restricted). A new tab on the Generate page where the tool's maintainer hands small feature requests and bug reports straight to an AI agent: it reads the Asana task, changes the app's own code in a dedicated working copy, proves the change with the full test suite, and ships it through the normal deploy pipeline, with every push and deploy release requiring an explicit confirmation click. The tab appears greyed out for everyone else and the backend is switched off on this site; nothing changes for day-to-day users.
    • Fixed Finalizing an AG Guide sale again updates the same Asana task even when the build was never saved first. The in-place update only worked for sales whose build had been saved before the first Finalize. A sale finalized straight from the form had no build for its task to be linked to, saving a checkpoint afterwards could not repair that, and so the next Finalize created a second task. Finalize now saves the sale as a build on its own (it appears in the build list with a "Finalized: ..." checkpoint under Save progress), links the Asana task to it, and switches the button to "Update Asana task". After a reload, open the sale's build from the list first and the same button updates its task.
    • New Upload the hero image right in the AG Guide builder. Answering Yes to "Do you have a Hero Image ready to upload?" now opens an upload box instead of only recording the answer. The image is attached to the Asana task for whoever builds the auction web page, and it is never printed on the guide page. It saves with your checkpoints like every other input, so a rollback brings it back, and finalizing again replaces it with the current one. Switching the answer to No clears the file, so the task never carries a hero image the sale says it does not have.
    • Fixed Finalizing an AG Guide sale again updates the same Asana task. A second Finalize used to create a second task, leaving the first one holding out-of-date notes and the old press PDF. It now rewrites the task the sale already produced: the notes are brought up to date, the press PDF and photos are replaced with the current ones, and a comment on the task lists what changed so everyone following it still gets notified. The subtasks the crew is already working are left alone, and files anyone attached by hand are never removed.
    • Improved Clearer AG Guide form labels and examples. "Seller" is now "Sale Name", and the greyed-out examples in Location, Directions to Yard, Equipment viewing, GPS and Legal land description have been replaced with the format each field expects, so nobody has to guess whether a sample town or a real one is wanted.
    • New A second Territory Manager, an extra phone number, and the hero-image question. The Territory Manager section can now hold a second TM, each seller contact can carry a Phone (additional), and the Asana push section asks whether a hero image is ready to upload. All three save with your checkpoints and ride into the Asana task.
    • Fixed No more duplicate TM boxes. The Asana push section no longer repeats Territory Manager 1 and 2; the page's own Territory Manager section is the single place TM details are entered, and that is what is pushed to Asana.
    • Improved Bulk Upload waits out Facebook's rate limit instead of stopping. When Facebook temporarily limits the ad account partway through a push, the ads that already landed are recorded, the rest stay ticked, and the push pauses with a visible countdown and resumes on its own the moment Facebook allows calls again (a Stop button hands control back at any time). Previously the push stopped with an error and an immediate re-click ran straight into the same block.
    • Fixed The Preview "Retry" button no longer looks dead during a limit. It now counts down to the moment Facebook lifts the block and retries the unresolved files by itself. The message also says plainly that the pause is Facebook's per-account call allowance, not a problem with your files or with any campaign or ad set name.
    • Improved Fewer calls burned during a limit. Once Facebook throttles the account, both Preview and Push refuse to call Facebook again until the block has lifted, so a wait is never extended by retries.
    • Improved AG Guide pages now match the printed guide exactly. Pages are built at the guide's real trim size (8.25 × 10.75 in with an eighth-inch bleed and printer trim marks), with the specified margins, and the whole page is set in the guide's Inter typeface at the faces and sizes from the design team's guide. The page size is locked so it can never drift again.
    • Improved Seller and secondary name share one line. The page header now prints the seller and the secondary advertised name together, separated by a middle dot, matching the approved design. The Hurricane banner question is now a fixed choice (Farm Auction Fees, Site Fees, or N/A) instead of a typed answer.
    • New Shared builds and recall search in AG Guide. Saved builds are now shared with the whole team — anyone can open a build, restore a checkpoint, and save onto it, with each checkpoint showing who saved it (deleting stays with the creator). A new search box filters builds and checkpoints by name, date, or teammate.
    • New Asana stays in sync with sale-detail changes. Once a sale is finalized to Asana, later edits to its key details (date, directions, collected dollars, and more) post a change notice on that Asana task the moment the updated work is saved as a checkpoint, so the crew following the task always hears about updates.
    • Fixed Saved AG Guide builds no longer vanish quietly. The tool used to make room for new saves by silently deleting the oldest saved builds; a guide season has more sales than the old limit allowed. The limits are now far higher, and if one is ever reached the save message says exactly what was removed.
    • Fixed AG Guide print polish after review. Long names, titles, and contact lines in the page footer now shorten cleanly with a visible ellipsis and a warning, instead of wrapping over the line below; every footer detail that had to be shortened is called out. And when the seller and secondary name are too long to share one line, the secondary name prints on its own smaller line so it can never drop off the page.
    • Improved More precise equipment results in Image Search. Searches can now distinguish closely related equipment—such as a dump truck versus an articulated dump truck, a track loader versus a wheel loader, or an agricultural tractor versus a truck tractor—and favour photos where the requested machine is the main subject.
    • Improved Better coverage for exact names and model numbers. Image Search can combine meaning-based matching with the terms used in the photo catalogue, while preserving most of the broad semantic result pool, so specific equipment and model searches are less likely to miss a relevant image.
    • Fixed Bulk Upload previews no longer trip Facebook's request limit. A preview now gathers destination and ad-copy details with a small fraction of the Facebook requests it used before, so even a single file that fans out to many campaigns previews reliably. If Facebook does throttle the account, the tool now backs off immediately and tells you how long to wait instead of retrying into the block; staged files stay put for a one-click retry.
    • Changed Safer Image Search relevance rollout. This deployment adds a frozen regression set, detailed search telemetry, independent rollback controls, and guarded retrieval options for future relevance improvements. Existing search ranking remains unchanged while the new options complete human review.
    • Fixed Creative Agent now locks the exact image count you ask for. “4 concepts, 4 images” means four final files—not four images and four copy variants for every concept. The confirmation card shows the exact total, and the server refuses any hidden multiplication before a paid generation starts.
    • Added Stop generation. Every active Creative Agent run now has a Stop generation button. It cancels active image and copy requests, prevents queued renders from starting, and keeps any creatives that had already completed.
    • Improved Creative Agent now follows your direction instead of a house template. From-brief generation preserves the visual and copy direction you give it, with no predefined lens, palette, crop, medium, lighting treatment, copy formula, or four-style portfolio. It defaults to one concept unless you ask for more. The authentic RB logo, kept legible against the finished artwork, is the only fixed visual brand decision.
    • Added New access level: Image Search + AG Guide. Accounts can now be scoped to Image Search plus the AG Guide builder. These accounts land directly on the AG Guide and see just the pages they can use. Administrators pick the level from the Admin page, both when approving a new email and on any existing account.
    • Changed Clearer sign-in help. If you try to log in or resend the verification email before your account actually exists, the login page now says so and takes you straight to the Sign up tab with your email prefilled, instead of reporting an email was sent when there was nothing to send. It also tells you when your email is already verified, so a wrong password sends you to password reset rather than a pointless resend.
    • Changed Sharper, more professional AI creatives. Generated images now stay in their intended aspect ratio (no more equipment cropped in half when a wide photo landed on a tall canvas), and the 4:5 mobile-feed size gets its own natively framed image. Text legibility is now guaranteed: the darkening behind headlines adapts to how bright the photo actually is and holds steady under the whole text block, with a soft shadow replacing the old hard outline. Long headlines automatically size down instead of wrapping into a wall of text. Runs also produce fewer, better creatives, so the same generation budget goes further.
    • Changed Review is now part of the Library. Open any run from the Library (or a "View run" link after generating) to see every creative in one grid — filter by size or name, click to zoom, fix a creative with a MagicFix note, and download the whole run as a zip. The separate Review page and its like/dislike bookkeeping are retired; old Review links redirect automatically.
    • Added Usage feed. A live view of who used which feature and when — grouped by day, all times US Pacific, refreshed every 30 seconds. Find it next to How To in the top nav.
    • Added Account access levels. Accounts can now be scoped to specific features (for example, Image Search only). Administrators manage the approved user list and each account's access from the new Admin page.
    • Added How To page. Live documentation for every feature — each Generate tab, the Library, Image Search, and Meta Assets — one click from the top nav and updated as features ship.
    • Added Image Search video walkthrough. A narrated 3½-minute demo is embedded in the How To guide's Image Search section — watch a real search from query to full-size photo.
    • Added Image Search. Describe the photo you need in plain language — "yellow bulldozer at an auction yard" — and search the Ritchie Bros. reference photo library. Results carry perfect / strong / partial / weak relevance badges so an exact hit stands out from a near miss. New link in the top nav.
    • Added AG Guide: auto-fill from the sale write-up. Paste the write-up from the Word doc or Wrike and one click fills the auction fields — date, auction type, location, seller, directions, viewing, GPS, legal land — while bulleted equipment lines become the printed Equipment Highlights.
    • Improved AG Guide: portrait-ready headshots. Territory Manager headshots are cropped face-aware, so the head sits correctly in the portrait slot whatever the source photo's framing.
    • Fixed Auto-fill keeps both consignors instead of dropping the second, and the login page now says what actually went wrong instead of failing without an explanation.
    • Added AG Guide: save progress & rollback. Save a named checkpoint at any point in a build and restore any earlier one if something goes wrong. Checkpoints are stored on the server, so they survive a reload and follow you to any device.
    • Improved Print-true color. Guide PDFs now encode photos for the press (CMYK), so the printed page matches what you approved on screen. Superseded August 31, 2026: that in-tool conversion turned out to shift equipment colours, so photos now keep their original colours and the print shop handles the press conversion.
    • Added Creative Agent: from-scratch creatives. No reference creative needed — give the agent a written brief in chat and it generates branded creatives directly from it.
    • Added AG Guide: printed photo captions. Every photo prints with a caption — two lines with automatic height, on by default.
    • Improved AG Guide: Territory Manager library. Saved TMs are searchable by name and fill the whole contact block in one click — and the existing TM roster was imported, so most TMs are already there.
    • Fixed AG Guide layout tidiness. Undocumented photo codes no longer leak into the printed page, and long directions stay inside their box.
    • Added AG Guide: photo ordering + bulk add. Add photos in bulk and let them sort into standard equipment order, or switch to custom order and drag to arrange.
    • Fixed Bulk Upload into empty ad sets. Pushing to an ad set with no live ad now borrows a sibling ad from a peer ad set in the same campaign for copy and landing page, instead of failing.
    • Added Dynamic destination URLs in Bulk Upload. Each push now reads your live event schedule and sets every ad's landing page to the matching event automatically — no more exporting a sheet by hand. Rows without a URL fall back to the equipment-auctions page, and you can still upload a CSV to override a single push.
    • Fixed Safer URL matching. A schedule row with a half-filled or malformed URL now falls back to the default landing page instead of shipping a broken link, and a push tells you when the schedule could not be read instead of silently leaving links untouched.
    • Added AG Guide. A new Generate tab that builds the press-ready Ag Auction Guide page: pick a template, add photos (dark ones brighten automatically and everything sorts to standard SOP order), fill in the auction details, add the Territory Manager and consignors, then generate a print-ready PDF with a live, zoomable preview.
    • Added Live previews in Creative Agent. Attach images to the chat and see rendered previews inline as you set up a campaign, so you can confirm each creative before anything is pushed.
    • Improved Conversations persist per login. Your Creative Agent threads are saved to your account and reload when you come back, instead of resetting each visit.
    • Fixed Bulk Upload reliability. Large multi-batch uploads accumulate correctly, the tool recovers gracefully when Meta rate-limits a push, and a transient lookup no longer reports "no live ad set" by mistake.
    • Added Creative Agent. A new chat-driven way to set up Meta campaigns, powered by Claude. Describe what you want in plain language and the agent walks the campaign and ad-set setup with you — every push is confirmation-gated and every ad is created paused for review.
    • Added Per-ad destination URLs from a schedule. Upload a schedule alongside your creatives and Bulk Upload matches each ad to its event and stamps the right landing page, with a results summary showing exactly which columns it read.
    • Improved Grouped, placement-matched ads. Size variants of the same creative now combine into a single ad that Meta serves at the right size for each placement — on standard ad sets, with no Dynamic Creative setup required.
    • Added Call-to-action picker. Choose the button for every ad in a push from the full list of Meta CTAs, or inherit the matched ad's existing button.
    • Added Automatic UTM tracking. Pushes carry campaign, ad-set, and ad tracking parameters out of the box, editable per push, so reporting attributes traffic correctly without manual tagging.
    • Added Description and ad-name labels. Add an optional link description to every ad and an optional label suffix to each ad name, both inherited from the matched ad when left blank.
    • Added Multiple headlines and bodies. Provide several copy variants per push and Meta optimizes which combination performs best.
    • Fixed Brand-accurate type. Headlines, badges, and CTAs now render in the Eina brand typeface on every deployed size, so text width and spacing match the brand exactly instead of drifting to a fallback font.
    • Improved Sharper text legibility. A brighter photo treatment and refined outlines keep copy readable across busy and high-contrast backgrounds.
    • Added Bulk Upload tab. Match a folder of finished creatives to your live Meta campaigns and ad sets by filename — with loose label matching that tolerates real-world naming — then push them in one batch. Paused ad sets are surfaced so nothing is missed.
    • Improved Faster campaign lookups. Campaign and ad-set data is cached so repeat pushes and previews respond quickly instead of refetching every time.
    • Fixed Proof-point routing. Event creatives with a date or named auction now route to the correct layout and match reliably.
    • Added Team-member template. A new creative type that pairs a person's headshot with a title and optional region, with face-aware cropping that keeps the head fully in frame and headlines that shrink to fit so long titles never clip.
    • Added Scrim-text mode. A rendering option that lays copy over a tuned gradient scrim for clean white-on-photo readability, available from the operator UI.
    • Added Push to Meta. Send finished creatives straight to your currently running Meta ad sets from the app, with each creative sized to match the placements it is going into. Ads are created paused for review.
    • Added Multi-variant copy and CTA selection when pushing, plus a URL tracking template so every pushed ad carries consistent campaign parameters.
    • Added Proof-point creatives. When a proof point (date, dollar figure, or named auction) is set for a row, the headline demotes to a small all-caps label and the proof point becomes the dominant line — Edmonton-style.
    • Added Status badge + CTA pill. Two new copy slots: a short ≤8-char badge (top-left, e.g. SOLD / NEW) and a ≤16-char CTA pill rendered under the copy.
    • Added Per-pair dark backdrop. Each headline row can opt into a dimmed canvas with a feathered spotlight on the equipment — same Edmonton-style treatment, picked per row. Auto-falls-back to photo with a reason chip in Review when the source image's bbox isn't usable.
    • Added Event-campaign A/B. When the campaign type is event (or any proof point looks like a date), each pair fans out a dark_hero + photo_bright variant so Meta data can pick the winner. Operators can override the A/B by typing an explicit dark or photo for a row.
    • Added Hero auto-pick. Single-unit hero photos historically out-perform fleet shots ~2× on the same audience — uploads now classify each image and the system prefers single-unit shots in the sample pipeline when both are available.
    • Added Specificity warnings. Review surfaces a "warned" filter for creatives whose copy lacks specificity (no $, year, month, state/province, or auction+place phrasing) so you can prioritize the actionable subset.
    • Improved Composition rules. On tall canvases (1080×1920, 300×600, 160×600) the lockup + copy block never overflows the lower 1/3 — auto-shrinks type before reducing the logo so the brand stays readable at every step.
    • Improved Full wordmark on every size. The 970×100 and 320×50 banners no longer fall back to the orange RB monogram — the full "Ritchie Bros." lockup now renders at every approved size for brand consistency.
    • Improved Tighter top inset. The padding above the lockup (between the orange top bar and the logo) is now half a RB monogram instead of a full monogram, so the headline sits higher on top-anchored layouts. Logo↔text breathing room and the scrim taper below the copy are unchanged.
    • Fixed Status badge no longer silently drops. The layout now reserves vertical space above the logo for the badge, so it renders cleanly on every size that supports it instead of being hidden when the headline starts close to the orange ribbon.
    • Fixed Backdrop input respected on event campaigns. Typing an explicit dark or photo for a row on an event campaign now renders that single variant for the row instead of being overridden by the auto dark_hero + photo_bright fan-out. Blank entries still get the full A/B.
    • Fixed Dark-backdrop spotlight is rectangular. The dark-mode spotlight cutout was an ellipse inscribed in the bbox, leaving the four corners dark — long dozers and trailers got clipped by the multiply layer. Swapped to a rounded-rectangle spotlight that fully contains the bbox while keeping the existing feathered edge.
    • Fixed Dark mode auto-falls-back to photo when the spotlight would overlap the headline. Tall portrait sources cropped to a short banner used to render white-on-black-on-lit-photo and lose contrast. The renderer now demotes to photo with a reason logged into Review's backdrop chip tooltip.
    • Fixed Backdrop chip honesty. When a dark variant auto-fell-back to photo, Review used to show "dark" on a file that actually shipped as photo. The chip now reflects the resolved mode and a tooltip exposes the requested mode plus the fallback reason.
    • Improved Text readability, round 3. Dropped stroke outlines in favor of a lighter, longer scrim taper that fades cleanly into the background image.
    • Improved Full-canvas scrim on tight banners. When the safe text zone is small, the gradient now spans the full canvas so headlines stay legible.
    • Improved Brand feedback, round 2. Refined the orange-RB lockup clear-space, polished the gradient treatment, and reduced logo height by 30% across all canvases.
    • Improved Smarter text placement. Headlines now route around the hero subject — not just away from canvas edges — using a normalized safe-bbox and pre-projection padding.
    • Fixed Equipment occlusion veto. Text zones that would cover equipment in the source image are now rejected outright.
    • Improved Brand feedback, round 1. Logo crops are now tighter with sub-pixel padding so anti-aliasing isn't clipped on small renders.
    • Fixed Logo / headline alignment in the cutout-mode fallback path.
    • Fixed Email casing. Login, signup, and forgot-password now lowercase the email so capitalization can't lock you out.
    • Added Library page. Every past Generate run is now persisted and browsable from the top nav — open any run straight in Review.
    • Added Auth, end-to-end. Invite-only signup via PocketBase, email-verification gate, self-serve password reset, and verification emails wired through the deploy.
    • Improved Rebrand to Ritchie Bros. 2026 guidelines. The whole UI now matches the new brand foundation — typography, color ramp, and orange as a 10–15% accent.
    • Improved Generate → Review hand-off. Generate output now flows straight into Review, and the "Download as zip" action moved to Review where it belongs.
    • Improved Faster image generation. Parallel rendering across canvases with bounded concurrency cuts large runs down dramatically.
    • Added Bbox-fit cropping, text placement, and text treatment across all approved sizes.
    • Added Rich VLM metadata. Source-image metadata is now extracted at upload time and used by both the renderer and MagicFix.
    • Fixed Unreadable black text on dark or mixed-luminance backgrounds.
    • Fixed Cross-plan logo-variant axis picking the wrong variant in some canvases.
    • Added Generate UI is live. Upload source images, pick sizes, and render branded banners straight from the browser — followed by a post-review bug-fix pass.
    • Added MagicFix. Gemini-powered regeneration in the review viewer, with a glassmorphic UI and cache-busted thumbnails so the new render shows up immediately.
    • Added Local review viewer for sample_output renders — the foundation for the Review page.
    • Fixed MagicFix prompt context and aspect-mismatch cropping when the model returned an unexpected aspect ratio.
    • Added Initial release. The first version of the creative automation pipeline, aligned with the Ritchie Bros. 2026 brand guidelines and using per-image logo variants chosen from per-zone luminance analysis.